skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you distribute material like that, it will get leaked. That should be taken foregranted. If I got that memo I probably would have leaked it to the press, too.
The quote you mentioned results from the process he criticized, not his criticizing it.
> Women and POC will continue to be the scapegoats until culturally we decide that "success" isn't about being an individual that becomes rich or powerful.

I am a "POC". I would very much like it if you and others of your ilk (leftists/liberals) stop speaking for me. I am not a scapegoat and have never been one. I take ownership of where I am in life.
A simple thought experiment.

Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement.

And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome.

I posit that priceless data would be worthless in American society.
Everyone is taught to compete. But I don't think competition is the sole driving force, or even the major one that makes sense for humans. Collaboration seems to always be better for people than conflict.
Messaging as state was described very thoroughly by David Reed[1] in his 1978 thesis[2][3]:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Reed

[2] http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-20...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021833
>he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce

Scenario 1:

Hiring policy : Best candidate for the job irrespective of race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation.

A good Engineer who happens to be a woman: I work for Google. :)

Society: How awesome!!! You go, girl!!!

Scenario 2:

Hiring policy : We are trying to have more gender diverse workforce.

A good Engineer who happens to be a woman: I work for Google. :/

Society: Nice! (Did she make it at Google because of gender diversity program?)

It was Google's announcement that declared their efforts to create a gender diverse workforce, created inferiority complex in the minds of the female engineers whether they got the job because they deserve it, or because they were women.

It was Google's announcement for gender diverse workforce that created hostile work environment for women because now everyone, including other women, doubt if an engineer, who happens to be woman, made it because of the diversity program.

Google fired the whistle-blower. They shot the messenger.
This isn't an uber problem - it's a startup tech problem - no one wants to take security seriously because it's a cost sink that only averts risk, does not actually make a company revenue. I have seen ssn's store insecurely, open api's with customer data, old frameworks and languages that no longer receive security patches. Nearly every startup says they take security seriously, because that's the right answer to say, but very very very few actually do. This is just another minor blip in the otherwise very large system of data available everywhere. Your data is not safe, trust me on that.
> I'm not making any endorsement of the comment or of the science, since it isn't my field, but just relaying what he said.

Perhaps this is an off-topic question, if you don't mind responding: why did you feel the need to emphasize this, after your initial sentence:

> He stated on ....

Thanks!
Very well said! Damore is not a seasoned press veteran, and even if he was it wouldn't matter because press veterans are constantly being attacked too. I thought he did great in the CNN interview despite being out of his element. Just an introverted, earnest person trying to defend himself.
I can't help but shake a feeling that all of this posting of text messages is just trying to shame Levandowski, Kalanick, or both.
Open AUV comms protocol embarks with BeagleBone based modem
Damore advocates removing "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar", so he's actually proposing a solution to this problem. Also, he himself isn't stereotyping women as crap engineers. He says "Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women".
You came to this conclusion because he said he doesn't have the urge to "go for it" when he sees a female he finds attractive?

Not cool dude :D
I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".

I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.
Err, I'm none of the things you described. I'm not speaking for you, but myself :)
What sort of things typically fall into that range other than atypical genitals?
win64 FF has been built with LARGEADDRESSAWARE for the last 7 years.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556382#c28
> Seeing load averages of ~900,000 blows my mind.

More impressive is that you can run "uptime" and it actually responds with an output in reasonable amount of time with said 6-digit load-average.
Please educated me!
This is one of the first rational discussions I've seen of the memo.

edit: for context, I'm a female engineer
Would you please not break the HN guidelines by (a) arguing snarkily and superciliously or (b) going on about downvotes? Trainwrecks though these recent threads have been, we're still trying for a higher standard of discussion on HN, and comments like this one make take us all in the wrong direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War

the last speedrun was 38 minutes. I wonder how much faster we can go!
Its pretty obvious to all that a generalization is just that. By definition it doesn't include the entire population. The urge to hit on a woman you find attractive doesn't make anyone a doucebag - it makes them a straight/bi male. Not all of us, but a pretty good chunk. And to be clear I'm not including egregious things like unsolicited dick pics as "hitting on a woman." But good for you if you've never wanted to let a woman know you were interested while in conversation with her. How saintly of you to never have such a lurid thought.
Your first sentence seems like it's conflating correlation with causation.

As for the second, saying psychology is ultimately biology is reductionist in a way that dismisses the context and environment biology gets expressed in. You would be a much different person if the same set of genes was born in a different place, or at a different time, or if your life circumstances were different in any mild way.
Again, only if you believe a line was crossed, or whether he wrote a well-intentioned memo with the goal of supporting and increasing diversity that had some dubious conclusions based on controversial research.

He is also young and just starting his career. If this had been addressed calmly maybe he could have learned from this situation. Zero tolerance for a young man's folly instead turned him into a sympathetic figure and an alt-right star. It has reinforced the perception that the PC left is oppressive and reactionary. And worse of all he will never learn from his experience because the reaction confirmed his natural bias.

I guess there is no cutting people a break anymore in this era of shouting into the ether, virtue signaling, and political hellfire.
I believe this conflict stems from:

* Lack of opportunity (especially for the poor)

* Conflation of race (looks) and subculture with general oppression of the population rooted in the economic divide.

* Targeting portions of the population in a self re-enforcing feedback loop of further isolation and lost opportunity.

* Lack of civic planning and political leadership towards ends that improve the outcome for as many as possible as much as possible.

* Lack of a clear goal or set of goals to work towards globally, let alone locally.

The most obvious global projects for improving everyone's experience are:

* Ending hunger (surplus of food)

* Increasing available (useful) energy to improve quality of life.

* Science fiction projects in space could be a good use of productivity.

* * Robots mining the asteroid belt.

* * Orbital elevators and a ring around the planet. (Useful as a platform for communications, energy transmission, and solar arrays.)
I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

You are completely right, but on the other hand if you are going to invoke "science" and you present your writing as scientific (he did), you have a higher bar. If you fail to be objective (see semi-related assertions about Marxism), or your writing obscures the point you are attempting to make, then you've failed as a writer of scientific content.

If your writing isn't good enough, then don't release a memo to your workplace of tens of thousands of smart and ideological people. Put it on a blog, write it anonymously, but expect whatever criticism you get.
But I don't think it makes sense to compare population expansion to a refugee crisis. People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave. In your hypothetical, I assume people are leaving for economic and social reasons, normal motivations for voluntary immigration. I don't think the refugee crisis will continue forever, and I don't think malaria eradication will reach the sources of the refugee crisis until the violence has mostly subsided.

Edit: I phrased this a little wrong, the source of the current refugee crisis is mostly not Africa, but my point is that the societal disruption you're referring to is not caused by voluntary immigration.
The Future of Biohacking: Implanting Malware to DNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux provides a substantial amount of evidence to the contrary, for starters.
The fact the scripting seems to be on top of the GUI state rather than the underlying scene graph is what turns me off to Blender scripting.
Seems like a tough problem (if you consider it a problem). The unfortunate reality of a power-imbalance is that those who are giving out their expertise expect something in return (ROI, promotion, attention/validation, sex).

I don't think what this guy did was even slightly morally wrong, but I would say it sounds unprofessional trying to milk your social status and social capital for physical affection.

But then again, so is hopping to the press because you found 1 sleazy man out there and trying to milk the cultural moment for a few views. (not that one cancels the other)
Bill Gates is also applying his money where he thinks it will have the most impact - their foundation often invests in new technologies and startups whose products will have the greatest impact per dollar. If Gates and Musk are both working to maximize impact their difference is who they focus on. Gates primarily focuses on the most impoverished on the planet, while Musk focuses on the first world (and indirectly the most impoverished due to the effects on climate change).

Saying that the Gates Foundation does not reinvest into new ideas that maximize impact does a great disservice to what is one of most effective and effectiveness-oriented philanthropic organizations on the planet.
Zero text content for me (without having to scroll, and ad-blocked enabled).

JS Disabled: https://imgur.com/a/IAcXb

JS Enabled: https://imgur.com/a/TtSeg

Likely a result of my zoom/font settings, but this is ridiculous.
This is rather the page I've been on (outside of my personal disagreements).

You put it more concisely than I have previously.
Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius.
I'm fuzzy on why your wife would become a stay-at-home mom when your cost of living would at least double. Not like there aren't plenty of nonprofits that underpay in the bay (every little bit helps). If you can't keep your wife happy without her not working, don't do the move, period.

There are families of 6 that live in illegal 1-car garage units on the peninsula who pay >$1k a month for the privilege. If you think that's crazy (I do) then you have to come up with less-crazy alternatives.

If you want to try hacking it in the bay, recommend you go for an extreme commute from a place like Antioch or Manteca. You can get otherwise-sane deals on housing if you're willing to sacrifice an extra hour's drive each way. Your little ones can have a yard and their own rooms while you slog it out on some of America's most miserable interstates.

Also kinda crazy, but totally worth considering, move to Las Vegas and commute via air. Cheap one hour flight each way, low cost of living.

As you "season" in the bay, you may be offered more and more money as you take on new positions. Eventually even buying a $1+ million house that checks all the usual boxes will become possible. It takes years for this to happen, but you may find as your career grows, uprooting the family every year to move 10 minutes closer to work can make things better.
But Damore didn't do anything to make women think they were hired only because of diversity initiatives. It's common knowledge that Google makes an effort to hire more women. That was already the case, and Damore merely brought attention to the negative aspects of it.
Why has this topic exploded like it did now especially in the software engineering context? Whatever talent or affinity to abstract and inanimate things we do or don't assume being correlated with gender, isn't software engineering just a lighter version, compared to mathematics and physics?

Did math and physics communities already have their internal crisis/debate on these things, perhaps a decade or two ago? Or have they been able to cope without lighting such a fire?
The headline and image are also content, they're just not body text.
That the US can wage small wars abroad without impacting its domestic capital production and labor bases much at all is due largely to asymmetry of forces, economies, and of course distance.

Another American civil war that isn't just brief and minor discretionary intervention by the Nat'l Guard (as in the LA riots or Katrina)–which is an awfully poor definition of civil war–but rather is more like 1861-1865, would significantly impact domestic quality of life. In fact, I'd wager the American middle-ground between the small regional events it's experienced in recent history and total chaos is small, if it exists at all.

Which is probably what will keep it from happening, so long as most people are reasonably prosperous, which is likely to be the case, assuming it deals gracefully with the rapidly dwindling lower middle class and the rapid consolidation of production (a non-trivial assumption).
Not much about that memo was "factual", whatever that means.
>I'm about halfway through and many of the classes assume that you have the equivalent of an undergrad CS degree. It's not intended to replace an undergrad degree.

I'm curious what you expect. I will soon have a BS in computer science. I would be awfully disappointed if I went on to get an MS in comp. sci. that didn't teach me anything new.
Resources aren't actually that scarce and haven't been for quite a while. The Breadbasket of America can feed everyone. Population growth isn't really a scarcity problem, it's an organizational and structural one. Unless you think we're at max efficiency!
While there are individual EU HY bonds yielding lower than Treasuries, that is not the market as a whole. To be generous, 30 year Treasuries are currently yielding 2.84%. I'm looking at Bloomberg Barclays Pan-European High Yield index (ticker LP01TREU) and it currently has a YTW of 3.24% with an average life of 5.07. If you were to match that life to 5 year Treasuries, those are yielding 1.82% right now. That's not even touching on the currency and duration mismatches.
This is the worst damaging consequence of this whole charade.

The words themselves no longer have any meaning.

- "Man" is to no longer define any category except for people who self identify as men.

- And at the same time, it is sexist to say that girls prefer dolls.

Regardless of the correctness of either statement, to say both in the same breath is simply contradictory.

Here are some definitions:

Man: Adult human male

Woman: Adult human female
It was a politically charged topic, he would have been crucified either way.

But by phrasing the memo the way he did, he covered himself legally.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear everything was run by a lawyer first.
There are many, many reasonable criticisms of the memo that do not focus on writing style. Here are a few examples -

https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Blogging Pro Tip: A blog community can help fuel content/social media automation
Biology is the study of living organisms. Psychology is the study of the human mind and its functions. A mind is a part of an organism, not a discrete one itself. The study of the part is not the same thing as the study of the whole. Psychology is not biology. This is not a controversial thing, every person who has graduated college in the past 30 years should know this, besides it being illogical.
> Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows

This last point is fairly obvious to anyone with common sense, and may people - also on HN - object to increasingly divisive reporting, often aiming at clicks rather than the truth. An yet, most media outlets keep doing it, always finding someone else to blame.
Complicated, but simplest explanation is from wikipedia:

In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at birth, including:

the number and type of sex chromosomes;
the type of gonads—ovaries or testicles;
the sex hormones;
the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females); and
the external genitalia.

People whose characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at birth are intersex.
Hopefully hes just ending his career now.

Google shouldn't be soaking up all these ignorant young college boys if they're not mature enough to handle a workplace.
>> political correctness makes it hard for people with unpopular opinions to ask questions and discuss their viewpoints...

non_PC != unpopular
It definitely isn't, it's just a good quick check. I don't think there's any easy way of testing UV protection at home.
From your quote:

> When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

Your perspective is that this is harmful because the memo caused self doubt, so the memo was the problem.

From Damore's perspective, if there were no quota/diversity hiring programs at that place of employment, the woman in question would have no reason to suspect the latter. The hiring policy was the problem.

Totally different interpretations of cause and effect.
You might find https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943 to be a decent starting point.
‘Angry Birds’ Maker Rovio Plans IPO
>I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.

That's something you learn pretty early in "first world" countries where military service is obligatory. Cleaning toilets for 100 people, picking up cigarette butts, obeying orders despite what you think about them and dealing with people from all walks of life is a valuable lesson. Doesn't help with smoking though :(
Every neighbor who I speak with gets an invitation. There was a population, though, that felt it unnecessary to establish even the most basic personal connection before helping itself.
I'd actually say just the opposite - the memo seemed to be written as well and in as conciliatory manner as it could be written and the memo made good (or at least plausible) point and bad points. But the bad points were so bad that it was appropriate and necessary to fire Damore.

Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast through their entire workplace, and not have that person be creating a hostile work environment for African Americans. If that person says "I don't mean in general, I mean inferior just for this occupation, I don't mean inferior, just 'differently talented, they've got great rhythm'", it doesn't matter, if that person says "here's a study which says this, we should consider this in an open minded fashion" it doesn't matter. The message is unacceptable. That person is done, that person should be done.
I've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the language."

How I laughed.
I'm really glad they went into the detail they did on the landing page on Github. But, not knowing exactly what kind of diagrams/visualizations can be done, it took quite a while to find an example of what they were talking about. The very first thing I should have seen there should be examples of output that can be produced.
> no language that even comes close to being as pragmatic.

That's what I'm disagreeing with. I find Rust to be extremely pragmatic. There are other competing tools written in C++, and from where I'm standing, their maintenance story is quite a bit harder. Conversely, my tool works seamlessly on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Also 500px (I think--if not a similar image host) has recently banned all 3rd-party images, at least at the free level, which has broken a TON of the old forum posts I want to see. It was the defacto image host, kind of like imgur is now.
Hopefully not anymore: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
https://i.imgur.com/12g0j6f.png
I am well aware of my inabilities to tackle this issue properly, so ... I don't write a big document about it and circulate it. Discretion is an issue here too. If you are not capable of addressing an issue in a productive manner, then don't, especially if it's not even related to your job. James was hired as an engineer to work on engineering stuff; he wasn't hired as a sociologist to work on diversity stuff. He made the choice to inject himself into something in an ill-advised manner when he could've instead simply not done so.
When they say they feel they are hurt / offended, do they know this is a typical easy thing for women to do in the society, not men?

I don't know, maybe everything is sexist. Maybe we should expect a society where men and women cry equally.
Procreation only comes behind not dying in our list of biological prerogatives. Avoiding being a "douchebag" involves controlling these impulses. Suggesting men have a sex-drive is a not an example of the typical-mind-fallacy.