skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that her "infinite loop" theory was her perception of the anecdote around hiring at her own startup. It does seem conceivable, but yeah obviously data is light here.

Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.
Or to flip around your statement: it's a special kind of out-of-touch arrogance to assume that programming is the mecca of career paths. Great way to judge anyone who chooses a different field.

While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their own decisions they'd be engineers.
"Men who reported to me liked and respected me. Men who managed me liked and respected me."

Starting straight off with this makes me wonder if it's a perception she had or if it was the reality. The majority of people to not tell someone if they dont like them or dont respect them.
The whole point of the original memo was that it was making statements that only applied across large populations - i.e. sampling.

Providing anecdotal evidence as a means for support is counter productive...
This one's global:

https://fallingfruit.org/
“Packages should be reproducible” added to Debian Policy
This comes up constantly when python is used for compiler scripts. It super needs to be fixed.
Do you remember what the performance impact of xprivacy was? I'm currently doing something similar with cyanogenmod's privacy guard + xposed app ops which allows statically revoking permissions, but Xprivacy seems to have a better little-snitch like ui
Not quite, but what I do believe is true is that learning multiple programming languages is similar to learning multiple spoken languages.

Just as knowing Spanish will aid you in learning Portuguese, knowing Python will help you pick up Ruby. After you know a few varying languages it becomes much easier to pick up a new one. You notice that they all share the same basic constructs.

Also, each language (in both realms) brings new modes of expression to the table and these can open your mind to alternate ways of thinking. You notice this with spoken languages most when you run into a phrase that is untranslatable to some other languages. This part is perhaps more true of programming languages than spoken languages, but I believe it is true of both to some degree.
I am entirely okay with paying for new versions, especially if they are updated to take advantage of new features or support for new devices.
If I had to learn to read, spell and pronounce words in an alien language using an alien alphabet to read a book I wasn't sure would offer me any value when I have plenty of alternatives written with alphabets and in languages I know you might have a point.

The choice facing people is one of doing something we find unnecessarily hard and of uncertain payoff vs. doing something much easier with a more certain payoff (because we've got past experience with it).

How is your mandarin? Sanskrit? Klingon?
Walking around London yesterday morning for an hour (with a step ladder!) we managed two carrier bags of tasty ripe plums. I also ate some orange things that I have no idea what they were but they tasted fantastic. There's raspberries, blackcurrents, blackberries and even (in an abandoned lot) tomatoes which my friend ate. I missed the mulberries this year but in a couple of weeks I'll also have some apples and avocados to add to that and maybe some persimmon. And this is all stuff that'd be on the floor and/or rotting later without people blinking an eye. So many fruit trees in London! And that's not even mentioning the mint, huge basil tree-bushes, rosemary, lime trees and countless other herb lying in clear sight.
Why are you so mad about it? The answer is completely obvious: if her startup is offering below market rates to guys and they join anyway, they are apparently passionate about what the company does or motivated more by the promise of future wealth than day to day salary. These people will naturally have more energy because they believe if they put in 110% they'll get back 200%.

Almost without question the interview process was also eliminating men who did not seem energetic or interested in the company.

But she wanted to hire women. So, the women were hired at market rate or higher. Without question they were willing to make an offer even if they had doubts about the woman's energy or passion or commitment to the company. After all it's hard enough to make an offer if you have standards, let alone make an offer to a woman, so the last thing you want is a technically capable woman being rejected because she seemed a bit tired in the interview. These women may have joined simply because the wages were good, without any particular belief or care about the future of the firm. They will work exactly as much as needed to earn their salary and no more.

There's nothing wrong with such workers, it's a fallacy to believe all employees must be passionate. However if your process is selecting for passion except when the candidate is a woman, then the women will seem low energy in comparison. And their "I don't care, why do you care" attitude will probably rub off on the rest of the team too.
Can you tell me which Elsevier Computer Science journals submissions are filtered? How do they filter? What is the criteria?
Honest question from someone who does not understand finance : why are companies taxed on profit while I am taxes on revenue? We have both costs, of different nature but still.
I understand why decimal notation returns a rational, I'm wondering why exponential notation doesn't.
I don't know. I used to make money off of Photoshop and was happy to pay the up-front fee. It's no longer a money-maker for me, but I still have and use CS5. I think it's been something like 5 or 6 years and I haven't needed any of the new features since then. If I were still making money at it, then yeah, it might be worth it. But it's nice to know that if cashflow gets tight, I don't have to keep paying a fee. I can stay at the version I have now and continue to do the same work (and continue to be able to open my own goddamn files!) without paying anyone. Being stuck with a product that won't work if I'm offline for 30 days (say I'm on assignment is a 3rd world country. What then?), or if my connection goes down or their company folds, or their server is attacked at a time that's critical for my business, is unacceptable.
Here's the article I linked containing some criticism of the methodology: http://www.thetutorking.com/2014/08/criticisms-of-connellan-.... This paper came up barely a decade ago. Studies showing the influence of gender stereotypes on behavior go back decades.

To clarify, I'm not saying that there's 0 possibility that there are differences between sexes, just that trying to rationalize the current gender imbalance in engineering as "girls being girls and boys being boys" is a bit disingenuous, considering different countries perform differently. This article has some interesting data to mull over: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...

There's no "right answer" right now, and yet there's a lot of people around here defending Damore's memo as if all the premises were completely accurate.
This is the sort of decision which scares away deep learning people: when the only hardware advantage is not supported at launch, it tells us that AMD really is not serious about good support and that the stack cannot be trusted.
Obviously. He'd have fallen of the edge.
The sun only provided the fuel's origin the chemical alteration of this material is caused by pressure, heat and millions of years. Though fossil fuel is scientifically photosynthesis based the alteration is what makes it a fossil fuel. Hench the name fossil.

https://www.geochemsoc.org/files/6214/1261/1770/SP-2_271-284...
As the coach of a fall little league baseball team, no, it's mostly kids who love baseball and just want to keep playing. A lot of kids also play travel ball tournaments in the summer which could mean about 5 games over a single weekend. But the only position a you could get burnt out on is pitcher. We always keep track of pitch counts and it'd be a serious issue if any coach went over. It's baseball, a kid is not going to get injured because they had too many at bats, or spent too much time standing in center field. It's perfectly safe for a kids to play one sport all season, with the exception of maybe tackle football, but that's a whole other discussion.

There will always be a small number of parents who push their kids too hard and it's up to the leagues and other coaches to step in when it could be dangerous. That said, the vast majority of kids still practicing baseball in the summer and fall are out there because THEY enjoy it and they themselves want to get better at their sport.
The way a carrier group works you shouldn't be cramming it all into a canal.
> I don't know how Mongols today live with that.

Why should they have trouble "living with that"? Are you saying they're responsible?
Huh, I found the anecdote about her children just a cute example. The meat of the post to me was her drawing on her years as a hiring manager.

Since you, tptacek, are well known here on HN for your hiring experience, both at Matasano and Starfighter, I'd be extremely curious to know your experience with regard to that and gender. How many men vs how many women completed the crypto challenges? What about people you worked with and placed at Starfighter?
With twice as many towers the enlisted personnel on Royal Navy carriers will have twice as many people pissed off at them when there's a minor slip up.
It depends. But generally, I think it is. Although it uses different facilities from those which we commonly use to speak languages.

It's most evident when you use related families of languages. Using up to Python, Ruby or Coffescript is a lot like the related family of english languages; once you know one or two you sort of get them all fundamentally. Javascript, Io and Perl are like lost cousin languages; you can often recognize bits but the sentence structures and dialogue conventions may seem quite foreign.

Confronting purely functional languages is VERY much like having to relearn the same skills of communication from the ground up.
> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?

I would say that this woman's credentials, personal experience with hiring at Google and hiring at her startup, and her (seeming) non-idealogical leanings lends weight to her words.

I wouldn't say she writes perfectly but at least well enough that I could see her frustrations, and more importantly, understand why hiring quotas may create vicious cycles.

Finally, to say "who cares?" shuts down a potentially-enlightening discussion before it can even occur. I'm all for dismissing vitriol spewed by randos, but this post was written by someone with good intentions, a clear mind, and above all, feelings that she feels are valid.

Implying she has nothing worth hearing on this subject is rather unkind.
I think it's ok to not write everything in Python, and this is a long way from the top of my problems with it.
I believe that treating everyone as individuals, rather than as stereotypical groups, is the only way forward. It's the only truly fair approach.

What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit?

If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hiring," instead of the current "diversity-conscious" hiring? You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.

It worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in tech?

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....
Rock music is profoundly uncool, but the guitar is having something of a resurgence amongst young people thanks to Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift. Their signature model guitars are selling like hotcakes.
But what if there aren't enough women training in tech because not enough women want to train on tech. And why aren't we doing the same for male nannies?
Let's all stop using such imperative languages!
She clarifies in the comments. She says that she didn't mean to imply that this was because they were women. And I think she should have gone into more detail because this is the anecdote that defends the title of her post, and this snippet sounds terrible without context.

But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.
> They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever.

Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal.

In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's good. But they are often weird, rude, or creepy (still 40 and shopping at Hot Topic?). They're usually taking orders rather than giving them. And they're often squirreled away in some lab instead of being part of the story itself. I'm concerned the message for women (and men for that matter) is "Tech is great... if you're into dressing up like a wizard and sitting in a cubical. You do you (over there)!"
What is NYC known for?
Last century, my grandmother went to Ireland and brought me back some stickers as a souvenir. Fine print at the bottom: Made in the USA.
4. Facebook, Apple, Google, have proven to the world of finance that big returns are possible and happen regularly in the tech world. It has high risk and high return.

5. People like Elon Musk or Masayoshi Son in Japan are leaders of opinion and, being very rich, they manage to convince other rich people that the future is into the tech they focus on. And thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It exists in the SaaS world. For example, charges based on volume for field marketing campaigns. And, of course, most of AWS is pay-per-use (either time or amount).

It's probably not more widely used even in the SaaS world because people generally don't like the thought of there being a meter ticking while they're using something. Which in turn discourages use and that in turn means that users don't get as much value out of a product or service than they otherwise would.
Python is a very practical language for the "non-professional programmer" who wants to do some simple automation, turn their subject matter expertise into code, etc.

Python is also a language that professional programmers can stand to use (and even like), so it is possible you can collaborate on a cross-functional team, scale up without having to do a total rewrite, etc.
You blame LaTeX for all of these shortcomings, but some are a deficiency of your PDF reader.

For instance, if you use zathura and mupdf to read PDFs, with a single keystroke you invert the text for reading at night. I do it all the time, and it works great. Whether that PDF was generated with LaTeX or not has nothing to do with it.
It definitely is. Classical picking is hard, too. It's about generating a good tone and keeping good time, and also about muting to control rhythm and tone as well as unwanted notes. Picking is an endlessly deep well. Chords and scales are quite straightforward by comparison.
I feel like the GIL is, at this point, Python's most infamous attribute. For a long time I thought it was also the biggest flaw with Python...but over time I care less and less about it.

I think the first thing to realize is that single-threaded performance is often significantly better with the GIL than without it. I think Larry Hasting's first Gilectomy talk was extremely insightful (about the GIL in general and about performance when removing the GIL):

https://youtu.be/P3AyI_u66Bw?t=23m52s

I am not sure I would, personally, trade single-threaded performance for enabling multi-threaded applications. I view Python as a high-level rapid prototyping language that is well suited for business logic and glue code. And for that type of workload I would value single-threaded performance over support for multi-threading.

Even now, a year later, the Gilectomy project is still slightly off performance-wise (although it looks really really close :) ):

https://youtu.be/pLqv11ScGsQ?t=27m32s

As noted elsewhere, multi-processing offers adequate parallelization for this type of logic. Also, coroutines and async libraries such as gevent and asyncio offer easily approachable event loops for maximizing single-threaded resource utilization.

It's true that multi-processing is not a replacement for multi-threading. There definitely are tasks and workloads where multi-processing and its inherent overhead make it unsuitable as a solution. But for those tasks, I question whether or not Python itself (as an interpreted, dynamically typed language) is suitable.

But that's just my $0.02. If there is a way to remove the GIL without negatively impacting single-threaded performance or sacrificing reference counting for a more robust (and heavy) GC, then I am all for it. But if there is not...I would just as soon keep the GIL.
MicroKorg, probably. Maybe an Ableton Push.
> you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money

You cherry-picked corporate-backed projects. Statistics show that unpaid work (without side benefits like resume building) is far from "occasional".
Who uses PyPy? I have been hearing about it for so long now, maybe 10 years. And I have been programming in Python almost full-time for 14 years.

But still I don't know anybody who uses it? It seems like the C extension API is still an issue, or am I mistaken?
Did anyone do the math on using Uber vs buying a car? I probably spend like 100 per month on Uber
The author's post is odd. She's sick of "our" approach to diversity, by which I assume from the headline she means "Google's", although that's not clearly laid out in the text.

Her specific advice is:

> Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.

> Start a mentoring program.

> Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.

These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.
>It's probably because of the Age of Enlightenment in the west that did a thorough self evaluation over a few centuries.

I'm not sure what a "thorough self evaluation" would actually mean. I don't think that's even remotely feasible, given the immense scope of the subject matter. What has happened is that certain elements within western civilization have focused their efforts on criticizing western civilization, some in good faith and some not, and the rest of western civilization has allowed them to do so. That is the part that is rare, just like suicide, and for the same reason.
IPC gains per generation are vanishingly tiny, if they exist at all. Skylake -> Kaby Lake, for example, had no IPC improvements at all. A very small clock bump to the various tiers was it.

Even if you look over a large generation gap there's only a ~20% IPC improvement going from an i7-2600K to an i7-7700K ( https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v... )

6 years & a shrink from 32nm to 14nm and all it can muster is +20%. Cores are just not getting faster by any meaningful amount.
Yeah, frankly I think the technical specifics of XMPP are why I need about ten incompatible messaging apps with mostly the same features.

It simply has never been straightforward enough to do the right thing. Unlike with functioning protocols like HTTP and SMTP. XML was a fundamentally poor choice for wire and processing efficiency, XEPs don't get ratified quickly enough, and there's a chicken-and-egg problem between server and client software in implementing them even if they do.
The central idea at the core of all the diversity ideology is that everybody can do anything, they just have to try and people who fail to become Google engineers or sports stars only have themselves to blame, or even better, since people are loath to blame themselves, some other dominant group.

Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever dreamed of.
> This is not the argument. You should be ashamed of yourself for behaving like this

So what is the argument?
I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What minorities need protection and rebalancing?

We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity?

She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.
I'm enjoying reaping the rewards of all the dotnet core work in my F# projects.

One critique:

Why break semver?

https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/faq.md#w...

Like I get that it feels like a big change (and it is), but you've gone and confused a huge population of library writers and users with the major version bump.

https://github.com/search?q=netstandard2.0&type=Issues&utf8=...

How many of those are irrelevant or invalid? That's just github. I already see the noise being created in slack and gitter channels as well.

Other than that I think dotnet core is an amazing engineering effort and I've been happy using F# on OSX with it.
True this. I think it was on Ars Technica that I was downvoted to oblivion for raising the privacy implications of Google's DNS service.

There is a huge segment of the semi-tech literate crowd that feel wise for using it. I think it's because it's the only time they get to type in an IP address and it makes them feel l33t.
Another weird attribute of her theory about setting the bar and paying premiums for talent is that her engineering team, according to LinkedIn, is in India --- which is a radically different market for software talent than SFBA. In particular, the gender distribution of CS grads and programmers in India is very different from what it is here.

One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.
Since you want to bring up Randoseru, consider that children and young people in the Nordic countries have continued using and loving Fjällräven Kånken backpacks even as production moved from Sweden to Asia, and it wasn’t the end of the world. The iconic design still comes originally from Scandinavia, and as long as quality doesn’t decline in the course of outsourcing production, then who the hell cares where it is put together?

The chocolate analogy isn’t quite comparable here. In that example, the Swiss presumably aren’t setting up their own factories in the US and dictating the recipe. The USA and Switzerland have different food labeling laws and understandings of what chocolate is, so if the Swiss just imported just any US chocolate, then sure, it would jar with the traditional culture.