skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
quoting Greylock here:

If we rewind the clock to 2012, Lyft launched a peer-to-peer ridesharing service and Uber was a black car marketplace. Lyft and Sidecar’s P2P taxis were a bigger idea in a bigger space. And like most marketplaces, it was a winner-take-all opportunity, or at least a winner-take-most. At the time, all three companies were only in SF and everyone was racing towards liquidity, with sights to have a right of first refusal on every other city in the country thereafter. Lyft had a big head start, but Uber was trailing right behind.

Uber began to aggressively put its war chest to work to achieve liquidity as fast as possible. This meant enabling ~5 minute pickups for riders and ~$25 hourly earnings for drivers. First, it guaranteed drivers hourly rates and spent money to acquire drivers. With drivers on the road, Uber focused on filling their cars through paid channels and incentivizing referrals. In a nutshell, the company subsidized fares and gave away free rides until there was enough demand and drivers could earn enough on their own. City by city, Uber implemented this playbook — buying drivers, buying passengers, subsidizing rides — to shave minutes off the pickup SLA and increase driver earnings, propelling Uber to liquidity.

In short, Uber burned cash to get more drivers and more customers on the road. As availability went up and the marketplace became stable, Uber got closer to profitability and could scale faster.

-----------------

Sidecar: ‘We failed because Uber is willing to win at any cost’ (2016)

https://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/sidecar-we-failed-because...
Everything is easy if you're hosting all your stuff in the same machine. It gets complicated if you're using third party services, PaaS etc.
> It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.

He mentions aptitude right here,

"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

He also mentions it in an interview:

https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s
Oh really? Left and right imply different sides from a center. Do you have evidence that google "leans left" versus merely embracing majority positions? A sizeable majority of Americans believe in things like LGBT rights and the value of diversity. Those aren't "leftist" positions, they're widely popular American values.
> Women are more interested in working with people and nurturing professions and men are more interested in working with things and abstract, theoretical, mechanical and spatial professions.

Don't agree with number 2 at all.

Half of all new attorneys are women. There is nothing "nurturing" about the profession--it's adversarial and conflict-oriented by nature. And you spend most of your time dealing with abstractions, not people. More than half of accountants are women. That profession isn't any more people oriented than programming, and you work entirely with abstractions. 70% of tax preparers are women. 60% of insurance underwriters are women. Etc.

Conversely, professions we think of as "people-oriented and nurturing" are dominated by men in other countries. E.g. teachers in India are 80% men.
Many people did though.

See for example "Edith's" point in the linked article "Edith: There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”"

To me, it's really hard not to imagine the author being the type of person who would have a "I'm an Atheist, debate me" shirt. It's written in that style.

Beyond that I don't really know what to say. Technical discussions unfortunately frequently end up this way too, so maybe its easy to get used to it. But its counter-productive.

And note, I'm suggesting why it pissed people off at google and should have got him fired. It isn't an explanation of the media reaction per-say because in the context of a public discussion there is no precept that you are cooperating with people (unlike your co-workers) and your audience isn't going to repeatedly interact with you. So adversarial arguments are common and generally accepted. It would have been fine as an op-ed in a news paper (though IMHO doesn't make the quality bar). Its not in a discussion with co workers.
The workplace absolutely is the venue because hr policy is built around it.
Rust's "boxes" are there for safety reasons. I don't see what else could have possibly been meant.

And Go has a runtime. The fact that it has green threads and runs a GC makes for a heavier runtime than C or Rust.

I'm not sure I get your argument about Go' boxes. The original post was clearly talking about the "extra" work a developer has to do to "satisfy" the compiler and run their code. It's a common complaint from those coming from less safe languages. I don't see how I could interpret the meaning as you suggested and still make sense of the post.
I never said I believe in hiring based on diversity over merit, but I also don't mind looking for candidates in different places.

I don't believe the person was hired because of their sex or race. But again, even here, all minorites have to prove it, while the majority are assumed to be there on merit.
> Here's the thing: for men being decent requires effort

Here's the thing: this is called projection. You're speaking for yourself, not men in general.
> That seems an odd approach tbh.

If that's odd, then what is firing just to prove him right?
The original article already provided evidence, based on analysis of the performance of similar students who do and do not get into a selective school. As it says...

"Except that attending those high schools simply doesn’t matter in terms of conventional educational outcomes. When you look at the edge cases – when you restrict your analysis to those students who are among the last let into such schools and those who are among the last left out – you find no statistically meaningful differences between them."

So unless you're calling out the original article, how about offering counter-evidence?
Unsplash powers nearly all of the stock photography I see these days. It's crazy to see photographers are able to get more impressions on their photos than any other platform (ie Instagram and the New York Times)
It refreshes with a new QR code every few seconds it seems. Reload not required.
It's very pretty, and it tells you absolutely nothing.

Sorry. Correction. It tells you that you can sign up for...something.
lol, great points. You are saying it is not common to image drives? The google results for disk+imaging+in+forensics disagrees
I mean, 90% is bigger than 90% of the other numbers. Like 40% for instance.

What is truth when you have a gun to your head.
> And there are many times when this can not happen. Example? Eviction. That requires a process, complete with appeals. Good.

Sure. Now where is the argument that the special protection granted to real property tenants but not applied to most other contractual property arrangements should be paralleled for domain name registration?

> This is not okay, even if Nazis suck.

Repetition of a conclusion is not an argument for it.
I think this is what you're looking for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I've always assumed this was an official rule of Hacker News commentary, but now that I look for it, I don't see it explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. Yet it somehow seems to be woven into the fabric here.

The opposite is to paint your opposition as despicable as possible to show that you are righteous and just. I feel like I've been getting way too much of this from Facebook in the last couple weeks.
So at the top of the article, just before the interview starts, there's this:

> There’s been a lot of anger on both sides, but I haven’t seen many constructive discussions between people who disagree on these issues. I and all the women who have contributed in this post feel that there’s forward progress to be made by finding common ground and discussing different viewpoints without yelling. I hope this will be a good forum for that.

Do you feel like this article does this?

To me, it looks like three people (two of whom openly identify as having left-wing political views) mostly agreeing. That's still useful, but falls way short of "constructive discussion between people who disagree on these issues."
> "Dwarves" and "dwarvish" were deliberately introduced by Tolkien as a way of making Middle-Earth language stand apart from English.

> It's a mark of the popularity of his books that people assume that's the correct spelling in English

It's more likely a mark of the fact that people are familiar with other common English nouns ending in f, such as wolf(wolves) / leaf(leaves) / hoof(hooves) / elf(elves) / staff(staves). (Granted, some of those are less common than others.)

I see no reason to believe that "dwarf" was the odd noun that resisted that process. Making Middle-Earth language "stand apart from English" by applying a perfectly normal rule of English would be an odd thing to try.
> because there isn't evidence that biological differences cause people to choose different careers.

Oh? What about basketball players or jockeys?
Julian Assange: A man without a country
There's a reason why all sports, including non-physical ones, like chess, have separate competition for women

Women compete fine in competitive shooting. That requires some swrious mental skills. Source: I like to watch the national championships.
Even still, you can opt-in to those features in a GC language when you need it, but the contrary is not the case in Rust at the moment.
Working pro with 12 years experience. Absolutely not worth it. Most of your classmates will have not coded before.

The classes are cheap. The hours are long. In the end your grade depends on teammates who haven't been vetted. Three teammates who can't code? You get a C and don't pass.

Course content is extremely dated. UML and SDLC paradigms from the 70's with xerox pdfs distributed to "learn" from.

This is a money grab.
That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
Ok, what happened to Demore would be like me working at a company of young Earth creationists who had an internal message board for discussing controversial religious subjects and then firing me because I brought up natural selection. Is it wrong for me to bring up natural selection or is it wrong for my hypothetical company to entrap me?
Got the same first impression. How can a link like this get to the first page of HN?

Without any useful information without having to look on another page, wouldn't it just go into unnoticed?
Summary from the post: "My take is that if desegregation has any impact on achievement, it is small and drowned out by other factors."
More annoying is that even with as a IEEE member with Spectrum subscription, there's no way to log in and remove the ads, only to download the magazine.
How about "precognitive skills"?
GitLab is looking at Matrix https://matrix.org/
> Having unconscious bias or otherwise being incorrect doesn't make you intellectually dishonest.

If you purport to be a (competent) scientist in the 21st century then personally I expected you to be highly aware of biases such as publication bias & confirmation bias and act accordingly. That speaks either to his discipline/understanding or his honesty, I don't know which.

> Whether or not his claims are true, Damore presented a much more metered and reasonable argument than virtually all of his detractors or even published social pundits.

Damore was metered, but understandably triggered a threat response in the people who his memo targeted as being below "the bar".

You may have read a selection of counter-arguments, some of which will be less "metered and reasonable" than his. Unfortunately the emotional tenor of an argument is not the measure of its merit.
Yes, but this raises the issue of affirmative action causing bias about innate abilities, and that's absolutely true.

If you knew there were a lower bar for people who had red hair, for example, because there's a pay gap and their population ratio isn't represented equally, every time you'd have someone on your team with red hair, you'd wonder if they were there because of the exception made for them or if they got there on pure merit. Thus, affirmative action causes people to question that merit (bias).

Worse, the redhead who got in never knows if they got accepted based on merit or based on some quota, which contributes heavily Impostor syndrome, negative self image and confirmation bias based on that negative self image.

You combine these two things over time and there is absolutely an impact.

Damore's ultimate points were: let's discuss this and, by the way, please don't ignore me just because my opinion is unpopular.
But isn't that true of any hiring practice? Should people start lowering their standards just so other companies can get better candidates too?
Indeed. Windows support was critical, and I have a ton of users there as a result of it being so easy to distribute a Rust application to them. Microsoft even picked it up and is now shipping it in VS Code. :-)

> Still, the language I'm using interacts with the way I'm thinking; if that part isn't working out, all the features in the world isn't going to help.

Sure, and there was a lot of friction between me and Rust in the beginning. But my experience---and a lot others' experience as far as I'm aware---is that the friction settles down quite a bit. But yeah, experiences can vary there!
> However, if you love to learn and don't mind putting in the long hours, it can be rewarding for its own sake.

I love learning. I took one MSCS class when I worked at a university and completed a Udacity Nanodegree. That said the one MSCS class I took was intense (Applied Cryptography) and I had to spend time in study groups on the weekend.

What kind of time commitment am I looking at for the OMSCS?
Well said. I thought the memo was well written with poor reasoning as to causation. Though the memo said there were influences outside of biology, it spent no time exploring them.
Funny, I've been reading through his entire essay. It's a brilliant deconstruction of the fascist mindset. Shit like this is what kids need to be learning in school.
> Last ditch effort was an experimental drug... he's the only one alive

I assume it wasn't the drug then but some other factor that was either missed or underestimated in his actual recovery. Wish more of these missing-pieces were known.
I have DDG as my default, but I append !g any time I am looking for something local. DDG obviously can't (and shouldn't!) compete there.
Have you seen the video? It's way more jacked up than what you're implying:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pzzQ42D9Srw

Watch that and tell me that it's reasonable or caused by a short yellow...
That's one hell of a story. Now you have to wonder if that company would have existed if he had not gone through that terrible ordeal.

If your brother ever writes a book about his life I'll be sure to buy a copy.
> I don't think I'm alone in thinking that discussing race or gender issues at work is out of bounds, regardless of your position.

But most tech employers already broach the subject in many ways. It's not right that employers get to have controversial opinions, including during work hours, but employees do not.

Things like this need to be addressed if we want corporate power to be moderated.
One interesting point that hasn't attracted much attention is that the author self-identifies as being on the autism spectrum [1]. If this fact were better-known, would accessibility advocates defend his memo — and possibly even attack its detractors for not being sensitive to his neurological differences?

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/JamesDamore/comments/6thcy3/im_jame...
Benefits and challenges of using machine learning to optimize on-chip data flow
The Simple Path to Worthy Code
Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.

HBR found there's an innate bias against any minorities in hiring pools [1], and considering that women make up a much lower percentage of potential CS positions, the deck is probably stacked against them. This means that for other companies, they have already passed on hiring the qualified minority candidates. Speculatively, Google could be trying to counteract this by diverting more energy into finding minority candidates.

Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?

[1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can...
> If that's odd, then what is firing just to prove him right?

Google is a company with shareholders and P/L. It's not a thought experiment, a family, a social commons, or a debating society. It exists to make money.

Google took the decision to fire him based on what was likely to create a conducive atmosphere for its workers.

His memo, however construed, made it likely that he could no longer be able to contribute as effectively to some teams.

Google's responsibility to Damore begins and ends at their mutual alignment of economic interests.
Not sure what you mean here?

Women and men are different: agree.

Physical is different than mental: yes

Example of a sport that takes really strong mental skills and where women compete alongside men: competitive shooting.
The curiosity in me wonders what happens to IAM if us-east-1 suffers a total outage.
We ship the certificates out transparently to users using Yarn. Yarn keeps them as private local resources and cleans them up for us.
The right way for women to do that is developing interest in the field and being good at it and working hard. Thats how women/men got into fields they respectively dominate now. Not by forcing affirmative action and shaming.
Because they never had a chance to own the means of production and thus were not able to negotiate on an equal footing.
> They didn't hire, fire, promote, or speak differently?

Sure, now prove it. Other than the lack of black engineers in his department and some comments made at non-work-related functions, there wasn't anything you could point to and say "a-ha!" It can be insidious.

> nobody seemed to dispute innate differences between men and women

I think everyone agrees there are innate differences. At least, the women who wrote this article do as well.

Now, do those innate differences make women inferior engineers? (I know, Damore never explicitly said this, but he implied it. Maybe it's just poor writing? I wish he'd run his memo past some interested women before posting internally so he'd have a chance to clarify.)

The "core" of which you speak is basically Google's exec staff. It's not a conspiracy, it's just the company.

They fired Damore because, whether it's due to unfair implications or just bad writing, his presence had become hostile to a good percentage of Google's workforce. He's not going to be in a position to manage many female engineers after posting that.

Personally, I wish Google could have condemned the memo and let HR handle it. Their reaction seemed over the top. Ah well, sometimes life isn't fair, even for white male engineers. :)
I find it annoying how all these people get to freely debate this and voice their opinions, but the person who started it lost his job for doing the same.
I have never accepted having a 3 month notice period, would never have 3 months of theirs is 1 month. I was asked to have a 3 months period once and asked them to change it to 1 month and they did without any problems.

It sounds like they want their cake and to eat it, which in itself is a big red flag I would stay well clear
If you look at when the "v" form spiked, it's a good bet that Tolkien influenced that a lot. But, yes, it's a common plural form for many (but not all) English words that end in f in the singular. But no one uses chieves as the plural for chief for example.
Right, but the alternative for Amazon isn't liquid cash, it's Amazon stock, which they believe will increase in value faster than the interest on bonds (not unreasonable imo).

If they had $16B lying around in cash, yes that question would probably make sense. You also have to take into account where that money is, since you can't bring overseas money within the US without paying a tax.
We raise our children to be more evolved and better than we are as their parents, are we worshiping our children?

The proof of the reality you need to adapt to is in the work, the output. If a machine can do everything you do practically, but in a way people would agree is more optimal - including being empathetic, just and kind with it's resources, then that's a reality you need to adapt to.

Okay, a charitable reading of "significant powers" might just mean "a working prototype, something more than nothing".

Effectively. What I mean is something that is interwoven into the fabric of our lives that can't just be shut off, like electricity. Something that brought so much progress that it would be irresponsible to remove it.
As far as I understand, the memo was submitted to an area of google's internal google+ that was specifically meant for controversial/contrary opinions and discussions.

It's not as if he submitted the article in an inappropriate place in an attempt to shock and offend. He spoke his mind in a place that was seemingly designated for that purpose... Yet another person leaks the memo to drum up outrage and that's somehow ok..?

I'm really disappointed in the culture of mob outrage that's been taking over the Internet in recent years...
It's not just "pro-affirmative-action stakeholders" that are expected to respond. _As referenced in the article_, it's extending to expecting women to come up with responses just because they are women. You're talking about a situation where one side (the side of the manifesto) has dropped an "evidence bomb", some of which may be valid, some not, and is now complaining "why won't you have a discussion?" They weren't invited to a discussion, they weren't talked _to_, they were talked _at_, and are now being looked to as the defenders of their gender when they just want to do their damn job.
Your action might feel self willed but may in fact follow inevitably from all prior events. Individual agency could just be a creation of the mind. Personally I try not to dwell on these thoughts, but the philosophical discussions around free will cannot be dismissed simply with a wave of the hand, as you seem to be doing.
A professor at the University of Rochester (my alma mater) has begun a project to better evaluate the value of a liberal arts education, and to try and quantify what impact it truly has on the career trajectories and future earnings of graduates[1].

[1] https://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V79N6/0304_lennie.html