skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nobody is saying this isn't in context to hiring policies - that's your straw man.

You're evaluating the statement that way. That's not a straw man--it's removal of original context.

> Damore was arguing that women were not in engineering and leadership positions because of preferences and biological abilities (in support of his memo's argument about hiring policies).

Yet another example of the suspiciously common inability of opponents to comprehend the statement.

The statement makes no mention of biological abilities, only distribution of abilities in general (and preferences), caused possibly in part by biological factors.

And once again: The relevant group is the hiring pool for leadership / tech at Google, which undoubtedly has an unequal distribution of qualified men and women as a result of differing distributions of the abilities of men and women at that stage of their careers.

Here's Damore's statement again, with the context from the purpose of the document added by me:

> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women (by the time they can be affected by Google's hiring policies) 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.

Tah-dah! When it's not stripped of context, the meaning is more clear. I still don't suspect misinterpretations will stop, though.
It did. The last page of the User's Guide[0] that came packaged with every C64 says:

> Commodore hopes you've enjoyed the COMMODORE 64 USER'S GUIDE. Although this manual contains some programming information and tips, it is NOT intended to be a Programmer's Reference Manual. For those of you who are advanced programmers and computer hobbyists Commodore suggests that you consider purchasing the COMMODORE 64 PROGRAMMER'S REFERENCE GUIDE available through your local Commodore dealer.

Honestly, until I checked the PDF just now, I thought the User's Guide came with a card to order it through the mail.

[0] http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_users_guide/c64-users_gu...
Twilio will soon launch Flex, a dedicated contact center solution
> He was terminated at Google's discretion under at-will employment, the same standard that might allow you to be fired for coming to work with blue hair.

Exactly. Google had the right to fire him. Which is why he should have published his memo anonymously. Unless, like Snowden, he felt that authentication was important, and was willing to face the consequences.
I used to back it up by quite a bit of data but I get downvoted to oblivion regardless of all the effort. Why bother anymore. I put it here, whoever is interested can research on their own.
I think it's plausible that had the memo not been leaked externally he'd still have his job. In that respect he truly didn't have agency.
I think that it's helpful to provide accurate information.

And that a conversation inspired by false statements should be derailed before it strays even further into fantasyland.
Honestly, if I were teaching someone to program now, I’d just tell them to buy a raspberry pi. For $50 for the nice kit, plus a surplus monitor + keyboard + mouse, you get a fully working toy dev environment preinstalled. You also get piles of programming tutorials written for that exact environment.
Which Moons Have Atmospheres?
It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar effect.
He claims that women on average choose to work less stressful jobs. The exact terms he used are, "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance". Perhaps others think "tolerance" is closer to "ability" than "preference", but that's not how I view it. For example, I have a pretty low tolerance for cold climates. I can tolerate them when I need to like when hiking on Alaskan glaciers, visiting relatives in cold places. On average I'm a pretty outdoorsy person so I think have have a good ability to hike in the cold, as I'm confident in my ability to layer clothing and whatnot. But usually I choose not to because that is my preference. Regardless, Damore even says that there are ways to mitigate this. He suggests that Google should,

> Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

For your second paragraph, here is the full quote.

> This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for
raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences
and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a
women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men
without support.

This is in the context of how women prefer to channel extraversion. Again, preferences make it harder for them to end up in leadership roles. And yet again, Damore offers a way to mitigate this and achieve greater numbers of women in leadership roles:

> Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.

For both of your points, these aren't claims about ability but preferences from my reading. Even if you disagree with this interpretation, Damore still claims that these differences shouldn't exclude women from tech and advancing in tech careers and lists out ways to limit the impact these factors currently have.
A lot of scientific progress in USSR happened despite communism, e.g. consider Lysenko, fights against cybernetics, and other ideology-based interference with science.

Pretty much anything that did not have to do with weaponry, and especially any of the social/philosophical sciences were far behind because they did (or could) go against the communist dogma.
Neat idea!

Sadly, it doesn't seem to handle non-ASCII characters. I entered my name, Cristi Burcă, and it got saved as Cristi Burc?.
You’re not messing with bleach right...
Jobs demanded a $40 MM private jet and large equity increases from the board.
I've had the opposite experience, with older programmers balking at new libraries, techniques, and setting up any environment they're not used to. If it doesn't work right away they go back to what they know. I know one guy who absolutely refuses to learn c++ because it doesn't compile for him and he only "trusts" c. Another who writes only in good ol' python2.7 (scipy dropping support; subprocess bugs; cough cough). Younger people tend to be aware of and use newer tools. But we're all bias I suppose.
similar background (started my career in APL, only language i've ever used that had its own keyboard)

also NumPy, and Nd4j via scala bindings

of course NumPy and Nd4j are libaries

i strongly recommend Julia as an array-oriented programming language

particularly because it has quite a few other features to recommend it

Julia follows the Matlab syntax conventions more closely than NumPy (or R) which i think was a good design choice
Don't forget to mention that the term "user agent" for HTTP clients like web browsers used to be taken literally. Now, the expectation usually is that the browser acts in the best interests of the server, not the user.
Maybe programming isn't, but perhaps finishing something is? Because while the hands-on-the-keyboard, moment-to-moment writing of code is almost certainly easier than ever, actually making a thing out of that is nowhere near as simple as it used to be. Building a nontrivial thing in QBasic was really, really easy. Building a nontrivial web app--whether it's strict server-side PHP or strict client-side JavaScript or whatever--is really, really hard, requiring the consideration of a lot more stuff, and the failure cases are much bigger and much nastier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb9AXBowb0E
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554
It's a total shitshow. But since ruby manages everything with environment variables, you need some kind of tooling to manage multiple versions. Horrendous.

Ruby should just standardize on a way to point projects to rubies. Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how everything else works.
All new iOS apps must fully support the iPhone X screen
Then perhaps Google shouldn't ask for feedback on their courses. Seems rather disingenuous to say the least.
I agree, weekly I can handle, daily I'll end up unsubscribing or ignoring eventually.
It's not just new constructions, ground pin on the top has been the "correct" orientation for a long time. They've been installed "upside down" this whole time but that's what stuck. It's not in the NEC and while there was a suggestion to put the ground pin up, that has never been required by code and most people think that having the ground pin down looks correct.

If you actually look at a NEMA 5 outlet with the ground pin compared to old ungrounded polarized NEMA 1 outlets the NEMA 5 outlet is rotated 180 degrees. The larger neutral slot is on the right on old outlets and with the ground pin down on a NEMA 5 outlet the neutral is on the left.

It's not just for people dropping coins or paper clips on it though. Some outlet covers are metal and if the screw is loose or damaged that's basically guaranteed to short out if something is plugged in with the ground pin on the bottom. Another common thing is people using a tape measure along a wall, it's so thin that if there's a small gap it could shock someone using it or if you're lucky just short against the neutral.
You are not allowed to make protected groups feel harassed or discriminated against. Women are a protected group.

Its a federal workplace law. A company will correctly fire you if you cause women to feel harassed or discriminated. Peoples understanding of whats allowable needs to catch up with the implications of the laws.
Right. And what many have said is that there is not enough evidence in his to support the top half on his claim of biological abilities. Preferences, sure, but that can also be attributed to social constructs which he specifically tries to rule out.

It's splitting hairs to make it about distribution when there isn't sufficient evidence to support a distribution in the first place.
These kinds of objections will draw approving nods from people who already agree with you, but to everyone else, the implication that differences in IQ variance between men and women lead the "top of the curve" to be naturally overpopulated with men is exactly what it sounds like: a claim for the intellectual superiority of men. Sure, there are dumb men; maybe they're even dumber than the dumbest women! But if you're looking for the best, that logic says, you're going to end up mostly with men.

But put that aside and just try to engage with the simultaneously naive and arrogant assumption that the people Google hires --- people, we assume, like Damore --- must somehow represent the top of that curve. Because what they do is just so demanding.

I work in this field, at a pretty deeply technical level, and when I hear other people in it make arguments premised on the notion that what we do demands the pinnacle of human cognitive ability, I just want to hide under a rock from embarrassment.
Can we differentiate between firing Damore and participating in a nation-wide metaphorical public hanging?
Until we can control the microbiomes at will whe trick is that it's very hard to tell if you are one of the people who won't smell bad if you skip the soap and deodorant, or if you're one of the people who will. Especially if you're single. :)

Personally I've found I don't need a ton of soap, can get by without deodorant if not especially active, and can skip shampoo most days but do need conditioner and aggressive rubbing it in/scalp self-massage to avoid dandruff.
Do you remember what the ransom was/what it said on the homepage? I can't find it in Wayback machine (and others).
There are obviously limits to the strategy for effectively preventing crime.

But I feel it's also fairly obvious that there are positive effects to demonstrating care and good hygiene in general. It promotes the same from others. To do the contrary, demonstrating carelessness and neglect, has the opposite effect.

<anecdata>
This week I was hauling a trailer load of trash from a cabin I'm rehabbing out to the dump. One of my distant neighbors I hadn't met yet walked out to the street and flagged me down to introduce himself and have a chat.

In the course of the conversation, he asked where I was taking my load of trash. I replied "to the dumpsters at the community center", an appropriate place for disposal.

He indicated across the street to an abandoned, decrepit cabin, which is directly across the road from his property a sprawling ~20 acre complex. What he suggested surprised me considering the proximity to his own property. He said "You could just throw it in there, the owner doesn't care about the place."

I bit my tongue and continued on to the dumpster, with thoughts of broken windows circulating my mind.
</anecdata>
Russia-Trump inquiry: Full text of Mueller's indictment
The density is very much a feature. Some previous discussion from an APL'er about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565743

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797797
I'm really relieved the number is a power of 2.
/shrug

I'm not telling you what to do or that what you're saying is wrong; I'm just telling you you're being rude by doing what you're doing in the way you're doing it.

If you don't care, that's up to you.
If I am naive it should be perfectly easy to point to where I am wrong. I am not sure what agenda exactly you think I am pushing.
> Can we differentiate between firing Damore and participating in a nation-wide metaphorical public hanging?

Yes. Starting with the first is a thing that actually happened, and the second is not, so it's not worth talking about.
You strike me as reasonable. I would appreciate if you could answer a couple of questions.

1. If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?

2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?

I won't challenge anyone who answers. Thank you.
Problem bacteria levels for hands and body are different. Hands are also typically washed for far shorter periods of time than showers.
It isn't the cache side channel that is the important part of meltdown. Flush-reload is just out the information is retrived and ask acceptable problem.

The problem is data hitting the cache when it comes from an unreadable page. Meltdown looks like a bug in the cache hit logic because the page information is already in the tlb, and the fix is probably fairly trivial.

If the unreadabld page doesnt hit cache or is never mapped there in the first place, spectre can only read its own process.
From their page when you click apply:

> NB! Please be aware that e-Residency does not confer citizenship, tax residency, residence or right of entry to Estonia or to the European Union. It is not a visa or residence permit.

Too bad. It looks like this can't make you a citizen of the EU.
This is one of the few subjects where much of the HN crowd is either experiencing some shared hallucination, or is relying heavily on poor journalism.

There are many comments that classify his memo as anti-diversity (it is pro diversity), and there are many that seem to suggest that the memo claimed women are less suited for these jobs, which again is patently false to anyone who gives it a reasonable and full read.

The injustice here is that this employee was taken to a workshop/seminar, was asked for feedback, which he submitted, and was ignored. His firing only came when his memo was leaked to the public and it became the subject of a media witch hunt.

Had the memo not been public, he would still be working there. This was not a planned firing and there was nothing normal about it. The CEO cancelled his vacation to return to HQ and address the situation caused by the media outcry.

This is a cancerous cultural problem that manifests the worst forms of censorious and authoritarian practices of dictatorial regimes of the past. Diversity at this cost is not worth it. Nothing is worth this kind of environment that is openly hostile and punitive to "wrongthink".

People of various backgrounds are not tokens to be planted into various positions to fulfill some fetish or misguided sense of justice. Under-representation by a specific group or sub group is not sufficient evidence of discrimination or a conspiracy. Deeming programs and opportunities unavailable to people because they don't have the correct biological trait is disgusting, and the ends do not justify the means. To argue that favoring someone because they belong to a special genetic group is rooted in the very "essentialist" thinking that is claimed to be chastised.

There is a better solution to these issues, and at this rate it will never be found. Ironic that some of the world's most innovative people who have no problem bouncing from one design pattern to another, are perfectly content with an approach to a point that criticism of it will get you fired.
That may be true, but their retail business still is profitable. Last year they made around $1 billion of profit from selling a lot of stuff ($120 billion in sales).
> Like I said: Go does everything C does, but better.

It doesn't do everything C does, it doesn't allow manual memory management at first place.

So you can't pretend that a garbage collected language does everything a language with manual memory management does.

Manual memory management is a feature, Go does not have such a feature. Deterministic behavior in a program is fundamental when writing hardware drivers or real time programming, Go can't do that.
From a statistics point of view, this statement is dispositive: "...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."

The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.

P.S. snarky commentary such as 'read the memo yourself', implying I'm lying about having read it, doesn't contribute to civil discussion.
> Water washes off odor but not the bacteria that make that odor.

That is simply inaccurate.

"Bacteria of potential faecal origin (mostly Enterococcus and Enterobacter spp.) were found after no handwashing in 44% of samples. Handwashing with water alone reduced the presence of bacteria to 23% (p < 0.001)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037063/

Whether body soap is necessary for you in particular to not smell bad I cannot comment, but it certainly isn't universally true.
>Yet some of those people reject the idea that it's something they should do at all. They just don't like it the same way a kid doesn't like vegetables

How about this part, where you compare anyone who doesn't exercise to a spoiled child?
Now that was interesting, and thought provoking. While I don’t know enough about the real standards of paranormal researchers, and so can’t really judge the validity of all the assumptions presented, it passes the sniff test. Besides, given the prevalence of things like p-hacking in the mainstream, maybe it doesn’t matter.

How disturbing!
as much as I love LSD, it's by no means a safe drug for severe clinical depression. bad trips can easily push someone over the edge, especially if they have suicidal ideation.

ketamine, on the other hand, has a MoA that doesn't depend on how well the trip went. it's also a known quantity to doctors and far safer and more predictable.

please do not encourage severely depressed people to try acid.
so basically "deodorants smell more than car exhaust"?
Was he?
But long-term, 10, 20 30 years out?

I can't name a single friend who has successfully dieted short term that has kept it off long term.
>He didn't really say women were less capable, though (biologically or otherwise).

Did you read the memo?

>>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.
You don’t “start conversations” and “learn” by drawing conclusions, such as the lack of women in tech can be explained by genetic predispositions.

No, but you can start conversations and learn by asking questions. What silences conversations and prevents learning is a menacing attitude towards to having conversations and asking questions.

He was attacking core assumptions about what a fair society should look like.

Aren't the assumptions the very things which should be questioned? If your axioms are flawed, then the systems built upon them are invalidated. Why should there be equality of outcomes? Should Asians have representation in the NBA proportional to their population percentage? Why is it that Jewish people have been radically more successful than the general population at tailoring across literally thousands of years of history, in so many different cultures and contexts? Why is there a Scandinavian Gender Equality paradox?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8

(Watch that video and try and tell me that the "equalists" don't come across as unreasonable, closed minded, and ideologically driven?)

A broad reading of history tells us that cultural human capital is tremendously powerful. It also gives one hope, as the historical record also indicates that cultural human capital is also transferable. The transformation of the Irish diaspora from their utter destitution to their descendant's current place in 21st century society should tell you that. (Some historians would place the average displaced Irish peasant's wealth at something like 1/2 to 1/4th that of the contemporaneous average US slave's.) Such a reading of history also demolishes the ideology of the worst segments of the Alt-Right. (As well as demolishing that of the identity politics US far-left.)

Let's call such a world view, "Cultural Primacy." Given that cultural human capital has such deep-rooted and powerful effects, what conclusions could we draw about Google's policies? It could well be that cultural human capital would have strong and persistent effects on the preferences of groups, so it would be unreasonable to expect immediate 50/50 outcomes. In fact, it would be expected for such changes to be generational, perhaps taking 2 or 3 generations. Such a world view would also emphasize the educational pipeline, and the way the subcultures of professions and fields are perceived by under-represented groups. This also happens to be in line with James Damore's suggestions from the memo. It's also entirely in line with what Google and YouTube execs have said in public:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc
>Not everyone is rich enough to have the time to exercise

For full-time wage earners, there's actually a slightly negative correlation between wages and leisure time - people who earn more money have less free time. There has been a major long-term trend towards greater leisure time across all socioeconomic groups. Unemployed and retired people are not significantly more likely to exercise than working people, despite their obviously greater amount of leisure time.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

>can't even afford healthy food

The richest American households only eat 0.6 more servings of fruit and vegetables per day than the poorest. The overall average intake was 4.76 servings, so this difference in intake is clinically insignificant. Education level was more strongly correlated with fruit and vegetable intake than income, but differences within socioeconomic groups are far more significant than differences between them.

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/87/6/1883/4754427

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...

The shortcomings of American diets and lifestyles are a hell of a lot more complex than just a lack of time and money.
Speaking as a statistically-impaired person, how do you determine if you have a power law?