gopz's comments

So this is probably a dumb question...but is the clock at all accurate? It says it stops periodically when there isn't sufficient fluctuation in temperature so do they manually correct it after?

> The organisation acquired its own servers, and began encrypting its communication

yikes, sounds pretty sloppy from all sides

I am also wary of the mass legalization of illicit drugs, mainly because of the already huge problem my states has with opiates. I think it's a good goal, but should I really believe that the "regulated" decriminalized drug market is going to be that much better than the already heavily regulated prescription drug market? Maybe once the US can get it together with it's painkiller problem I'd be more inclined to believe in total decriminalization. I would like to see how a system like Portugal's works with opiates in US before I'd hop on board for the whole shebang. However, it seems unlikely to happen since it's already hard enough to get tax payers to sport for Narcan let alone the drugs themselves.

True, but what's troubling isn't that he was fired, it's that the memo got leaked, caused a bunch of controversy and basically forced Google to take a position on whether they want to discuss this stuff. Yes, one guy getting fired for sending out something inflammatory and critical isn't a huge deal (although I would have expected Google to be more tolerant), it's the fact that it went public and then when Google had to make a public statement deciding whether to fire him or not they chose "we don't think these ideas should be discussed".

In case it hasn't already been posted, this (apparently) is the original memo which includes sources and reads much differently.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Give me a break.

1. It wasn't published anonymously

2. What he's saying is not even close to promoting slavery or legally allowing religious discrimination

3. The entire point of the screed was that the diversity issue isn't talked about openly but should be. The response by Google's diversity chief literally says:

> Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.

So your assumption that these things should not be discussed at Google is wrong, at least in the eyes of their Diversity chief, who's opinion I would think is highly relevant in this case

Finally, like many others in this thread deride what's said in this article as untrue and unhealthy without ever backing it up. Obviously I'm not saying the article is 100% right, but most the claims he makes about men and women have scientific backing, they are just not regularly discussed. As others have noted his premises about men and women being biologically different are basically a summary of this study:

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

I think we're in agreement on what the original author personally believes about diversity programs. But there is a difference between outright calling for the end of diversity programs at Google and wanting to discuss it further. It seems that the commenter I originally replied to in this chain doesn't differentiate between these two goals, which is why I said something in the first place.

Although it is tough to tell, it definitely seems like Gizmodo may have stripped out some of his sources. From Gizmodo's preamble:

> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt that there were probably sources. As has been noted in the original YC post about this, it seems like he gets a lot of his info from this study:

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

I think he's saying he accepts that sexism is present in the hiring process, as are all biases, but the answer to that is not diversity programs. My guess is that he believes market forces will sort it out (i.e if someone is qualified regardless of sex or race, they will be hired because it makes sense economically). I'm not saying I agree or think that diversity hires will happen naturally, just extrapolating from what I got from the original post.

I would disagree. While he obviously sees the diversity programs as misguided, he stops short of calling for an end to them. To quote:

> Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

I understand that discussions within a business are different than talking with friends around the kitchen table, but I still think that you should go as far as you possibly can to have open discussions about sensitive topics like this. Of course you aren't going to open a dialogue about the benefits of white power, but there is still a lot of ground to cover between that and what people are doing this weekend. I think that the original article fits into that realm of what is acceptable to at least talk about, regardless of whether you disagree or not.

Yeah, what was up with that? I was really disappointed that stuff was omitted and assumed it was why some of the author's claims seemed so bold. Is there a link to something closer to the original around?

What I've found after living in a few foreign countries (originally from the US):

If you balk at minor incidents of xenophobia and in so doing generally act as if you don't belong, it will only make it worse.

If you can take it in stride and keep a stiff upper lip people will assume you've already gone through enough "hazing" and leave you alone/be more welcoming.

Even if you're trying to be polite, being overly apologetic is almost always bad, unless the situation is incredibly dire. It makes people think you are trying to get away with something by being there.

Thanks, I forgot about the automatic increase/decrease in difficulty as miners come and go. Why won't increasing the transactions per block scale forever? I see lots of people saying it's not a permanent solution. Is the SegWit stuff basically just going to allow for 'meta-transactions' so that you can create a faster overlay network as a sort of clearing house?

As someone with a basic Comp Sci understanding of crypto currencies could someone explain to me why there is a scalability problem? I thought one of the primary benefits of Bitcoin was that higher transaction fees will attract more miners and ergo the transactions can be processed at a higher rate. Why won't this problem be resolved naturally? Tinkering with the block size makes sense to me as a way to crank through more transactions per mined block, but again, why is it even a problem? The mining power is just not there?

yeah, I think we're pretty much on the same page

Okay, but if journalists had no ethics whatsoever beyond a legal obligation, than no one would want to talk to them and we would not get to listen to people's stories. It's not so much about what you could get away with as a journalist, but about trust between you and your subject. I think that by and large Reed did a good job of giving the story a fair telling. There were a few things though, like what was said in the article, that went to far in my opinion.

I don't know...Reed at one point exposes something John specifically told him to keep off the record and he writes it off for two reasons, both of which I take issue with. I can't explain it without getting into spoilers though, which I think any sane person would expect from this thread, but nevertheless, just in case, please stop reading now if you plan to listen to the podcast.

So the first reason Reed gives for revealing John's apparent first lover is because John is dead and based on his assessment of John's personality, he believes John would not care, because again, he's dead. Besides the fact that there is obviously more at stake than your personal relationship with private information, i.e secrets effect your friends, family and enemies who are still alive, presuming that someone feels a certain way based on a few years of talking to them towards the end of their life is not an ironclad basis for an assumption like that. This reasoning is so shitty, that it almost makes the second reason weaker, as if Reed was kind of desperate to bolster his argument for exposing this somehow. The second reason is that other sources corroborated what John told Reed in confidence, so he feels that he can reveal it even though John told him not to. This logic sounds a little better than the first, but still, I'm not an expert in journalistic ethics, but I would venture to say that it's still a bit immoral to reveal that information via a third party, not least because they may be giving you a corrupted version of it. In my opinion it would almost be better to say "This person told me that John had a sort of boyfriend at one point early in his life", but not verify it with John's own off the record remarks.

Additionally, it doesn't realllly seem to add a ton to the story for me. I think that whether or not John had boyfriends early in his life could have been left vague and had the same effect.

As for the "church" stuff, again, I'm sort of at a loss. One thing that is for certain, as the article says, is that John intentionally did not reveal to Reed what was actually going on in these sessions. Again, I don't really know what's acceptable here from a journalist's standpoint, but to me it seems like he went a little overboard with it. By the end I got the impression, which I think was intentional, that John was getting something vaguely sexual out of "church" based just on Tyler's account. This is really dicey because John gets no retort because he's dead and it's clear he didn't really want to talk about it in the first place. I think that the pain addiction was an important part of the story, but again, I'm not sure it was worth the better part of an episode since John didn't want to talk about it when he was alive.

Anyway, I'm not saying that totally agree with the writer of the article. And as I said twice above, I can't figure out exactly how I feel about the whole thing. On some level though, it definitely made me a little bit uneasy, like I was eavesdropping.

I'm living in Kyiv right now and it this seems like the most reasoned response in this chain. Expats tend to have an overly optimistic view of Ukraine because they don't have to deal with the day to day bullshit native Ukrainians endure because of eastern violence, corruption and needless bureaucracy, but Ukrainians I've met also tend to see the US (and I would assume the "West" in general) as overly idealized because of Western media and misleadingly opportunistic headlines.

Yeah, but I'm guessing they cost a lot more than a raspberry pi, they mention these systems in the article

> Recognizing the potential profit opportunity, the Nagoya merchant bought the future harvest of his region by paying approximately 10% to the farmers and writing drafts for the rest of the negotiated amount. These drafts were not to be presented for payment before the rice was actually sold. When the harvest came in, he stored it and after three or four months sold it with a profit of 30- 40%, as prices had climbed in the meantime.2

It is interesting that this sort of financial instrument would have been totally impossible with water logged veggies.