naiveattack's comments

Thank you internets and HN for participating in our extensive experiment.

In this experiment, we monitored how we could manipulate opinions and elicit reactions by posting content on different mediums.

Unfortunately, due to the classified nature of this study, we can't really reveal more to you right now.

Also, we made a fuck tonne of money! You helped fund the whole thing, and then some!

No, you can't have the data. Really now, I'm surprised you even asked.

- The Man in the Shadows

This is a good point. Here's an open question:

How do you know when you have enough positive discrimination?

Do you just make sure that the representation of different groups is the same as in the population? This is a poor solution because it cannot be said that this would have been the distribution without negative discrimination.

Also, along what lines would you now pick your categories?

Would you ensure representation for latino lesbian women who speak spanish and like chocolate cake on tuesdays?

Which is to say that the category can get arbitrarily small.

Yes, but what happens when the voice of science is underrepresented?

Now read the grandparent comment again.

Perhaps it's just that the people who actually have the useful-science-shit to do aren't in stupid discussion threads like this one? ;)

I really like the "What You Can't Say" essay. Interestingly, what it says is not that speaking out is bad. It says that you must weight the benefit of speaking out to society, to the cost to yourself. It says you know what, sometimes it's ok to pick your fights, to be a coward, or to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the good in society. I agree that sometimes it's important to be selfish.

This means that I can avoid the short term cost to me, but what about the long term cost?

Every time you stay silent, you are complicit in the foolishness and irrationality in society. Every time a mob silences an individual and you ignore it, you lend power to the mob, and power to the idea of a mob in the mind of society.

You lend power to the idea that the louder you shout, the more correct your idea is.

And it's the ideas that make our society.

Here's an example of where this is going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nvNAcvUPE . The rabbit hole goes deep.

I am worried that even HN, a crowd that prizes itself on being intellectual, is so easily swayed by virtue signalling and shouting loudly (see comments here and on other similar threads). If these rational minds are so easily swayed, what about the larger crowd that thinks even less for itself? These centres must be held to a higher standard or we risk corruption of everything.

Your choices make a difference, choose wisely.

Ugh. It doesn't matter how good your math is if your model is wrong.

Here's an outline of what I believe to be a useful model, and some useful questions to ask, and experiments to run in real life to change things.

                +-------------------+
                |                   |
                +                   |
          +---->X1+---+             |
          |           |             |
          |           +-->Q         |
  M+------+           |   +         |
          |           |   |         v
          |           |   +--------+W
          |           |             ^
          +---->X2+---+             |
                +                   |
                |                   |
                +-------------------+
  

M = male / female X1 = math ability X2, X3 ... Xn = other factors (analytical ability, ability to work in teams, ability to understand real problems, etc, also bias of interviewers against women) Q = performance on interview questions W = performance in real life work

The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'.

The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP?

Now,

If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first.

Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ... -- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive -- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W

Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths!

The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people.

Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made.

A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small.

I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.

+1 this

Does more than putting buttons on existing commands

Improves discoverability of interesting combinations of commands and option flags to make higher order commands

This was an excellent read about how to deal with the irrationality and repression of mobs. Thanks.

Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important as it allows the discussion of ideas without giving importance to the persons behind them. Of courae, allowing for the fact that nothing can be truly anonymous :)

TED: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...

This discussion should be about empowering women.

Not about painting people who've made mistakes with a brush. Not about placing blame.

If a friend / family member of yours, a woman you cared about, was in a situation where she was being harassed by someone with a cheque in his hand, what would you want her to do?

Women in cave feeding the babies. Men venture far and hunt with spear.

Welcome to the stone age all over again :)

THIS. What a wonderful study.

Given a problem statement, the questions that emerge should objectively be largely based on the problem itself: the industry, competition, business models and risks. Regardless of whether it is being presented by a man, woman, monkey, or dog.

The only way the questions could change is if you already knew about the person, and if the objective of the questions was to test only weaknesses in the whole system including the people driving it, assuming the strengths.

This would then imply that on average the men should being tested on what the men are weaker at! And correspondingly for women.

I do not see this in the result set.

Scroll down to the bottom comments for real personal anecdotes and experiences; and contrasting perspectives.

The bottom comments are important to complete this discussion if you are willing to entertain different thoughts.

I won't say more here, because I want people to actually be able to find this comment. Unlike the ones at the bottom.

Cheers.

Microsoft Dynamics / Salesforce allow you to set up a data model without any code.

Turns out you still have to be able to model things, and understand the mental model for programming which is why people end up with hell on these systems.

Also, if you've gotten this far, plain text is actually a far more easy and convenient way to specify things.

Further, if you need to run such a system yourself, you'd still need to deal with the rest of it, which is just hidden to users, which we're developing tools for all the time.

This is interesting.

The only way to do it should be to sync your observation to other observers as soon as the observation is made. The other observers can confirm the time then by knowing when they received the information.

Block chain with comments.

"while each additional choice beyond two decreases the maximum load by only a constant factor"

Mathemagical!

I've also been thinking that the world needs to begin banning American software.

We already know that the totalitarian government that it's becoming is a threat to the privacy and rights of people worldwide. Avoid censorship and surveillance. Look for and build alternatives.

Nothing better to change deep rooted policy rot than economics?

Thanks for engaging honestly with that forward comment.

Yes, I have. No, I have not sold to engineers.

To add some perspective: Airbrake/Sentry error monitoring; NewRelic monitoring; Pingdom uptime monitoring; Log management Ala Papertrail; Github/Assembla version control; are things that I reach for in the initial set up.

I think engineers are/(should be) unwilling to give up on control when it comes to their core business areas. This is why I prefer open source (or at the very least known stable and long lasting) solutions for the data layer and core infrastructure pieces. Or at least compatible managed services; no introducing new layers of abstractions. Also they’re unwilling to pay for things like editors, from ideology and from the market today.

I’ve seen the build it ourselves approach, primarily put forward by engineers who do not appreciate the costs of building and maintaining things, and from stakeholders with a vested interest in selling particular services. I would call both a circle jerk kind of situation.

To reiterate, in my mind, great engineers would quickly outsource all non core competencies so that they can focus on the more important things. It costs me more to build something, both in terms of time and opportunity, than to have an expert do it for me. Herein lies understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve.

To me, intelligent engineering is, cliched as it is, about understanding the tradeoffs, and building the bare minimum that delivers. Keeping in mind that the tradeoff could be about investing in future directions. One example that comes to mind was a data pipeline built using ifttt, dropbox, s3, and spreadsheets for data analysis: brutally simple, probably fragile, but brilliantly done for what was needed in that situation.

Engineering is not writing code, engineering is solving problems.

From a different angle, from a limited vantage point, I’ve seen companies that sell to engineers struggle because they fail to clearly articulate the value that they bring, and because they introduce too much risk to the rest of the system (What if the vendor disappears, or if I want to migrate to another? Why is there yet another API to learn that also strongly couples with my system?)

I am curious about where you are coming from on this. Would you care to get into some specifics?

This is nonsense. And therefore dangerous if used as some form of inspiration.

Great engineers do cost benefit analysis. They solve real problems.

Great engineers do not just write code for everything to inflate their own egos.

My apologies if I missed some form of too-subtle sarcasm here.

Thank you for this.

It was enlightening to go through the do not click link to see what this extreme viewpoint looks like first hand.

I second this. Looks like a less complete knex.

Also, in recent times, I like objection.js for a level up on knex.