Wow this got modded down. Seems lie the idiots are out in force.

Why do you feel Google owes this to you?

And pray tell where did I ever say that. I was just disputing that the data has no relevance.

You should actually learn to read. I hear it's wonderful to be able to understand what people write.

How much of the dexterity comes from the tongue?

Lots. It's a combination of beak and tounge. The beak is very mobile, not just a simple open and closing hinge like the OP is thinking of.

Actually, that's just mathematically simplistic. Here's what your reasoning does not account for: There are leanings, abilities and competencies that do not exist in isolation from other influences.

How does it not account for that? Gender gives you a probability density function over performance, which gives you a prior on someone's performance in the absence of further information. Once you have a measurement of the performance the prior PDF doesn't yield anything extra.

For instance, the air force has definitively determined that females are significantly better at maintaining more comprehensive situational awareness in complex aerial situations.

Yeah on average. Inevitably some women are crap at it, where as others are good. This is not unexpected. What it means is that in a given random pool of men and women the women will be on avreage better, so you'd expect to hire more women.

But you don't make hiring decisions based on gender because there's far too much intra-gender variation. So you evaluate their skills and hire based on that.

The thing is once you've evaluated the skills, you know the skills and gender has no further bearing.

The law, unfortunately, but needfully (due to blind prejudice), specifies decision by rote.

Unless you point to the specific statute that states that I do not believe you.

No, it's not.

Yes it is.

To do that, you'd need an analysis that includes much more

Well done, clap clap. You've just stated that that information you claimed was unnecessary is in fact necessary (along with a bunch of other stuff). Smooth. You just really angrily proved me right and rebutted your own arguemnt.

Go take your zero knowledge SJW

You know if you weren't so outraged about "SJW" you'd be able to engage your brain and think rationally and sound an awful lot less silly.

Pretending otherwise doesn't make such things go away.

Pretending those matter though doesn't mean they do. If one accepts the hypothesis that gender has some effect on the ability to write computer programs then if you aggregate together many members of each gender and figure out their ability there will be some statistically significant difference.

If then, one were in the odd position of making blind hires with no information other gender, then if the hypothesis is true, you'd get best results by hiring people of one gender.

However no one at all ever makes blind hires.

If you already know the person's ability via their qualifications, interview performance, past performance etc, then gender provides no further information.

Therefore hiring based on gender is a bad idea.

And that applies to just about every other category.

Because of these truths, consideration should be given to such factors.

No it shouldn't. If gender is a predictor of ability then the probability distributions are BY DEFINITION not independent. If therefore you use the knowledge of gender after evaluating ability then you are treating them as independent variables when you combine them. This is mathematically bogus.

What is the distribution of skin colors of Google's employees possibly ever relevant to?

Its relevant to knowing if their hiring practices are biased for or against people with a certain skin colour, for example...

I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.

Everyone says that, but mostly it's talking the talk, not walking the walk.

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011...

Google hires people based on talent.

ITYM google hires people based on an obscure interviewing process which requires you to be able to recite details of algorithms you'd only learn in a CS course, but without reference to any reference material.

It's a substitute for talent, which biases them towards hiring people who have very recently finished a CS degree. And are therefore young.

This explains the astonishing level of churn in their "products" and why they seem to value nuking something that works and replacing it with something higher bandwidth, slower, more featureles but shinier every 6 months.

Think about that for a moment. Suppose hospitals did things this way? If you need critical brain or heart surgery, do you want your surgeon to be one of the best in his or her field,

Yes I would, so I'd rather the company didn't have hiring practices that preferentially hired from a limited pool of people or had biases in hiring that made them biased against people based on race or gender.

Which is what these initiatives are about.

It's more than that though.

It's also about making sure that when non white men apply they're actually evaluated on merit rather than on their perceived race and/or gender.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

But yes, the entire thing is actually about making sure the best people get the job.

Speaking of it being crap. It's gone totally to shit recently in terms of network usage.

Time was I could make skype calls over HSPDA. These days it's impossibly bad. Anyone know a good cross platform voip system that works over 3G and supports conference calls?

Oh also, if there's a long backlog of chat messages about one time in 20, skype will basically fuck up and be unable to sync them. The solution seems to be to blow away all config data (i.e. equivalent to reinstalling) and reinstall it.

Lovely.

Beaks have *one* joint. How the hell they be agile?

Go and watch a dextrous bird (such as a smart parrot) manipulating things with its beak. You won't be incredulous that such a thing is possible when you've seen it in action.

The failure mode of democracy is group A voting to tax group B. Once 51% discovers they can vote to raise taxes on some 49% group without taxing themselves, everything starts falling apart. OTOH "everyone votes on how everyone is taxed "is a sustainable system.

So even if most people agree that people on the poverty line shouldn't be taxed as much as really rich people as a percentage of income, that's somehow a failure of democracy?

Besides, everyone is treated the same in that the laws apply uniforml and blindly based on only how much income you have (modulo wirednesses like capital gains which few people understand and never make it on to party policies anyway).

The use of hex floats is to be able to write out floats efficiently and with guaranteed full accuracy to a text file. You can use decimal but you need a LOT of digits in order to do so, making the files rather bloaty. The reason Perl now supports them I suspect is because they're now supported in a bunch of other languages such as C++, so if you want to be able to mutually exchange data, you need hex floats in perl too.

Pesonally, I like them. A lot of data one generates in numerics isn't exactly human readable, but is generated as text for easy parsing with the original language and other tools. For example if your algorithm generates a log of checkpoints you can restart interrupted computations (great for splitting work into smaller chunks for a cluster), for example. To do that properly, you need to be able to save the state without loss.

That's just one of many examples.

It's curious that people (not you) have been guffawing over how stupid Perl is for doing this. It's funny that a supposedly hackish community has a significant cadre who brags about their anti-intellectualism as much as any self-respecting highschooler.

I use mobile firefox and noscript turning javascript off. I also have slashdot set to "classic" mode (I remember whenSlashdot 2.0 got as much whining as Beta). Works like a charm.