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Tether is a fiat currency supported by the crypto oligarchs. It doesn't have to be backed. It just has to avoid taxes, avoid governments, and avoid sequestration.

You can't take a tether and redeem it for a dollar, so it doesn't really even have a price. Tether is just a placeholder for a dollar in the crypto-world.

Furthermore, Bitcoins aren't really priced in United States Dollars anymore, they are priced in Tether Dollars. The price reported on CNBC is tether dollars.

It's so synthetic, even that chart doesn't really matter. So, where can we find real dollars being exchanged for Bitcoin? We can find that in the GBTC trust. I would argue the actual price of a Tether is equal to the GBTC discount, which currently sits at 37%. So, a tether dollar is actually about 0.62 dollars.


Yes! And in addition to that, some people have argued that the more bots the better, because, since Twitter's financials are not in dispute, the value of each actual mDAU is proportional to number of bots.

Twitter revenue for 2021 was $5b, for, say, 200m mDAU (actual number is a little over that); each mDAU is therefore worth $20. But if half of these are bots, then each non-bot is worth twice more!

If all mDAU are actually bots save one, that one user is worth five billion dollars per year.

Musk should be very happy that there are bots. Not only is his defense irrelevant, for the reasons listed above, but it's also incoherent.


> RCTs are used to establish causality and are as much “proof” as you’re gonna get in science.

No, they're not. The real "gold standard" in science--the standard that prevails in, for example, physics or chemistry--is a controlled experiment. Not just a "randomized controlled trial", but a controlled experiment, where you can actually dictate exactly what state the things you are going to experiment on start out in. And the eventual output of controlled experiments is a predictive model--a model that can predict, accurately, what will happen if you run further experiments. That is what it takes to truly "establish causality".

But in most other domains, including the one under study here, controlled experiments simply cannot be done and predictive models with any kind of accuracy simply don't exist. The correct response to that unfortunate fact is to realize that we can never achieve the same level of confidence in these other domains as we can in domains like physics or chemistry where we can do controlled experiments. Unfortunately, the response "science" has settled on instead is to pretend that it doesn't matter--that because we can't do controlled experiments in these other domains, the universe will somehow magically lower its standards of what it takes to achieve the level of confidence we want. But the universe doesn't care what we can or can't achieve.


> Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware

Very large ETH miner here, we use GPUs. Mostly 4-5 year old tech too. Unlike BTC, ETH does not require the latest hardware because the algo, ethash, is memory bound. This is a great explainer [1].

You may be implying that the majority of the network is custom ASICs. I doubt it is more than about 30%, if that. Come august, all the ones with 5gb of ram will also disappear off the network because of DAG growth.

GPUs are also not destroyed by using them. I've got GPUs sitting in the worst possible conditions, running just fine for many years now. We have started to change the thermal paste on the hot ones though... it dries out. I don't know what you were dealing with, but that sounds like something else caused the failures as the chips themselves don't wear out like that.

[1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...


> If we had some "Open Worker Initiative" where I can build my software and then choose where I want to deploy it, it would sound ok.

To that end, two announcements from yesterday:

* Cloudflare, Deno, and others have formed a working group for serverless API standards. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-the-wintercg/

* The Cloudflare Workers runtime will soon be released Open Source under the Apache license. https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-open-source-announcement...

(Apologies that we don't actually have the code up yet... I'm working on it, there's a lot to detangle from our internal infrastructure, but it should be ready in a couple months.)

> small bits of compute

FWIW, there are some fairly complex applications on Workers. You can basically write arbitrary web apps. There is currently a 1MB-after-compression limit on code size for a single Worker, but we're working on increasing that.


Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements.

For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for consultation not diagnosis. [1]

In 2015 he predicted: “Self-driving cars are going to get here much faster than people think,” Altman said. He thought we’d see them in three to four years. [2]

I think he would be wise to learn from Bill Gates that it's a bad idea to over-predict what will happen in the short term. "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."

I'll add to this that it's generally a bad idea to make big predictions outside of areas that you have strong domain knowledge in. I doubt Sam Altman has strong domain knowledge around US higher education. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley culture is full of people who feel that because they've succeeded in one domain they have some kind of hidden insight into others.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go...

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-020-07230-9

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/elon-musk-sam-altman-say-s...


I really love the wave of new tools that are gaining traction in the Python world: tqdm, rich (and soon textual), fastpi, typer, pydantic, shiv, toga, doit, diskcache...

With the better error messages in 3.10 and 11, plus the focus on speed, it's a fantastic era for the language and it's a ton of fun.

I didn't expect to find back the feeling of "too-good-to-be-true" I had when starting with 2.4, and yet.

In fact, being a dev is kinda awesome right now, no matter where you look. JS and PHP are getting more ergonomics, you get a load of new low level languages to sharpen your hardware, Java is modern now, C# runs on Unix, the Rust and Go communities are busy with shipping fantastic tools (ripgrep, fdfind, docker, cue, etc), windows has a decent terminal and WSL, my mother is actually using Linux and Apple came up with the M1. IDEs and browsers are incredible, and they do eat a lot of space, but I have a 32 Go RAM + 1TO SSD laptop that's as slim as a sheet of paper.

Not to mention there is a lot of money to be made.

I know it's trendy right now to say everything is bad in IT, but I disagree, overall, we have it SO good.


> Not sure how it’s causing him so many troubles.

The allegation is that Cloudflare's in the (anycast) CDN business, hence its customers do not require EDNS (ECS) to be steered to the geographically-nearest server, and so, they naturally want to kill EDNS (ECS) and that privacy's just an excuse.

As a consumer, I agree with what Cloudflare's doing (though they could potentially engineer a solution to send fake/blind EDNS (ECS)). Wearing my developer hat, I also agree with archive.is' decision to stage a protest.


Ain't a dumb question at all! It actually takes reading the ActivityPub specs to answer it, so no surprise if you didn't get it just from reading the landing page ;)

The answer is: it'll happen automatically. Just search for someone's handle, and your server will talk to that other server. When you follow that other users, your server will start federating with that other servers.

Note though that servers might block each other. For example, many Western servers block Japanese pawoo.net, since it allows posting lolicon. Western servers don't want this content in their timelines and caches, so they block it. If your server blocks another.social, you won't be able to follow anyone on there.

But your question also hints at a real problem with Fediverse (of which Mastodon is a part), which is: each instance only sees a subset of the Fediverse. Thus, searching by hashtag will only get you a subset of all posts that contain it. Full-text search is even more complicated.



For those interested, AllAboutSteveJobs.com keeps a pretty good repository of Jobs moments. My personal favorite is his 1997 WWDC talk [1]. In one talk he demonstrates what it is to be a great leader organizationally, publicly, and as a product visionary.

He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today.

He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy.

Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments.

[1] (full video): https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

[2] (insult excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o


B2B consultant here for 30 years weighing in with broad truths:

* If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later.

* This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process.

* As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed.

* You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work.

* Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.


I don't necessarily agree with all of this advice. Yes giving talks, having a blog, etc. help but they are a medium to long-term play and you have to wait for leads to discover you or be referred to you. You don't have much control over when this happens, which is what causes a lot of the feast and famine cycles.

I have had success just directly reaching out to companies I wanted to work with. This meant I was at least proactively putting myself in front of them, instead of hoping they find me or remember me.

Came across this comment from another thread [1] that breaks it down a bit:

1. Go to https://trends.builtwith.com/framework to find websites that use the tech stack you specialize in.

2. Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)

3. (Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5).

4. Find the email format of these companies with https://hunter.io/.

5. Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email.

The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your programming skills to use. Here's a template you can reference: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer

There are a lot of businesses out there whose teams don't have the capacity to build everything so they would be keen to have a reliable freelance programmer help them bring some features or projects out of backlog.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20971098


(1) Start a freelance practice.

(2) Raise your rates.

(3) As you work for clients, keep a sharp eye for opportunities to build "specialty practices". If you get to work on a project involving Mongodb, spend some extra time and effort to get Mongodb under your belt. If you get a project for a law firm, spend some extra time thinking about how to develop applications that deal with contracts or boilerplates or PDF generation or document management.

(4) Raise your rates.

(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.

(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the business objectives of whatever you build. This sounds fuzzy, like, "be able to talk in a board room", but it isn't! It's mechanically simple and you can do it immediately: Stop counting hours and days. Stop pushing back when your client changes scope. Your remedy for clients who abuse your flexibility with regards to scope is "stop working with that client". Some of your best clients will be abusive and you won't have that remedy. Oh well! Note: you are now a consultant.

(7) Hire one person at a reasonable salary. You are now responsible for their payroll and benefits. If you don't book enough work to pay both your take-home and their salary, you don't eat. In return: they don't get an automatic percentage of all the revenue of the company, nor does their salary automatically scale with your bill rate.

(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.

(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -> NoSQL -> highly scalable backends. Document management -> secure contract management.

(10) Raise your rates.

(11) You are now a top-tier consulting group compared to most of the market. Market yourself as such. Also: your rates are too low by probably about 40-60%.

Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) and (b) take responsibility for the business outcome of the problems that code is supposed to solve --- people who can speak both tech and biz --- are exceptionally rare. They shouldn't be; the language of business is mostly just elementary customer service, of the kind taught to entry level clerks at Nordstrom's. But they are, so if you can do that, raise your rates.


No.

- You visit evil.com

- Evil tries to make an HTTP request to bank.com/transfer.php

- The browser happily performs the request, authenticated with your cookies, and the bank, having a CSRF vulnerability, happily sends your money to the attacker.

- Since 'evil.com' and 'bank.com' are different origins, Browser refuses to provide the response to evil.com, but the attacker doesn't care, he got the money.

CORS allows you to relax these restrictions, not tighten them.

Now, bank doesn't like these attacks. So they make the legitimate application send an additional custom header, "X-Totally-Secure: true". Despite being a really bad idea, if (big if) the browser follows the standards, this prevents the attack:

- evil.com tries to make the HTTP request as before

- Browser lets it through, as before

- Bank rejects the request because it's missing the magic header

So the attacker adds the header to the request:

- evil.com tries to make a non-standard HTTP request to bank.com/transfer.php, with the header attached

- BECAUSE IT'S A NON-STANDARD REQUEST, browser asks bank.com (as you described, OPTIONS)

- Bank.com replies "wtf do you want I don't know what OPTIONS is"

- Browser refuses to make the request

Unfortunately, the bank forgot that they have a marketing department, that runs ournewbankapp.com, and shows your current balance in the fake screenshot of the app to show how awesome it is. And your bosses' bosses' boss has yelled at the IT department that rolled out the security measure to make it work again. They make ournewbankapp.com send the magic header (including access-control-allow-credentials), but now the OPTIONS request fails. So they teach the web server to respond with "everyone is allowed" (with "access-control-allow-origin: *" as you described) because they're lazy and dumb.

But because browser vendors know that developers are lazy and dumb, the browser completely ignores this: If access-control-allow-credentials is set, the allowed origin must be listed explicitly. The developers give in, and explicitly add ournewbankapp.com to the header, and now it works, but the attack doesn't work.

(part 2 follows)


The question of how to create general AI is fascinating but I don't think OpenAI is actually aiming for anything like a leap to full general intelligence at the moment. Rather, it seems like their goal is to follow the same incremental path mainstream AI is following but without having to hide it's methods.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

"In the short term, we're building on recent advances in AI research and working towards the next set of breakthroughs."

-- Which is to say, ordinary progress, not extraordinary progress.

https://openai.com/about/


The article has it wrong with Safari. While ITP (Intelligent Tracking Protection) started in 2017 indeed, Safari has been blocking all third party (and thus all tracking) cookies since almost forever. Safari started to block all third party cookies in 2003 with the release of Safari version 1. [1]

Not only that, Safari also started to partition web cache in 2013, and it's still the only browser with such partitioning. [2] Without it, tracking doesnt even need cookies.

"If you only block cookies, you still have all the other storage and stateful things to worry about." - Safari ITP engineer John Wilander [3]

Also the spin of the article is slightly dishonest, simply turning off third-party cookies in Chrome achieves to negate most of the explicit criticism in the article. The author probably had the conclusion of the article in mind (setting up good Firefox against evil Chrome) before looking for supporting arguments.

It's a bit ironic. While mainstream media starts to discover the existence of third-party cookies, which had been a known issue for around 20 years, Big Tech tracking has already moved to first-party tracking, fingerpringing and cache tracking.

For example, Facebook switched to first-party cookie tracking in 2018. [4]

Everyone who wants to understand the dynamic needs to look into the relationship between Apple and ad tech, with Apple's recent counter-move being the addition of ITP 2.2. [5]

Since the release of ITP 2.1, even first-party cookies now are limited to 7 days, and all first-party cookies that are even potentially tracking cookies get deleted after already 1 day. [6]

Firefox doesn't play much of a role in this fight. In fact, Firefox never did anything pro-actively to make ad-tech sweat. The decision by Mozilla to block all third-party cookies in 2013 [7] was reverted in fear of Ad-Tech.

Mozilla is better at marketing than with the technology, and still hasn't enabled tracking-protection except for new users.

[1] https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/982631777574338561

[2] https://twitter.com/johnwilander/status/1126191449161158657

[3] https://twitter.com/johnwilander/status/1126208457214836736

[4] https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/the-facebook-pixel-will-...

[5] https://webkit.org/blog/8828/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

[6] https://webkit.org/blog/8613/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

[7] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2013/02/25/firefox-gettin...


Note: you can do this yourself with a basic Linux VM, config to permit reverse ssh tunnel, and run some SSL proxy like Apache. And a DNS record.

In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes.

The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing.

I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.


Some of the highly processed cereal breakfasts should literally be forbidden, especially kids breakfast is very worrying.

Seriously, take the cereals that you give your kids, and read the ingredient list, you will be shocked. The second ingredient in the list is usually sugar, and the third is often palm oil.

The chocolate-like cereals are usually made of corn flour and not whole grains, which is even worst.

Here is a very tasty breakfast that is very healthy, and easy to prepare, I eat it every day.

Just take two tablespoons of rolled oats (not a lot of oats), and add frozen red fruits. Frozen fruits retain the majority of their nutrition, and are found everywhere and are very convenient.

Blueberries, raspberries, etc. take a cup, cover with plant milk and a tablespoon of ground flack seeds. Mix and microwave for 1.5 to 2 minutes.

Just to cut the red fruits potential acidity and to make it more fun, you might want to add a teaspoon of jam, not more.

Take 1 banana, mash half and slice the other half. Mix the mashed half and put the slices on top.

You won't be hungry until lunchtime, enjoy!


Yes, but it's just as easy to reject true things that people say because they violate preconceptions. We see at least as much of that as the other on HN. And don't forget that the site guidelines include "Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


It's hardly surprising the phrasing is a big WTF - the term "serverless" is the most ridiculous thing since rented virtual servers suddenly become "the cloud".

You may as well make a bacon pizza and say "vegetarian" and when someone questions it, just say "well you didnt personally kill the pig, so it's not really from an animal"


Con artists and criminals think everyone is corrupt.

If you know someone who thinks everyone is corrupt, or self serving, well... that’s one way people rationalize their own unethical behavior.

The meaner you are, the more assholes you meet.

When someone says “liberals are just virtue signaling” they probably are a horrible person because they don’t believe humans can behave ethically/altruistically.


I subscribe, too.

People are surprised that a techie nerd like me, with a PhD in ML, immersed in the IT world for the past 30 years, has an aversion to tech gadgets. Have I heard of the latest fad X? Do I like the last AI-powered Y?

But the first thing I did when buying an apartment was rip out the silly "smart home" system, installing back mechanical controls everywhere. Much happier.

My take on it is, with experience comes appreciation for simplicity. And respect for "doing things right", which seems a losing battle in a marketing-first world.


> plus I paid her a 2% commission instead of 3%, and of course not 6% as if she represented me as well.

I tried selling my home twice: first with the “normal” approach, using a real estate agent and paying everybody full commission. My agent just didn’t do enough to move the process along. After my contract with her expired, I bid her goodbye.

On attempt #2, I listed it myself (for sale by owner) but put in the listing notes, “FSBO, but the buyer’s agent will get 4% commission.” Agents kicked my door down bringing buyers in, and we sold it for full asking price in under a week.


I believe you'll find that overall consensus on HN will strongly disagree with you on this point.

Here's the post most people will direct you to for an explanation of why you'll want to avoid hourly billing, and how to get to a place where you don't need to bill hourly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615

For what it's worth - all of the people I know who have been able to do software-related consulting successfully over the long term don't bill hourly. They'd actually agree with you that having a minimum billable period of a week lots them lots of clients - but it lost them the clients that would try to nickel and dime them to death and complain about every invoice no matter low the hourly rate was.

It sounds like your experience has been different though, so I'm happy to hear you've found something that works for you.


I'm involved in one and I can guarantee you that it's about 1000 times easier to blog about the issue than teach programming principles to kids.

My average student is a 14-year-old black female who wants to learn web dev. It should go without saying, I've not seen even a hint of ability difference based on gender or race. We cover JS as well as HTML/CSS -- this is not a design class, but a real development class where kids are writing native markup and code.

The program is free and held at the public library. All students are there because they want to learn. I thought some might come due to parental pressure, but I haven't seen that.

It's exhausting and rewarding.


A lot of people on "our side" did a bad job of simply refuting the argument presented. Its straightforward to do in one sentence:

"While there may be scientific evidence of differences between men and women, using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."

Then you can go on and explain why for historical and societal reasons putting forth this weak theory is highly offensive and damaging to a large group of people.

Of course, many feel that you shouldn't _have_ to explain this to people, but unfortunately in todays environment, you do!


This defense of the "manifesto" is flawed just like the others. It picks out a small subset of the claims made in the document, discards the context and all the other claims, and then harangues us for having a problem with "science". I could argue "water is composed of two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, so women are bad at software development", and my argument would just be a difference of degree worse than hers.

We can talk straightforwardly about what makes the document problematic: whatever the validity of the "scientific" claims it makes about gender differences, there is no support (and likely no validity) to the connections it then makes to software development work. Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men. There is no science Debrah Soh can cite to back up that assertion, however much she might want to.

Anyone can wrap an incendiary statement up in a pile of banal sentiment and ambiguous appeals to social science. When challenged, refocus the debate on the truisms and the footnotes and pretend you didn't write the nasty stuff you hid in the middle. And, as we can see, plenty of very smart people will fall for the trick.

Gender equity has been improving in the United States for several generations. As that has occurred, female participation in STEM fields (and in the professions, like medicine and law) has expanded dramatically. Many science fields are now approaching parity. Most have more than twice as much participation as computer science. That includes the field of mathematics, which is closely related to computer science and is certainly more intellectually challenging than "computer science" as practiced in the industry.

Among all STEM fields, computer science is distinguished for losing the participation of women over the last 10 years.

Unless the women of 1950 are somehow biologically different from those of 2017, the author's theory will somehow have to address the fact that her argument would have predicted the fields or law, medicine, biochem, mathematics, astronomy, statistics, accounting, and actuary would all be bereft of women over the 20th century --- obviously, the opposite occurred, despite the sexual revolution that was immediately to come.

The author of this article discusses a correlation between increasing gender equity and decreased STEM participation that does not appear in the evidence. There's a reason she does that: if you don't stipulate that correlation, the argument against gender bias in computer science has to confront another damning fact, which is that gender disparity in the field isn't global. Unless women in Asia are somehow biologically different than those of the US, her argument needs some way to address the fact that women make up the majority of STEM majors in many of those cultures.

Reading this article and then this thread, I find that there's really only two aspects of it that HN finds persuasive: the headline's appeal to "science", and the footnote observing that the author is a female scientist. That's not enough. Everything in between those things is wildly off.

In discussions about gender parity in CS, the word "preference" is a coded appeal to the Just World Hypothesis. There is a yawning chasm between neuroscience findings about "agreeableness" and "stress tolerance" and suitability for any particular kind of white-collar symbol-manipulation work. Ms. Soh must intuitively understand that, but mentions it not once in her piece, instead pretending that observations about the kinds of toys children play with allow us to reflect participation statistics directly into real preferences about work. Shenanigans.


I read the whole thing and I think the allegations hold. There is one citation to a scientific article in the memo: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004..... It's a meta analysis that looks at abstract personality traits (agreeableness, people-orientation) in studies involving socialized adults. The big takeaway is that these studies show that women are more "agreeable" and "people-oriented."

Everything after that is handwaving and ipse dixit. Egregiously, the memo takes it for granted that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented." That defies reality. Software development is far more collaborative and social than, say, being a historian (a field where women receive 45% of the PhDs).

The memo also asserts, without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures. That's just false. Take education, for example. In India, men are overrepresented in teaching (80% of teachers are men).[1] And gender representation in STEM majors varies dramatically between different countries. Women are 40% of the STEM workforce in China. Over a third of the USSR's engineers were women, even in the 1960s.

In short, the reasoning in the article is so flimsy I'd be embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post, much less in a company-wide memo. Which brings me to sexism. I have a hard time believing that anyone smart enough to work at Google actually finds such sloppy reasoning convincing. Instead, the memo smacks of the sort of grasping at straws rationalization used to justify existing prejudices.

[1] The underlying study also makes egregious assumptions about whether professions are "people oriented" versus "thing oriented." Figure 1 depicts a people-things axis and an ideas-data axis. It puts "teacher" at the far end of the "people" axis, and characterizes that as a feminine profession. The study also characterizes "biologist" on the masculine side of the column, even though a significant majority of biology majors in the U.S. are women.


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