Why did you feel the need to even comment if you don't care about Duolingo's motivations for hiring people? Of course not every company could have 50:50 with the current pool of software engineers but that's a trivial point. It's true by definition.
EDIT: it's clear that you believe ideology is what's motivating this, despite your claim that you don't care about motivation.
Even your moved goal posts still try to connect one small company's policies to the industry as a whole. Maybe it's worth emphasizing _your_ unstated assumption that the only reason a company would want 50:50 is to satisfy some external ideological motive rather than careful analysis of what makes for a good team.
It doesn't assume that at all. Any company can choose to implement a hiring goal for (almost) any reason they choose. Maybe they wanted a broader set of perspectives on their team? The idea that Duolingo would have to justify their hiring decisions in terms of changing the demographics of the whole industry is absurd.
Also Duolingo has ~100 employees total. There's no way that the industry's demographics are somehow limiting their available talent pool. Having a policy like this sounds like a great way for a small company to attract highly talented women.
Having used products that bragged about their performance benchmarks (won't name any names), I respect the Datomic team's position on this. Benchmarks lead to gamed results and you still have to test with your workload.
The vast majority of people who did business with AIG had nothing to do with subprime. Your whole answer seems to assume that the consequences of AIG going bankrupt could have been neatly contained the subset of their business that caused the problem.
To take the biggest example, AIG's owners did bear the consequences. Their equity was wiped out in the bailout. Do you believe individuals who did business with AIG are the ones who should have born the consequences for bad decisions made by the owners of AIG?
The new discovery was that there's a speculative execution side channel. Those links are discussing the potential of a cache side channel which is very different thing. It's the difference between "i might be able to infer some things that are in the cache that something else put there" and "please give me the contents of this address".
How about if you invert it. If somebody came to you and asked for a system that can send emails when certain conditions are met in a database and track the results, would you assume that to write the program you would have to hang out with sales people? The actual work (in the two weeks to implement it) is development.
Because they don't need a full time person to achieve the results and it would be silly to shell out more money and try to train somebody to do something that they've clearly failed to do in the past. If my car needs $1000 of repairs, I'm not going to shop around for a class to teach me how to repair cars - especially if, like your example, it costs more than just getting it fixed.
It's really hard to tell from the overall numbers whether they're in bad shape. If a significant amount of the expense is in acquiring new customers then it makes perfect sense for investors to keep pouring money in.
There doesn't have to be any justification. Maybe they're hoping enough early investors want to lock-in their paper profits that they'll accept the offer.
>The number of bugs are proportional to the lines of code, this is undeniable from empirical data. Ergo, fewer lines of code will tend to yield fewer bugs. So if your code is literally the same, there's no reason not to extract it into a function.
Except you've added a dependency that connects two pieces of code that were independent before.
Float can be invested in pretty much anything. You're right that as an industry it tends to go into low risk fixed income investments but that's because it's safe (and easy for companies whose core strength is selling insurance) not because it's required.
It's not a label, it's a description. Based on his post, that Zhang guy believes that people shouldn't have donated to Arachne, for example, because he personally didn't think it was necessary. In other words, his personal opinion should have a special status => entitled.
To me the original article read as an expression of frustration - the sort of feelings that are easy to understand but hurtful and frankly stupid to put out in public.
"Entitlement" really captures the post Rich is responding to. Objections to the existence of Arachne and spec? Who is Chris Zheng to tell people what to spend their time and money on? And he wants Datomic open sourced. Waaah.
What does intention have to do with it? Are you saying that if you unintentionally seek people based on criteria like race or gender you're more likely to find the best candidates? Affirmative action, as you call it, is an intentional effort to overcome the sort of unintentional bias that tptacek described.
By the way, one reason people react strongly to objections like yours is that a very direct interpretation is that you believe the distribution of people in high status jobs actually does accurately reflect differences based on race and gender. Not sure if you intended that.
Ownership seems to get mixed up with efficient capital allocation in a lot of discussions about this (referring to likely comments, not the article). For index investing to work you only need a market that's "efficient enough in aggregate". What you're actually purchasing is ownership of future economic growth.
Right - that's a completely different topic though. That's an individual paying taxes on a gain that they've realized. Not a company paying taxes based on other people's gains.
It's hard to imagine a tax that would be sensitive to this difference unless it was a tax on market cap, which would be very odd because shareholders are the owners. So it would be a tax on one entity for the value of assets owned by another.
In my view, yes. If there's an all powerful force with a mind then everything is a theological question, though. "Does God choose to present my senses with evidence that leads me to believe gravity works the same way as I remember it working yesterday?"
EDIT: most Christians I've heard talk about this say that God put natural laws into place but of course that is itself a theological point.
One of the bizarre things about this controversy is that even if you grant all of the memo's assumptions (something that I won't do except hypothetically), it still wouldn't follow that _Google's_ policy was bad for Google. Google is a big company but it only employs a small fraction of software developers. They could very well decide that it's good for them to have more women represented regardless of whatever the "global" distribution is.