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Comment by facepalm | Hacker News Reader

"This doesn't mean there isn't any evidence--it just means that their internal investigation didn't find any."

How could you ever claim anything else, though? You can only make a claim about the things you did find (including absence of things), not about things you didn't find, because you can not know about them.

This is just another example of human communication depending on goodwill. If some involved parties want to misinterpret everything they hear, there is no way to stop them.

I think the emphasis on "gender based" stuff is because that was the gist of Horvath's accusations.

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I think it's more that the "gender-based" stuff was the legally actionable part of Horvath's accusations. Her accusations also included things that do not appear to be related to gender (in particular, nothing about Theresa Preston-Warner's alleged harassment seems to be related to gender).

Again, in my comment I mention that this memo is no different than other corporate statements. My point is that some comments on here say "there is no evidence", which is not what the memo says. Saying you didn't find something isn't the same as saying that something doesn't exist.

I'm not sure I agree. Of course, very strictly speaking you are probably right. So we can never know or prove anything. We can not prove that god doesn't exist, or that the flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist, or that invisible dragons don't exist. That doesn't seem a very useful attitude, though. I think not finding evidence is some evidence, at least in a bayesian sense. And OK, we can know some things - I know there is no visible dragon sitting on my keyboard right now.

Right, but there is no actual way that you can say that something doesn't exist; you can't prove a negative. There is absolutely no other wording you can ever use. Pointing that out as some sort of indicator that it's possible that there is some evidence is a little silly, because... well, duh.

Ultimately it depends on whether or not you trust the investigator to be thorough, and to be able to ferret out the truth where people lie and omit details.

The investigator in this case is not about uncovering the truth of everything - it's about investigating this specific case. They do not have an obligation, for example, to mention that they found taxation irregularities during their work.

... what does that have to do with anything? We're not talking about that.

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