skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could constantly identifying oneself as being 'marginalized' contribute to the feeling of being an outsider? As another commenter pointed out, the Kapor Center data is not nearly as damning as this piece suggests. Many of the reported reasons for leaving show similar numbers between genders & races. Sexual harassment is clearly a bigger problem for women than men, but not as drastic as this article claims. The Kapor study shows 10% of women surveyed leaving for sexual harassment, but also shows 8% of men leaving for that reason.
Everything you said is true, but none of it is very helpful to me.

> ENJOY VOGON POETRY

You grit your teeth, stiffen your upper lip, and discover that it's actually not all that bad. With a bit of drum machine, electric guitar, and some backup dancers, it might even pass as catchy pop song lyrics. Ford gapes at you in bewildered agony as Jeltz continues the reading.

I can't exactly blame myself for being weird. Which leaves me to blame everything-not-myself for being insufficiently respectful of weirdness in others.
It will cover any increase in expense. Not all jobs are equal, and Amazon R&D jobs are the most rewarding. They don’t have crime like non-college working class, they don’t die of opiuates like restaurant and other service workers. They don’t have cancer or birth defects like factory workers.
He called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." The fact that he didn't actually do that because of its manifest illegality is somewhat beside the point.
Well, some hospitals are honest, and dedicated to patient care. And some are dishonest, and only in it for the money. But whatever, none of them are as evil as most drug companies.
I moved from Philly to Seattle last year. I would also like to see a bigger tech firm in Philly. There is a great startup scene. The meetup scene is great, and the techie awards of best places to work were awesome. With University City providing good graduates. I mean Drexel, Upenn, Temple, Villanova, and just south University of Delaware. Then transit there was amazing. Philadelphia really feels like it has all the tools to be a great tech hub.

http://www.techinmotionevents.com/blog/post/2017/05/04/the-2...

That being said, I do not like what Amazon has done to Seattle. The culture, infrastructure housing, etc, etc. I have been hoping that they don't end up in Philadelphia. I feel one other big player, then more startups would be good. I guess put another way some new blood. As the east coast feels a bit old blood at times.

As noted with the tax breaks to Comcast the other resident tech giant. The city needs more investment, not more tax cuts. There were issues with septa, schooling, public services, etc.

I did a few stints at Comcast. It was a good place to work, but they weren't pushing the boundaries generally. There were some internal teams that were pushing tech. Contributions to OpenStack was very large. Some video encoding stuff, but I think that team was largely located elsewhere. To get to the more technically advanced stuff you needed several rounds there.

Comcast in the meetup scene though was great. A number of directors and seniors presented at software as craft, devops, various code katas. I also knew a number of comcast employees going to the open philly code meetups. See for the cities open source stuff.

https://github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia

There was a definite real estate boon when I left. With a number of areas being built up. But there was also gentrification issue as well. I lived down in Grey's Ferry area for a bit. The post office had been closed, and the local grocery store I think path mark as well. It went from a nice little area to a bunch of bodegas and boarded up houses. It was very hostile trying to force the people to leave to make room for improvement/rebuilding. I think something was going on around temple university. With subsidies being ended or modified.

The city has it's problems for sure, but it's still a great place.
Did anyone else find the coder vs engineer analogy strange? Especially given that this was presumably sent out to the whole company.
I think there's a continuity of business aspect. When you're among the most valuable public companies in the world, losing your one and only headquarters to a natural disaster might not kill the company, but it would be pretty catastrophic. As such, they're probably going to try to build up a pretty comparable workforce in HQ2.

Amazon recently released Amazon Chime, a videoconferencing system. Maybe this was prioritized so that they'll have a homegrown thing when it comes time for a lot of your meetings to be with remote participants.
I'm not totally sure "significantly more men in the study left due to unfairness than women do" is the right summary - I agree that the report says that, of men who left, significantly more reported unfairness as a cause, but I don't think that that translates to more men leaving, or men being more likely to leave because of unfairness, or more unfairness towards men (i.e., "women being treated more fairly"). And even if more men, numerically, left, if there were more men to start with, it doesn't mean men are leaving at higher rates.

(Anyway, personally, I think that toxic tech culture selects against "people who don't fit the stereotype," which includes lots of men, and lots more women, and I don't think framing this as either "it's terrible for women and not for men" or "actually men have it worse" is particularly productive.)

EDIT: I see that the article links the Kapor report with the sentence "Staying silent about the unfairness that causes 37% of underrepresented people of color to leave tech helps no one," which I think is the same misreading of the Kapor report. 37% of underrepresented people of color who have left tech have left because of unfairness - it is not that 37% of underrepresented people of color in tech have left because of unfairness. The previous sentence from the author, about the 50% retention rate, looks like it better supports the narrative point being made (although the source is about STEM as a whole and not just tech).
> When has someone pushed for a "Muslim ban" in the United States?

Right here:

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20161207195544/https://www.donal...
> has there been any factory floor, farm, private or government office where things have been different?

Yes. It's the 1930's anymore. Especially in the last 20 years even grubby industries have come around to treating their labor with dignity. At least in part because of legal liability.
For launch, we built our own API. It's very simple. Post a JSON list of students with two attributes - the cumulative time they've spent on the program, and the cumulative "progress" they've made ("progress" metrics vary from application to application - things like "books read" or "lessons passed"). Full docs are here: https://dev.clever.com/docs/goals-api

The reasons we didn't adopt tincan/xAPI (or the very similar IMS Caliper standard) already are:
1. Limited K-12 adoption
2. Focus of existing standards on event transmission from "dumb" data senders (e.g. stateless content) to "smart" data hubs (e.g. LMSs that are the only source of analytics data). Our use case is different - as all of our data senders keep track of their own analytics, and it's critical for Goals to stay consistent with these systems.

But now that we've launched & have a bit more time, I'd love to support an open standard. I'm optimistic that we can figure out a solution to #2, and then I'd love to have Clever drive K-12 adoption. In fact, I had a great call with IMS Global about this today :-)
It takes me 40 minutes one way to get to/from work, more if the traffic sucks. The US is spread out, not having a car is not an option for a majority of our society (outside of high population density cities).
It could. But what evidence is there of that?
> "prioritize profits and growth over human and societal well being"

As in: what every corporation is, by law, required to do. If it doesn't, lawsuits follow.
I used to be highly political on Facebook. From my experience, people just don't care.
They give you all that stuff to some degree to cover over how toxic the culture and job is otherwise. Leaving Google was the best decision I ever made despite the fact that I now get none of those things and make significantly less money.
I'm not a particle physicists by any means, but doesn't any theory of gravity have to deal with 'real' infinities at high energies from the physics we already know?

We have some idea that black holes are a type of singularity (something that could possibly called an infinity). With E=MC2 we have an idea that if you apply enough energy to a particle it can become massive enough that it becomes a singularity itself.
Facebook appoints American Express CEO as first black board member
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737276
(7 years ago!)
This report is about the technology/software industry - your link is about tenure-track positions in science departments.
As a fairly old woman(mid thirties) for tech anyways and with a family now, I really feel your pain.

I get the ageist comments too, and contract work has really been dwindling. Web Dev really seems a young person game.
If my husband didn't have a stable job, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
Do it in reality
Congrats on the launch, Jared - best of luck!
More comparison: Seattle $597 a year (just got my bill recently, vast majority pays for transit expansion)
@kang -- while I don't disagree that there's no shortage of snake oil and hand-waving in the blockchain industry ("Blockchain for X! Huzzah!"), I do disagree with your point about whether there is an efficiency gain to be had from representing debt agreements on a blockchain. The primary benefits are:

1. An ability to trustlessly hold and release digital collateral on an entirely peer-to-peer basis. This entirely removes the necessity for a whole class of middlemen that seek rent for existing lending agreements.
2. An ability to trade one's ownership in a loan as a cryptographic token -- again, something that necessitates various paying agents / clearing houses / intermediaries in the traditional capital markets ecosystem.

Re: decentralization -- that's a fair point. Right now, Dharma is functionally a centralized code base controlled by a centralized set of contributors. In the future, however, we hope to transition to a decentralized governance model so that the protocol can serve as a piece of common, shared public infrastructure -- unfortunately, we don't have robust enough decentralized governance models quite yet in the crypto community.
Hi all, happy to answer questions!
I'd be more inclined to believe 'hoax' if that's what the chip contacts said. But a 'refuse to confirm'? No telling.
The Generalization Mystery: Sharp vs. Flat Minima
The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.)
https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/

However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills.

There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet.

It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
That’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. Gravity resists space.
I'd rephrase that a little: it is not because you are a white male.

It wouldn't have helped if you were a minority either: in fact that can be even harder - at least around here.

But it is annoying in a special way to hear about that male privilege thing and know it means next to nothing - and still be told you should feel bad about it.
Definitely a pause in loading, however, it's worth the wait.

It's my doctor's site, I'll let him know.
Cloudron 1.9 Released – Restore UI, Google Cloud Storage and More
> What happens if they get a law enforcement request with warrant/subpoena? I bet the data is there to be delivered. If they aren't _very_ intentional about scrubbing it, it's maybe there in some historical logs too.

Under current German and EU law, they can only keep logs as long as technically necessary. If a warrant, specific to me, personally, exists, they can collect future connection info. And I’m okay with that – requiring a warrant specifically to be written for me, specifically signed by a judge, and in a way that they can’t be rubberstamped is okay, and about the level of surveillance that is a reasonable tradeoff.
Interesting that around the same time both Facebook and Snapchat are turning their focus away from sponsored content and focusing on friends.
I wouldn’t say it’s their value system, rather it’s a result of the enormous pressure they face. Torture should only be used as a last resort, and when there’s no other hope of getting information that is needed ASAP.
Oh, then I'm afraid I'm unqualified to say.
The tips in here on topics like building relationships outside work, being financially prudent and learning how to say no are all good nuggets of advice.

With that said, I thought that the article's title was kind of ironic because in my opinion, the intersectional identity politics espoused by the authors is itself one of the most toxic aspects of contemporary tech culture. It's the part of working at a mature venture-funded startup in SV that I miss the least, by far.
Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation.

If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.
Why is an app agency judging the client's business model. If what the client is asking for is legal, and if the agency can deliver, I'd think it a win-win to make it happen.

Specifically, they should have cloned Uber for their client, and let the markets decide.
I generally find that abstraction is good, but layering is bad. Let's say I have components A, B, and C that all do something useful and are good abstractions, the difference between good code and bade code is how they interact. In bad code A will call B and B will call C, from the top level it's completely opaque how everything fits together. I'd much rather A returns something and let's the caller pass it to B. There is very little difference in code required but it makes a world of difference to making it comprehensible.
If you're actually asserting HN doesn't censor, and wouldn't censor even more if people actually felt free to express their true opinions here, I question you're intellectual honesty.
I do find it interesting that the authors are ok with saying “Susan grew up on the Internet,” which is another variation on digital/internet natives, and clearly ageist.
And from Refactor Capital: https://medium.com/refactor/enzyme-58bb068c40b4
I recall seeing a Google tech talk over ten years ago where they talked about cleaning up OpenOffice (or was it StarOffice?) it was memorable because they mentioned it did #define private public. I’m impressed they kept at it and it sounds like it’s going well. Still glad it’s not my project, though :)
I agree it's a mess. However, most SaaS vendors realize that the people who have to clean up after them are often not the people in charge of the purchasing decisions. If you end up paying them for years merely because you can't find a way to gracefully exit, they do not consider that to be a poor outcome.
Articles do get resubmitted from time to time. Dupe only applies if it's following closely on the heels of another submission. In this case, 7 years is plenty to distinguish itself as a valid submission. It's often useful to link (without the "dupe") to the previous discussion (as you did) as there's often useful info there. In this case, there 75 comments.
An important point here - every time I read "X% of class A had this happening to them" I automatically ask "what's the baseline rate? If you weren't in class A, would it happen to you more often or less often?" If I don't find this comparison - and usually I don't - then the number of X% is useless for the purpose of deciding whether class A is an outlier or not. Unfortunately, as I said, very small number of people quoting the statistics do this basic due diligence.

In this particular case, it is natural that people that believe they are treated unfairly leave, and conversely, if somebody left, one of the probably reasons is because they were unhappy, and one of common reasons of unhappiness is that they don't believe they were treated fairly. The question pertinent to the purpose of the article is do e.g. women have it worse? For that, one needs more than one number, so any claim that includes only one number is automatically disqualified from providing proper information - it provides no more than half of it.
Tips for crypto newcomers
How I Accidentally Crashed 57K iPhones in a Day
Sorry, all the statements in the study would need to be qualified like that (and most of them much more), and virtually none of them are.

I am assuming the study has taken some care to be representative. Otherwise, there's no need to talk about the findings at all.
My understanding is that the software builds, runs and tests on desktops they SSH into. The sources either live on the Desktops or have a sync system setup. Either way, they need some proper editors or IDEs to work with locally on the CBs. Are there any tools with good enough experience that can do remote code editing available generally on any platform (and not just chromebooks?)
As someone who firmly believes in "that male privilege thing," people who tell you that you should feel bad about it are wrong. There's nothing wrong with privilege.

It's a lot like privilege in the operating systems sense. sudo isn't a bad program because it has root privileges. The kernel doesn't need to apologize for running in a privileged CPU mode. But sudo and the kernel both have abilities that regular userspace programs don't - and the ability to cause damage that regular userspace programs don't. They (or more specifically, their authors) need to be aware that they're privileged, be careful about doing things with the privilege by mistake, and realize that other programs can't do the same things they can. But that doesn't mean that they can do everything, or that it's their fault if there's something they're unable to do, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's meaningful or productive for them / their authors to feel bad about the privilege.
That is super cool.
You basically just said its expensive to live there, and residents should somehow feel bad for not making their city worse, to support more people.
Photos of South Koreans breaking things in response to crypto “bloodbath”
...and engineering departments. I don't see any reason to suspect a sizable effect difference between the engineering industries and the academic environment which matriculates them.
Used to live there. Inflated salaries courtesy of Federal govt and contractors, and talent pool looks bigger on paper than reality. Govt contracting incentivizes overstaffed projects with slow pace and awful tech. Who wants to work at Amazon for 90k when you can have an easy govt contracting job for 150k that is strictly 9 to 5?

Plus, northern VA has awful traffic and high cost of living. Traffic jam on Saturday morning is a thing in the burbs there.
Re doctors -- "The Family" cult de facto ran some hospitals and were able to get children into the cult from vulnerable teenage (and other) mothers.

"The group consisted of middle class professionals; it has been estimated that a quarter were nurses and other medical personnel "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Australian_New_Age...

I've heard that EST and Scientology and similar go hard after dentists.
Maybe he already knew he is going to be promoted? Usually my experience is these things actually happen (i.e. decided) a while before they are announced, and if he knew he is going to receive a major promotion of course he'd think everything is wonderful!
if you have the monitoring in place, and you have done proper canarying, friday evenings are not terrible
Interesting, so something like:

I get a loan for 20 magic bean coins, secured with 1 eth when the exchange rate is 20 magic bean coins for 1 eth. (Do I have to pay interest on this? Do I forfeit it at some point? Iiuc Dharma seems to be just a framework for setting up these schemes, so this might be controllable by the person creating the eth-mbc loans?)

Then I sell my 20 magic beanstalk coins for 1 eth.

A week later, magic beans have massively depreciated because there was a critical vulnerability discovered, code-named GIANTS and now I can get 40 magic bean stalks for 1 eth.

So I sell 0.5 eth for 20 bean stalks, and use that to pay off my loan?
What you describe there is a broken and unusable value system.
It's the value system. Either you follow the laws and values of your country always or you don't. You can't protect values by violating them.
I think fuel taxes, market rate parking fees and road/congestion tolling would be more libertarian. If you live in a rural area the impact of your vehicle is much different than if you live in the middle of a dense city.

Also, a $50,000 car does not have double the societal impact as a $25,000 car (which could be larger and less fuel efficient). Progressive taxes aren't a very libertarian construct.
The Blockchain HODL
That's honestly the most realistic approach. I make a conscious effort not to follow politics nowadays, too much negativity, but doing so online seems to always cause folks to fly into defensive mode. In person less so. Facial cues, maybe?
"Can't torture at home so let's fly people to some dictatorship to get it done there."

People are tortured in the US all the time. All the time.

Ordinary prisons are well-known example, where one can be subject to solitary confinement, denial of medical care, subjection to temperature extremes, beatings, and rape so common that it's the subject of the most common prison-related jokes.

Military recruits are often tortured to "toughen them up", as punishment, or ostensibly to prepare them for possible torture at the hands of "The Enemy".

Hazings at colleges and universities are often effectively torture.