T-R

I hate to be the one to make the skeptic post, because I'm sure it comes off a bit rude, but the timing of this does strike me as a little odd, considering that there are two posts about Peter Thiel on the main page, and the Scott Adams "How to get a real education" article just made it back. Not to say they couldn't have motivated you to post, but the anonymity (new account) and tone ("Due to excessive math & science training... I impulsively decided...", "an education that absolutely adds no value...") does inspire a bit of skepticism.

I'm a bit unconvinced that this isn't someone playing politics, though if you are really in a bad situation, best of luck to you.

Edit: In addendum, if you're going to downvote, please do make note as to why, e.g. if you think there's sufficient evidence not to merit skepticism, or if you think it should be taken at face value regardless, at least for the benefit of others. I won't, though, argue the point, in the interest of consideration to the OP, in case he is honest.

By "don't add classes", she means "avoid using redundant or non-semantic classes in the HTML", which makes sense, because unless you're generating the HTML on request or compensating with jQuery (and therefore adding another dependency to your layout), the repetition becomes a maintenance issue.

Avoiding non-semantic elements and non-semantic classes, however, restricts you to using descendant selectors (and multiple declarations), which, as she points out, creates another maintenance issue in the form inheritance conflict resolution (specificity).

She says we shouldn't blame the language, but how much of this is because CSS eschews Composition for (incomplete) Multiple Inheritance? And how much of the extra code is an effort to avoid bugs because layout properties are non-orthogonal?

At what point do we decide that it's not that "you're doing it wrong", but that there were actually some design choices that, in retrospect, maybe weren't such a good idea? I'd say that when we have other languages that compile into the language just to overcome these issues (CoffeeScript,Less,SASS,etc.), we've about reached that point.

I don't really see how he makes that point, though, by holding up a big carrot and then cherry-picking a few for extra-special treatment. It makes me think "you can be successful if someone throws money at you and gives you special attention", but I'd be tempted to think that those who go for the prize would be less likely to be independently successful than someone who persevered through and finished what they started, in spite of how good dropping out looked.

It'd be a whole lot more meaningful to test an alternative education program - maybe get people learning online or doing apprenticeships, something people could actually do without massive sponsorship - and create a credentialing system that's actually selective and credible, so those people aren't at a disadvantage in the job market. Something like that would actually take aim at the prestige of higher education.

I think there would need to be a little more to associate the action with the punishment. Since the point deduction would be pretty delayed from the voting, voters might not recognize which votes were poorly placed, and wouldn't learn to place better votes.

For reference, the link is here:

http://techrights.org/2010/04/11/florian-mueller-and-erika-m...

Apparently Mr.Mueller thinks my removal of the link was significant enough to make note of on Twitter. I want to make it clear that my removal of the link was not in any way indicative of my opinion of him or BoycottNovell/TechRights, and I don't appreciate his attempt to imply that it is.

His wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller

In short, he and the author of Groklaw have opposing viewpoints regarding various software patent cases, including the Google v. Oracle case, and have been very directly criticizing each other. Groklaw has accused him of spreading FUD, and its readers have accused him of being sponsored to do this (see orangecat's link below), while Mr.Mueller has accused Groklaw of lying and attacking him to get attention.

I was not aware of that, actually, and I've now removed the link.

I don't want to assert that anything in the above links is unbiased fact, I just want to provide context for the comment, i.e. Groklaw makes direct and critical reference to the above poster, and that relates to his comment. The first link (to techrights.org) was added later, because it provides some summary, but admittedly it's very biased, so I'll remove it in the interest of fairness.

Impressive, but might I suggest using a public domain ROM, instead of exposing yourself to a lawsuit:

http://www.zophar.net/pdroms/gameboy.html

For those not familiar with the above poster's relation to Groklaw:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091021164738392

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953...

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110122054409107

Edit, for a little more context: http://twitter.com/FOSSpatents

Arguably, if they did it too much more firmly, sites would start to game it.

An earlier thread on Reading Level: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993305

While I agree that Congress has a legitimate gripe with overstepping unelected officials, I really think that's a separate issue that should be treated independently.

Regarding rules that could unintentionally retard progress - that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same sense, the FDA retards progress of the pharmaceutical industry. We should be able to decide that some things are harmful enough to individuals and their rights that companies shouldn't be allowed to compete on them, at least beyond a certain level. At the very least, they should be required to make those things as visible to consumers as price, because consumers can only vote with their wallets on things they're aware of.

> The tone of these conferences is not the reason women are not more involved

I'm under the impression that it is - some women have voiced objection to the tone, so we know it's at least the case for some, and we don't have any data indicating that those anecdotes aren't representative of the whole. In fact, since so few women go, those anecdotes are pretty significant.

> Math, Science and Engineering are boring for women

If that were true, it still wouldn't account for the significant difference between the number of women in CS and other STEM fields - we do, though, know that the tone of the community is the reason for some.

> Solution: Don't make them boring when kids are in grade school and high school

Certainly there are other (and more far reaching) issues, but the tone that we present as a community is one that we have more direct control over (with a very simple solution), and changing it to one that isn't perceived as hostile would have little negative impact.

That's absolutely a fair point. I don't want to imply that we shouldn't keep it in moderation, but I do think we should be careful about what we define as "oversensitive", particularly for groups that we don't belong to, because there is a danger of defining the whole group as such, and therefore excluding them entirely (socially). If they are sensitive to it, overreacting or not, it does discourage them from attending. I personally don't think giving up arguably misogynistic references (specifically) in presentations would be so detrimental that it offsets the benefit of not offending those sensitive to them, particularly since it's a group that we as a community have been so effective at scaring off in the past.

> Have fun with that.

I think your tone detracts from your point.

> But a conference which will offend nobody in some small way is a sterile, dull thing.

I think the point to make is that this is not "some small way", as much as it may appear to be small to some - it's significant enough for you to stop attending. The group of people offended by misogyny is statistically independent from the group of people contributing to the conferences' success, so:

- there's no reason they needed to be offended

- offending them offers no real benefit

- offending them hurts the success of the conference by discouraging people from attending who otherwise would have.

- ignoring or supporting it exacerbates this problem, and so it's not in the best interest of anyone to ignore or support it, regardless of their views on women

> It's also a bit insulting...

Perhaps true, but if the community doesn't acknowledge offensive behavior, it comes off as tacit acceptance. If the speaker is invited back without question or actively defended by the community, a person couldn't be blamed for getting the impression that the speaker's views reflect the views of the community as a whole, or at least of those responsible for the event.

> There needs to be a serious education effort to remove that mistaken idea from people's minds.

I'd argue that that's difficult to do without acknowledging the behavior as undesired/detrimental when it happens, for the reason above.

I respect speakers' rights to express whichever beliefs they hold, but I think it's also important, both for them and for attendees, to recognize the effect that it has. Their views on women (or any group), popular or otherwise, are irrelevant so long as they don't needlessly bring them up, but when they choose to do something that makes some members of the audience less comfortable and less likely to attend in the future (particularly since speakers are often perceived to represent the community), then that's a loss for the entire community, with negligible gain.

Even if those who are offended are overreacting, publicizing their views is probably the best way to be sure that both speakers and attendees can make well informed decisions about which conferences to attend.

If they want it to be a club for guys (and women who'll deal with it), that's their prerogative. If, on the other hand, they think it's more to their benefit to be inclusive, they should probably make an effort not to be needlessly offensive. To that end, it's probably best they be made aware of who they're offending.

If you want to go down the Functional rabbit hole more, "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okasaki would be a good next step. There's a book and a paper - from what I hear, the paper is just Okasaki's original work, whereas the book is a more complete coverage of the field.

Good idea, I'll do that.

So far the comments in this thread cover Functional (SICP, Haskell books), Logic (Prolog Books), and Procedural/OO (Almost everything else) Languages, so I figure I should add a reference for Stack/Concatenative Languages:

Thinking Forth - Brodie

To steal words from a comment earlier today, Haskell has a very steep but very rewarding learning curve.

It'll reinforce some concepts from math, and lead you toward writing code in a manner that's considered good practice in other languages - such that it's generally maintainable and testable. Similarly, if you're familiar with Design Patterns, you'll see that a lot of patterns are attempts to implement functional concepts in OO languages. That said, as a fan of Haskell I'm definitely biased, and a lot of that can be said for other functional languages as well.

"Real World Haskell" is also very good, but probably not the best place to start if you haven't written in a functional language before.

I've heard "The Art of Prolog" is good, too... a quick glance at Amazon shows it to be ridiculously expensive, though.

It really depends on what you feel you're missing and what you're hoping to do (definitions of "daily work" vary widely). If you're looking to get up on theory by doing your own program of sorts, you could do worse than start with these (in roughly this order):

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman

Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein

The Art of Assembly Language - Hyde

a digital logic book (not sure which is most recommended), and an architecture book (see reply by tftfmacedo)

Modern Operating Systems - Tanenbaum

Introduction to the Theory of Computation - Sipser

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools - Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman (a.k.a. "Dragon Book")

Programming Language Pragmatics - Scott

A database design book (one that covers Relational Algebra, not just a book on SQL), and maybe a book on Networks. Also, Roy Fielding's paper on REST is both academic and applicable (and more approachable than you'd expect of a Ph.D paper). If you want to go all the way, an undergraduate program usually also has Calculus, Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, and Statistics. Some schools would also require Physics and Differential Equations. I'm sure I'm missing some topics, too, particularly electives.

If you can get through those and the associated problem sets, you'll have a better foundation than most.

I get the impression that the Haskell code was meant to be a direct transliteration of the spec, or had some other artificial restriction on the amount of abstraction. Code for "0 or more of any character" is repeated at least 3 times, as with the use of applicative functor operators to ignore separators (a lot of what looks like syntax noise). Things like numbers (takeWhile isDigit_w8) aren't abstracted, either. There's no real reason that these couldn't be abstracted away. Also, some of the verbosity (and most of the imports) come from using Strict 8bit ByteStrings instead of a type with more built-in abstractions. That said, I don't think you can be blamed for your impression.

> ...it takes a lot of pixels...

Just want to point out that you can hide it so it looks like a normal menu bar until you open a menu - seems a lot of people aren't aware of that feature.

I sometimes just completely fail to function at a whiteboard. I've choked to comedic proportions on problems I'd solved easily only a few days before. There's not a doubt in my mind that my resume's been thrown in the "Non-programming programmer" pile due to my stage fright at least once. I can certainly sympathize with the need for a low false-positive rate, but as a candidate I can't help but wish that overcoming stage fright wasn't also such a prerequisite for working with good programmers.

It's all about your your BATNA - what's your best alternative? What do you need that they're giving you, and what other options offer it? Do you need the income? How else could you get enough income before you need it? If you don't quit immediately, at least start making plans and preparations now. If you don't need the income - if you need a resume boost or something, there are lots of other ways to do that.

I was in this exact situation last year. I decided I could finish my part of the project in two months if I took on no other work, so I set a deadline and told them I would be leaving on it. Everything got much easier after that - I knew I had a plan, the end was in sight, and they stopped piling on new work, so I was able to finish my part of the project and leave with a clean conscience (of course, your mileage may vary).

Don't get me wrong, I think it has its uses, I just think it's pretty limited in scope, to the point that it probably shouldn't be compared with Quora and Yelp. Not only are you unlikely to find the best Mexican in SF, you're not likely to find out about too many new places with that particular type of salsa: chances are good that you've at least heard of the place that everyone's voting for, and that awesome new place doesn't look too appealing, 'cause it only got one vote.

On the other hand, it'd be pretty good for confirming that your friends actually like your favorite Mexican restaurant as much as you do (or maybe that you should have that party somewhere else), and everyone in Texas thinking of visiting SF will probably be happy to be able to make a poll of where they should eat (granted, they could have just posted a comment and counted the "likes" on each response).