biocomputation

First, a pitch meeting with a venture capitalist is generally accepted by our culture to be the kind of professional environment that is inappropriate to sexualize in any fashion. While I understand your basic point, you seem to be very interested in denying that there are many situations in life where notions and hints of sex and romance are just not appropriate.

* I hate to think that you might have trouble understanding this, but we're not talking about dating a co-worker. We're not talking about a pitch that didn't succeed followed by three months of radio silence followed by them meeting at a social event and realizing that they are attracted to each other.

* The mutual realization that you are attracted to a coworker is not the same as sexual harassment, it's not the same as being asked out by your manager, and it's not the same as receiving unwelcome sexual advances during a pitch meeting from a man who works at VC firm.

* Asking an available coworker out on a date, however unwise it may be depending on your place of employment and working relationships, is not the same as making remarks about her looks, clothes, or anatomy. It's not the same as denying her an investment or promotion because she rejected your advances.

I hope that clears things up for you.

>> But I reject the immediate interpretation of "man abusing his power to pressure women into sex".

Oh but that's exactly what this was. It was a man abusing his power to pressure women into sex.

>> Grabbing a knee under the table is of course not a good first move, but we might be missing context.

Grabbing the knee of someone you are not mutually involved with is not appropriate behavior in the workplace. Depending on the situation, it may be inappropriate even if you are mutually involved. But without mutual involvement, it's absolute inappropriate.

>> The accusations can be true, and at the same time it seems possible that the VC didn't take advantage of his "position of power", but genuinely believed the women liked him for his looks and personality, not because they needed his money.

This type of behavior is about boundaries. Boundaries are about power.

His behavior crossed what our culture generally says are the boundaries of a professional situation. That's what makes it inappropriate; it doesn't matter what he believed.

It's totally acceptable to meet someone in a social situation and, after a bit of due diligence, it's totally acceptable to ask them out.

But that's not what this was.

I am the very close relative of two women in tech. One of my relatives was on the receiving end of repeated, unwanted advances over the last several months, none of which were reported to HR because she didn't want to destroy her career at the company.

Last weekend she received an unsolicited, nearly naked photo from the same male co-worker. Needless to say, he is no longer at the company.

This is sad on two counts. First, it's sad that my relative felt she couldn't report because she thought it would harm her career. It sickens me to say this, but maybe she was right. Maybe it would have harmed her career.

Second, and I've seen this before, she had to endure further harassment until he really escalated so she could report something significant enough that she felt it wouldn't harm her credibility.

Though we're discussing this through the lens of the tech industry, the most horrifying thing of all is that this isn't even a problem that's unique to tech.

It's pervasive. Still.

>> main IDE to "a total step backwards", for some reason.

Cargo cult is the reason.

I also wasn't that impressed by the fact that I had to wait a few seconds for it to work. A font demo -especially a parametric font demo- really should be instant.

<< Technical writing is dead as a profession.

Hmm, I couldn't disagree more!

<< Too many companies expect technical writers to be as savvy, or more, as their developers, but for lower pay, less respect, and zero political power.

Hmm, I couldn't agree more!

At work we spend a ton of money keeping our documentation up to date, searchable, and available on the web. Worth every penny, and that's just if we count the productivity boosts for internal users of the docs.

Bing user here. I switched a few years ago when I finally got sick enough of Google's many creepy abuses of power.

It's just as good. As others have noted, Google's search is only good when you're signed in. Because they use all that data to personalize the results.

Are you referring to the line in which I asked to be spared the PR? Note that I didn't mean to insinuate that the author of the comment to which I replied was a paid PR professional or shill of some sort.

Thanks for your remarks.

No, I don't believe it. I believe that they sat on it, during which time their salaries were being paid by the taxpayers.

It's a bit horrendous because the NSA would have us believe that they're supposed to work proactively on the behalf of Americans. But then again, we all know that's not what the NSA actually does.

It's even more horrifying that, as a US citizen, I'm one of the people who paid for this work.

It won't be long before this is actually used very successfully against a company like Google or Amazon or Facebook.

> You must work for one of those other companies with 340,000 employees that always makes the right decisions, always puts people before policy, always maximizes shareholder value, always engages positively with the community, and always makes sure every single employee and customer and client and partner is 100% happy with everything that happens at all times. You should write a book about how easy that must be. It would be a bestseller. You could even sell it on Amazon, I bet.

Honestly, I've written some pretty controversial things on HN, but your response is frightening.

Bad behavior, behavior that some people would say is more than little evil, isn't excused because other corporations behave just as badly.

The fact is that the behavior we're discussing is quite easy to get right: just stop forcing people out of their jobs when they're sick or pregnant.

Your response is like saying "human rights violations are such a big problem that we shouldn't do anything about it".

It's a good thing that there are people that say we should stand up against hyper-wealthy corporations who are actively trying to exploit and harm their employees, instead of making excuses and looking the other way.

Except it's just a fact that your company punishes its employees for getting sick or pregnant.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2291301-aclu-ad.html

Other workplace abuses - especially at warehouses - are very well-documented at this point.

Please, please, please spare us the PR.

How is he over generalizing?

It's just a very simple fact that 90% of the bootcamp grads can't program their way out of a paper bag. In fact, most self-trained programmers are vastly better than even the best bootcamp graduates.

The problem with bootcamp grads is that they don't know what they don't know. And they don't know a lot. Undoubtedly some of them will turn out to be great programmers, but not after 3 months. Or even 6. Or even a year.

You should be able to do this easily. Go consult a trainer and try working out 3x a week for 3 months. Learn how to eat enough and lift heavy stuff safely.

Most people, including programmers, are not used to building numbers from numbers past basic arithmetic on digits from 0-9.

Floating point numbers use scientific notation which is rarely used by anyone, even programmers. When was the last time you expressed a large-ish number in scientific notation when you were working on paper?

Yeah, me either!

* Also, lists are a reasonable way of managing unrelated types.

Just wait until you turn 40. It's very difficult for some people to gain weight, even if you eat enough, and even if you lift hard.

How tall are you? How much do you weigh? How much do you want to gain? Who/what do you want to look like?

While you certainly can add muscle, you should be cautioned against trying any program to significantly change your basic build. If you're naturally thin, then you can be muscular, but you'll still be generally thin, and you probably can't ever be a tank. Being a tank is really more about your genetics ( bone structure, shape of your chest, overall length of your muscles ) than working out.

Not saying it's your goal to be a tank, just trying to provide some realistic counsel.

I was the same when I lived alone. My pants were nearly affixed to the back of the chair in my living room.

Don't see how something like this will be good for morale, but I suppose that's what the enormous bonuses are for.

* India is sovereign and can do whatever it likes. It can ban American companies at will.

* There are hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs in America right now.

* Most, if not all, of these jobs should go to Americans.

* Non-profits ( virtually all universities and hospitals in the US ) are exempt from annual caps.

* H1-B is frequently used to illegally replace American workers.

* There are so many Indians and Chinese in the H1-B program that legitimately qualified foreign nationals ( ex: PhD degree holders ) from other countries cannot even get into the US.

* Why is H1-B 80% Indian? India surely doesn't have a monopoly on brilliant people.

* If hundreds of thousands of Americans were being imported into India to do jobs for which there were qualified Indian workers, you better believe that Indians would be extremely unhappy about it.

* And here you are, with the expectation that US professionals should welcome low cost replacements with open arms.

* I live and work in Seattle. Nearly every single American citizen I know is opposed to H1-B. Many are too polite/afraid to say anything at work, but most of them would rather the H1-B workers just went home.

Which is why people say that the pioneers end up with the arrows in their backs.

Yes, it's a huge injustice. Foreign nationals should not be allowed to own property in the US, period. They're turning our housing markets into private casinos, to the detriment of American citizens.

Gay man here. In a long term relationship. Also have lots of straight friends, so I've heard about that side of things as well. I think the trope of a happy marriage requiring sex is just as harmful.

The truth is that a marriage needs as much sex as it needs, no more, no less. There are people who are perfectly happy in sexless marriages, and people who are miserable in marriages where sex isn't a problem.

The most important ingredients for a happy marriage are two people who are well sorted ou. Everything else is negotiable.

Yeah, inheritance is the best tool when I want a derived class to implement all the behavior of the super class.

>> but also provide implementation inheritance, which is bad.

Inheritance isn't bad.

Abusing inheritance is bad.

For the record, you can also abuse composition, polymorphism, operator overloading, free functions, interfaces, records, and abstract data types. I've abused them all and seen them abused as well.

Inheritance is just another tool. Like all tools, we are expected to use them wisely.

First class!

In light of all the technical problems with regular VR, it should surprise no one that Magic Leap is in trouble.

Consider all the information about reality you need in order to pull this off at scale ( as shown in the video at least ). Yeah, it's possible get this information, but we're nowhere near having it right now. Of course this is before we even discuss the hardware problems, and it sounds like there are serious issues there too.

You have Google trying to make Daydream into some kind of Prada-inspired objet d'art, and you have all the headset manufacturers trying to port games to stimulate demand. The fact that they are spending so much time and energy trying to stimulate demand is the biggest clue that it's going to fail. Yet all the proponents think that the industry is just 1 'killer app' away from huge penetration.

The amount of resources being exhausted trying to stimulate demand tell me that there's absolutely no consumer thirst for VR in general. Early adopters don't constitute large, liquid markets. People in VR talk about game-sized or iPhone sized markets, but I see no evidence of this in the real world. How long did it take Oculus to sell 1 million units? How long did it take Sony to sell 10 million units of the PS4?

In Seattle, I hear plenty of people talk about phones and computers and apps and web stuff, but no one in my tech heavy circle of friends ever talks about VR. There are one or two graphics blogs based in Seattle that have mentioned VR stuff a few times now and then, but that's it.

People have said the exact same things about 3D televisions and VR. Yet I don't know a single person who bought one and I've never even seen one in the wild.

The tech just doesn't excite enough people.

Yes, forcible suppression by a state actor is definitely censorship, but not all censorship is bad.

I am generally in two minds about this because there are convincing arguments for both sides. In the US, some people have a terrible time getting a job because of a criminal conviction. Yes, they did something wrong, maybe even terrible, but does society benefit from keeping these people from obtaining gainful employment?

If society does benefit, for how many years should the individual wear the scarlet letter? At present a criminal conviction in the US is a life sentence for a lot of people. What if the government passed a law that expunged their criminal records after 7 years, but did so for the greater good of society?

The French people think that the scarlet letter is bad for their society.