> Most HR departments are staffed by women for example
Do you see the irony in this statement?
2,514 karma · joined July 9, 2011
Do you see the irony in this statement?
That's an important observation and plays a huge role in perpetuating sexism and gender discrimination. It continues to exist because guys let other guys get away with it. If you speak up and indicate that you're not okay with it, behaviors and attitudes may change.
It's not easy and it requires courage. But it's necessary to really make a dent in the historical patterns.
There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people.
The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change.
I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone interested in the topic of gender discrimination. Jackson writes well, he's a man, and he brings a mans perspective to the issues. There is no demonization or undue blame assigned to men in the book. It's a powerful read.
I haven't personally observed this, but our society certainly shames the women who perform in pornography.
It seems that they are steadily tracking towards a browser-based cloud IDE. GitHub also seems to be a popular choice for devs hosting their blogs. I wonder if they're hoping to be a more all-round app hosting service?
I think I know the rationale behind this statement, but I'm always curious as to why we hold on to these beliefs. If we let industries move around based on true competitiveness, stripped of subsidies and other anticompetitive practices, we might find that to be a force for good.
That said, I've come to believe that this is most likely a minority view. Everyone believes in free markets until it starts affecting their bottom line.
I've resorted to having stuff delivered to a location where I know that OnTrac is less likely to be used. They do such a shoddy job of delivering on time and seem cheerfully incapable of reading delivery instructions.
My "claw" is illegible enough for people to know whether or not I really wrote something by hand or generated it on a computer.
How do you know this?
Strangely, it was partially because he was so insufferable that Apple became as successful as it is today. Steve Jobs was notorious for being in-your-face brutal about the quality of work being done simply not being good enough. Crying, screaming, throwing tantrums - all these histrionics went hand-in-hand with that.
What's interesting about this is that Steve had two things that most people lack: (1) vision in spades. And more importantly, very good vision. (2) an ability to push people beyond their limits by berating them, but then having really amazing work come out of that process.
Steve Jobs was awe-inspiring because he could dress people down and grill them on details that most other people either didn't notice or would gloss over. If you read many of the books about Steve Jobs, there's a common refrain said by many of those who worked under him.
"I'd never work for him again, but he pushed me to do things I never knew I was capable of."
[EDIT: forgot to add] The reason Steve was able to get away with all this negative behavior is that it produced amazing results. But for most people, being so belligerent and nasty without having an amazing vision to back it up will not get you very far. And, for the most part, such people are completely egomaniacal. (Steve was too, he just happened to be right a lot).
Hpricot in particular was under heavy assault. I'll be the first to say that maybe it wasn't always the most performant solution, but for a long time it was the only good solution (and I tried a few). So when people are ripping your libraries left and right, forgetting to pay a little bit of respect to how big an impact he had on the community, then yeah...I could see how he'd feel the need for a self-imposed exile.
What I find interesting about this is that that seems to be the route Google was going anyway. I remember reading a while back about Google building housing near Mountain View to house employees.
In a way, it's not too different from the old company towns of the industrial revolution (see Pullman Strike) and there is a certain logic to it:
If you want to retain people, hire them right out of college and drop them into a situation that is very much like the university experience. Long hours, lots of work, but free food and you can more or less walk to work and see your friends on a regular basis. It could be pretty attractive to someone straight out of college.
I've come to believe that the second part of this statement really is the primary reason why Lisp drives some people absolutely nuts. The parens are really just a distraction and "easy" justification for not liking the language.
It makes sense, though. When you have to read both "outside in" and "bottom up", a lot of your acquired reading abilities (left to right, top to bottom) are in tension with the code you're trying to understand.
At least in Clojure, the ->> family of operators ("threading" macros) are doing a good job helping to alleviate this. Maybe they're available in other Lisps, I don't know.
EDIT: found a reference to these macros in Emacs Lisp: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ThreadMacroFromClojure
I'm aware that what I'm saying isn't universally accepted, so disclaimer: yes, it is my personal opinion that it's fine for underage kids to have sex as long as they use protection.
Really, there's no need to post these types of stories on HN anymore. The discussion always goes the same way - lots of heated argument, no open discussion, no admission of vulnerability.
Very few men are willing to question the power structure they've been brought up in. If you're born at the top, why bother to question the system?
[EDIT: yeah, I'm grumpy about this today.] [Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day.]
I've been here for a year and I've yet to file a single TPS report, attend a team building exercise, and they throw company-wide beer bashes every Friday (usually with pretty good food).
It's a good place to work, in other words. Is it the same as a startup? Not at all. But if you're going to join a big company, you shouldn't be expecting that either.
However, whenever people post "Lisp in Ruby" stories, I always hope that it'll be a "Clojure in Ruby" implementation. I am surprised no-one has done it yet.