ditonal

I disagree, I think timr is correct, and despite him being criticized for poor socialization, he is in fact picking up the subtle but obvious social and language cues that you and dmor either fail to notice or choose to ignore.

This is clearly a compare and contrast piece. He is contrasting what he took from the meeting with what the Developer CEO took from the meeting, with a heavy implication that those benefits were exclusive to each other. He says it more or less explicitly:

"I suspect in his mind the benefit of meeting was directly related to his perception of the quality of data in my answers."

Also look at the language construct used:

"Whereas he based the value of the meeting on the quality of the data I focus on how much I think I got an accurate snapshot of how the person thinks and operates."

The google definition of 'whereas' is "In contrast or comparison with the fact that.".

To possibly overthink social cues, I think that timr wrote a true but slightly condescending response to a slightly condescending article. Since engineers commonly are condescending to sales people, and since HN is filled with contrarians, someone felt obligated to stick up for the sales guy.

You're not the first person to glorify volunteering and charity work over monetary donations, but I think it's misguided. It's my impression that most charities could use money a lot more than volunteer time, especially because it's easier to convert the former into the latter. If you make $50/hr as a contractor, you could go work as a volunteer for an hour or do an hour of contracting and give 5 man hours to a charity, as well as giving 5 people some work. Or if they don't need any extra labor but they need anything else they can use the cash for that. Even if it's a lot less romanticized, getting full value for your labor out of a market economy then redirecting part of it to charitable causes probably does a lot more overall good than doing a (relatively) inefficient amount of labor. You argued elsewhere that people can get dependent on money, but they can be just as easily as dependent on anything else you do.

The only exceptions I can think of are blood donations or anything where you're donating a 'human' element (visiting the elderly) rather than your work.

I got interested in sports mostly coming from a gambling background (and then fantasy, which hits most of the same psychological buttons as gambling), a hobby I think nerds tend to be slightly more likely to care about. Betting money on a game certainly gives you a reason to care.

Even without the money, people watch sports for the narratives. If it really is just two teams of people you know nothing about, then for most people, it's going to be boring. Most sports fan watching a league they're not familiar with will be bored, even if it's the same sport. How many American football fans enjoy Canadian football?

Once you get to know some of the players, their successes or struggles, it makes more sense why people enjoy it. It's basically a soap opera with testosterone. And while many nerds might not be interested in sports of soap operas, the majority of time you can find some activity they enjoy that does follow the basic tenets of enjoying narratives about other people that are essentially meaningless to your life. I would say that in many ways Hacker News has it's own players and teams that it follows (Google, Apple, Zuckerberg, Stallman, etc). While the stories of these people and companies probably does impact a lot of people here in some big ways, I think a non-neglible amount of interest is derived from the same storytelling aspect that sports provides.

And of course there is the tribal aspect of it, and being able to share something with other people, that glaugh touches upon, as well as the appreciation of athletic talent and strategy.

I've only been to one hackathon (Angelhack NYC), but I've heard that other ones have a similar problem - short demos. If you are evaluating a project in 2 minutes, you aren't evaluating anything except a team's ability to pitch. Granted, pitching is a useful skill, but maybe it should be called a Pitchathon because those of us who code all night get resentful of well-rested biz devs with a slide deck being in a 'hackathon'.

I know judging time tends to get limited, but one easy solution would have been to either split the judges up or use staff/volunteers to have some sort of preliminary round where you get 10-15 minutes to do a full working demo that shows all your work, not just a concept. The second added benefit is then you have a shorter 'final round' where only the best projects get demoed for everyone. The only downside is that not everyone gets to do a 'real demo' in front of the judges but maybe it's a good thing if it needs to be earned. I personally would have felt much better getting knocked out in an early round after actually showing all the work I put in rather than feeling like 90% of my work was irrelevant as far as the demo went because I didn't have time to show it.

It's in everyone's best interest to have fair, just economic systems. Good systems where wealth is more strongly linked to economic output rather than birthrights lead to more prosperity and justice for everyone. Too much wealth inequality hurts growth, and it also creates political inequality that can create a feedback cycle that worsens the problem. Social justice and economic justice are inexorably linked, if one group has all the power, bad things happen.

Also, you clearly live in a very wealthy neighborhood, but many people are struggling. Even if people aren't struggling, the "you can't complain about anything being injust because someone, somewhere is in a more unjust situation" is an absurd line of reasoning.

I'm surprised you found that rebuttal strong, I found it exceedingly weak. She complains that the original author used a few of her own unreviewed studies, fair criticism, but doesn't present any evidence that it was wrong. She complains that the original author painted the research as one-sided that men negotiate better, then reviews the research and show that it is in fact pretty one-sided. Then, having done nothing to really dispute the accuracy of the research evidence being presented, she goes into an unsubstantiated rant about privilege and minorities, which is largely unrelated to the book. It's true maybe the original book failed to address some of these issues, but it doesn't make the book wrong as much as incomplete. As she completely fails to hide her overarching political bias going into the rebuttal, her rebuttal made no striking critique on the book's research nor presents much conflicting research, and half the rebuttal was spent rehashing third wave feminism talking points rather than making scientific arguments, only to summarize by saying that book was shoddy science and sexist, I would not consider this a strong rebuttal at all.

I find it amazing you talk about mindsets that keep us in the status quo, and then you disparage IDE users and write a post full of hacker news groupthink regurgitation. I've noticed the type of person who hate IDEs tend to fall much more into the religious and close-minded crowd than those who don't. Most people I know who use IDEs are perfectly competent at an editor like emacs/vim and simply prefer different tools, but that doesn't stop many people who prefer text editors from trying to feel superior by stereotyping IDE users as paint-by-number morons incapable of embracing the beauty of the command line. It's a traditionalist and condescending attitude that I think is holding us in the status quo more than something like OO's popularity, because there are all sorts of cool programming language ideas you can come up with if you're willing to sacrifice the source code being easily edited by a text editor. Yet we see far less experimentation there then we do with functional programming languages, and I think that's because functional languages are perceived as cool and smart but IDEs are associated with the philistine class of programmers.

You are missing the point. The author claims to focus on the best product from a functionality standpoint, but he fails to convince us that the "best" wallet is actually any functionally better. His arguments for why it's better are based on imagined problems with cheaper products that don't actually exist.

Those meaningless low level problems are the basis for higher level skills. Studies have shown that students who are more capable of doing arithmetic without a calculator do better in college level math classes.*

This is not the first time I've read complaints about standardized testing being unfair, nor people rolling their eyes at defenses of testing as people who just don't "get it". What I haven't seen much of is a thorough explanations of which tests are unfair and what specifically is bad about them. I just looked at the math section of the EXPLORE test. I would be very concerned if my child was unable to answer those questions and I would want my teacher to prioritize those basic skills before his so-called "deep-thinking" classes.

Which tests are too long? It seems if tests are too long, we should shorten them. As an observer, it seems the standardized testing critics reach for any and all weaknesses of tests as a reason to shun them entirely, and it does raise suspicions they just hate the accountability.

Standardized testing predicts college math performance. http://faculty.etsu.edu/stephen/diss-stephens.pdf

Less calculator usage in grade school correlates to better college math performance. http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/ED/pubver.pdf

It's a theory in the colloquial sense of the word, and it is unsubstantiated in the only sense of the word. You are also working under the assumption that marijuana users experience "burn out" and trying to distinguish cause from correlation, but your underlying assumption has no evidence.

I agree that this is a political discussion probably worth removing, however I can't resist responding.

You want hard data to show whether or not marijuana use goes down, in order to combine that information with your totally unsubstantiated "burn out" theory to come to a decision? Don't you think the "burn out" theory is just as deserving of real evidence to support it?

My whole point was that my standard of living went up compared to Maryland. I'm making more and my bills didn't increase as to offset that. I have more money for vacations, going out, etc. It's true that the big house and car lifestyle may be more expensive, but even talking about those things IN NYC is ridiculous, obviously it makes much more sense to living in NJ or Long Island, where a develop salary can definitely get you a house and a few cars. I'm pretty sure cars are the same price most places and NJ has the cheapest gas in the country as far as I know.

I wasn't just talking about street foods, I specifically mentioned the markets that have cheaper produce and meat than what I paid in Maryland. For household items there's dollar store type places with pretty cheap general products. You do have to shop around more. As far as whose salary is adjusted, I thought we were only discussing developers.

I personally think the "cost of living" argument is bogus a huge portion of the time, at least it was for me when I moved from Maryland to NYC.

Sure, rent is expensive. That's about it, and even then if you're willing to live in the right part of Jersey you can still be 30 minutes from work and have very cheap rent.

Most big ticket items are the same. Anything ordered from Amazon is the same. Laptops, tablets, sound systems - the same. Tons of clothing deals all over the city. Food is actually cheaper because there are so many little farmer markets and dollar stores. I understand that if you just go by what some people are paying for a hamburger, you could think that NYC is much more expensive, but you don't have to eat at the same place i-bankers and tourists eat! A street gyro cost $4 and there's $1 slices of pizza.

Finally, even if the cost of living is higher, it's not a comparable product. You are paying not only to have a place to sleep, but you are also paying to live in New York City, one of the most exciting cities in the world with endless amounts of diverse people, places, and activities. Paying higher rent so that you can live in the city many people dream about makes sense, and the fact that salaries are largely adjusted to make this a reasonable proposition makes it an easy choice.

This attitude, and the casual "reverse" racism of this author, sets back social progress against institutional racism against blacks/hispanics so much.

I totally accept that blacks face more racism in many aspects of society today, especially professionally. But in Baltimore a bunch of black kids jumped me, and they told me it was because I was white and I "thought I could walk around their neighborhood" (a block from Penn Station which is actually pretty gentrified). It wasn't even a robbery, although they did rob me, but if that was their only goal they wouldn't have continued to beat me for the ten minutes after I had given up. Oh, and of course that's not considered a hate crime.

So when that happens, and then you tell me, in all caps, that white people are never the victims of racism, do you think I'm more or less inclined to agree with your other points?

He was in a treatment program for marijuana. Most would agree that marijuana is portrayed by the US government and its law enforcement as being far more dangerous than it actually is. I wonder if someone who hears this portrayal of marijuana and realizes it's inaccurate also questions our government's accuracy when characterizing other more dangerous drugs like bath salts. If he had checked less biased sources like Erowid, he might have learned that he wouldn't be the first person to have a terrible experience with MDPV.

Also I liked the following quote:

“It's so hard to understand how something sold over the counter can result in death,” Julie Sanders said. “I can't grasp it, I just still can't grasp that thought.”

I guess she's not too familiar with Aspirin.

Drug education in the United States is dangerously flawed.

My anecdotal evidence based on an aunt/uncle who work there is that it's VERY much a bureaucratic nightmare where most people work as hard as possible to work as little as possible. Then the minority of extremely smart researchers the NSA recruits just take advantage of the disorganization to research whatever they want regardless of whether it's actually relevant to the NSA's goals. So that's a plus for smart hackers. But I think in general the NSA has an easier time recruiting brilliant physicists/mathematicians because there's less competition from the private sector. I imagine it's a lot more difficult to recruit ultra-talented hackers, especially since they are totally unqualified to recognize them. At my campus' career fair they were interested in me but totally uninterested in the best programmer I know, who's far more qualified than me even on paper, because his GPA was too low (he was working full time as a graphics programmer at a game company throughout college which hurt his grades). But neither of us were seriously interested anyway because I don't think anyone smart would actually want to work for the government without a huge financial incentive. Even the fact that this article keeps referring to the students as 'soldiers' is the type of condescending Orwellian jingoism that makes me shudder.

What are you talking about? I did a phone interview and two on-site interviews, and the only feedback I got was a generic form letter that my background was not the right fit, which clearly isn't the whole story because there's no need to pay for a plane ride if my resume isn't what you're looking for. I'm guessing either they've changed policy here or you or someone you know happened to get a nice interviewer.