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It's terrifying that Amazon is doing so well despite treating their employees terribly. Behold, the future of software development!

Are we sure we want to keep inflating supply with all this "everyone should code" nonsense?

Please stop. Invoking race was completely unnecessary for making your point. If you really meant class, you should have said so. I know middle class people of all backgrounds.

> old white guys

Why did you inject race into the conversation for no reason? I've seen layabouts of every description

My understanding is that Twitter's culture has strangled it. I've heard that they developed a culture of blaming individuals when things went wrong, but distributing the credit when something goes right. Consequently, Twitter developers don't want to ship anything. There's no upside --- only severe risk of being flamed, punished, and fired.

Isn't it sad that every generation of programmers forgets, probably not deliberately, that previous generations of programmers existed and were just as smart and talented as we are today?

India needs to get its act together with traffic. I'm heartened that there are anti-honking groups already --- that's a big start. The first step in fixing driving in India is changing the honking culture. Seriously.

Efficient transit is just table stakes for being a serious economic power. Indians are smart. They'll figure out how to fix things.

> systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now

Lest aspiring systems programmers get the wrong idea: systems knowledge is still black magic and it's still plenty valuable. Knowing how systems actually work under the hood is a rare skill and can help you code circles around the node-is-close-to-the-metal [1] competition even when writing application code.

[1] https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says/status/234856345579446272

That's why the measure comes across as empty pandering. (Hint: you can tell it's pandering because all the rationale is gender gap bullshit instead of the job application process being shitty for everyone.) If Massachusetts really wanted to improve the strength of employees with respect to employers, the legislature would do things like ban non-competes, ban non-solicits, clarify IP assignment rules, and ban mandatory binding arbitration clauses.

But what do we get instead? Identity politics pandering.

The public freaks out when they learn that someone might have spliced a salt resistance gene into a tomato, and you think the public will accept the kind of advanced genetic manipulation you'd need to kill HIV dead?

An clever-enough emulator can just lie to an application and say, "You're running on a stock device. Everything is fine".

It'll be amusing to watch this video on my first hyperloop trip. There's a long history of people saying that innovative things can't be done.

Really? I'd love to learn more.

The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. I'm making a procedural objection, yes, and I'm doing it because accusations are too important to be left to innuendo.

The pattern I've seen over and over again is you have a core group of creators who are talented, but prickly or obnoxious in some way. The project creators spend years of their lives building the project and making it successful. Then others come into the project, and use real or imagined personal offenses to boot the creators out of the project. These usurpers don't have talent, but because the project is successful already, the impact of booting the creators doesn't become apparent for a while. The project, however, cut off from its engine, stagnates and dies.

Best example? Apple.

Maybe Appelbaum bucks this trend by not having the talent to balance his flaws. I don't know. But I'm pattern-matching against the phenomenon I described above, and so far, it looks like a perfect match.

> The victims

These accusers only become "victims" after an impartial jury of Appelbaum's peers weighs the evidence and pronounces him guilty.

The people who are the brains behind the project can always fork. An organization that's turned inward and primarily concerns itself with rules, codes of conduct, procedures, and investigations will always lose to an organization full of people who are passionate about the problem and the code.

> Given two socially well adjusted participants

So non-socially-well-adjusted, raised-on-the-internet types shouldn't get to date? Your comment is tautological and merely says that people who are good at dating are good at dating.

I'm sick of made-up and ever-more-implausible reasons for women not comprising 50% of the workforce. (Someone once mentioned that a company might be having trouble finding women because an employee had a model of the Millennium Falcon on his desk.)

The truth is that fewer women than men choose to enter this profession in the first place. You may or may not agree that this state of affairs represents a "problem". Even if it does, the hiring stage is far too late to "fix" it.

I've considered and thoroughly rejected that idea. If you choose to see the world through the lens of privilege and group grievances, my opinion of you plummets. That kind of thinking pushes us apart instead of bringing us together.

Do you have any fucking idea how unfair it is to discriminate against people, people who might have had very difficult lives, because they were born a certain way and share gonads and pigmentation with people long dead who do things that don't fit today's social mores?

If you choose the see people as group members first and individuals second, I want nothing to do with you.

Beware of runaway retries: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051107-20/?p=...

Personally, I'd rather systems fail quickly, with retries only at the highest (application) and lowest (TCP) levels.

And it's sad that acknowledging this reality is something you can't do in the workplace or in polite company. If we're to get ahead in life, we have to say, through gritted teeth, "diversity is our strength".

Women's suffrage (and suffrage in general) may be a good idea. When you say that the case for it being a good idea is as strong as that for a mathematical proof, you're discrediting yourself, since you're smart enough to know that political ideas can never achieve the rigor of proof.

Genome-wide clustering algorithms that are run with no a priori assumptions about population structure end up discovering human population groups that match almost perfectly with self-identified "race".

The claim that race doesn't exist is simply false. We can talk about whether or not it's useful to make policy decisions based on race, but if we're respecting the data, we can't say that there are no coherent human population groupings smaller than homo sapiens or that these groups do not align with traditionally-understood "race".

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

It's incredibly frustrating to see well-intentioned people just flatly deny facts about the world. The mistrust and resentment this denial causes makes it much more difficult to get useful messages across.

Are you seriously claiming that random innocent men deserve to be ruined because of their gender? Are you really claiming that this state of ruin is "living like a woman"? I like to think that women can amount to something.

When you're approving of driving innocent people out of work because of their chromosomal makeup, maybe you need to step back and reconsider your principles.

That's an excellent policy. I hope more women follow in the example of your friends. I'm tired of hypocritical and self-serving redefinitions of words like "oppression" that allow certain groups to engage in otherwise-unacceptable behaviors just because of their group identity.

We need to emphasize our common identity as technologists, not atomize ourselves into mutually acrimonious groups based on personal characteristics having nothing to do with technology.

> allowing such behavior to go on where people can clearly hear it is the same thing as condoning it

Toleration is what allows people who have different views to work together toward common goals. You can't have civilization without it, because no two people will agree on everything. If these people were really as boorish as the OP described, the best approach would have been to let them embarrass themselves.

What's next, hushing someone who dares admit he voted for a Republican? (I can imagine the rationale now: "you're enabling war and bigotry by proxy! Public GOPism is unacceptable!")

> I think the culture is still deeply sexist

What's also deeply embedded in many circles is that acknowledging any difference between men and women is "sexist". I've seen people called sexist for acknowledging that using attractive women in advertising leads to increased clickthrough rates. Should we deny the evidence of our own eyes?

You're complaining about people "aping the world around them". Isn't that just called acknowledging reality? I understand and sympathize with the desire to make the world more fair. I think cultural crusaders have gone well past that point, however, and are now asking people to deny real facts. They're applying social pressure to make people make false claims about the world.

Don't these people realize that using the thread of ostracism and unemployment to suppress earnestly-held, non-malicious beliefs rooted in honest observations of the real world is just going to lead to resentment and a massive backlash against not only the overreach, but against any actual bias?

People who call everything "sexist" are bringing about a world where everything will be sexist.

Policing speech like that just breeds resentment. You not only guaranteed that these people later made the same comments to each other in private, but also inched a bit closer to resenting people like you and your entire cause.

Mind your own business. You have no right to interfere in a conversation among friends, even one that triggers you. If you want to encourage change in the world, be the change and set an example. You're not going to change how people feel by suppressing expressions of those feelings.

Not once in human history has this censorious approach actually worked. But it's created powder kegs plenty of times.

A great deal of evil has been done in the name of saving lives and souls. Your good intentions do not excuse the long history of thought policing leading to injustice and misery.

Please stop trying to police language.