jackowayed

Their blog had been on Posterous. Posterous shut down. One of their partners made Posthaven to replace Posterous and to never shut down. Not a shocking choice.

The reason that people are berated for suggesting inherent differences is that there's so much more to the story. Almost nothing derives purely from genes; it's a complex interaction of genes, epigenetics (environmental and hereditary factors other than genes that control which genes are active), and socialization.

Males and females are treated extremely differently from birth. Literally, in the very first day. Thus, it is nearly impossible to actually prove scientifically that a significant difference comes from genetic and biological factors. The socialization is a confounding factor that's impossible to separate out unless you're willing to do a study where you raise kids in isolation from society so you can treat them identically.

And even "inherent" differences are often easily overcome with social solutions. There's research to suggest that the difference in spatial reasoning is societal.[1] Furthermore, I believe I saw a study suggesting that even in our society, if you put everyone through a proper course teaching them spatial reasoning, the women catch up to the men. So society can choose to eliminate "inherent" differences by devoting a few resources to something that helps one group catch up to the other.

Furthermore, it ultimately doesn't matter that much. Western society has decided that we want equality between men and women. If that's not happening, then we've committed ourselves to make it happen. There are currently differences between men and women, largely from socialization. Since our society was largely built by men, it unsurprisingly is oriented toward having successful men in it. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say, "well, this is how our society is structured, and our society socializes men to win in that structure. I guess equality is inherently impossible." No. We find ways to reduce gender socialization (see: radical schools in Sweden). We find ways to restructure society so that there are fewer barriers to some groups' success.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fk/gender_differences_in_spatial_re...

I don't think so, especially given these sentences:

"C marks virtually always denote unsatisfactory work in American graduate education. Law schools are the primary exception to this convention."

So it sounds like there are some law schools where the curve is simply that the bottom N% get C's or below. The author claims that in most graduate programs, C's are reserved for "unsatisfactory work." Being in the bottom N% doesn't necessarily mean that you're unsatisfactory; it may just mean that you're mostly learning the material, but you're doing a bit worse than your classmates.

It sounds like the author basically wants C's to turn into a soft F. If everyone is making decent progress in a class, there is no reason to fail anyone, even the very bottom student. It sounds like this author is arguing that there's no need to give C's as a matter of course, but only if someone is borderline-failing.

It sounds like the biggest issue is that C's being reserved for unsatisfactory work has been implemented at some law schools but not all. Since most employers aren't that savvy and can't know everything about every school, students at schools that routinely give out C's are hurt by the lower GPA that says more about their school than what they learned.

Ultimately, the author seems to be calling for a grading scale that is more similar between schools. But it's easier to convince schools to do that through inflation of the harder-grading schools ("Help your students!") than deflation of the easier-grading schools ("We promise this won't hurt your students ... if everyone else follows along")

But there's essentially a modest salary cap. Whether you just made the cut for a scholarship or you're in the Heisman race and are responsible for a huge boost in ticket sales, you get ~$70k, which must be redeemed in the form of tuition, college room and board, tutoring, etc. You can try to supplement with under the table money, but it will still be pretty modest (like 10k max?).

On the other hand, coaches get to demand pay that is somewhat linked to the value they provide to the school, and they don't even have to risk career-ending and life-changing injuries (and incur almost certain subtle brain damage) in the process.

Oh, and as is common in our society, the people with the high-paid, safe job are mostly white, and there are many people of color in the exploited job (especially in the sports that make real money). Oh, and they're basically all men.

Regardless of whether everything that's said is true, it is very clearly written as a persuasive piece rather than a purely informative one. Propaganda doesn't have to contain outright lies.

However, I would certainly take issue with, "The judge ordered an environmental review of the drilling process [fracking] that Texas, North Dakota and other states have safely regulated for years."

There are serious safety and environmental concerns about fracking. These include its significant water usage and the possibility that fracking might be able to trigger major earthquakes. These are both issues that are especially important to California.

Saying that fracking has been "safely regulated" seriously glosses over legitimate concerns that other states have accepted as the cost of the associated economic prosperity

Why do you think this ratio is currently around 25%? Do you think it's because women are inherently much less interested in tech? Or do you think it's because our society imposes stereotypes and values on women, and gives very "macho" impressions (often based in reality) about what work in tech is like, which leads women who would otherwise want to study and work in tech not want to?

Fixing the culture of tech and the role of gender in our society more broadly is a major part of what's needed to deal with these issues. And part of that is helping some women--and mean--realize that they want to be in tech despite false impressions they have about their abilities and what working in tech means.

The demo app is not served over HTTPS, nor do the instructions tell users to use HTTPS. This is bad.

Yes, in its normal (unattacked) operation, the connection to Stripe will be safe HTTPS. But if someone does a man-in-the-middle attack, then there will be no connection to Stripe, just a connection to an evil website that steals the card (or both to be sneakier; it doesn't matter).

If you're not serving your site over HTTPS, then an attacker can arbitrarily rewrite the content of your site, so no one can trust it.

I think that a lot of people hold very strongly the ethic "one should never treat someone differently based on their gender" extremely strongly even at the expense of other valuable ethics like "we should strive for a society where women are equal to men".

As a result, people frequently come to ask "how could a group that excludes men possibly be ok, especially as a solution to 'sexism'?" The answer is that ethics are not as simple as "X is always bad". Ethics conflict, and then you have to weigh which one it's better to relax in that situation.

Even if you don't agree in this case, I hope most people can acknowledge that a reasonable person who believes that gender should not dictate what one can and cannot do can weigh the pros and cons and determine that the harm of excluding men from certain spaces is outweighed by the good of giving women a safe space where they feel more comfortable speaking and connecting, which may have the power to help erode the gender inequality in our industry and society.

It's a case of competing ethics, both of which most people support, that reasonable people can come down on either side of.

The difference is that there is systematic injustice against women in our industry (and in society more broadly). One thing that can help fix this is by creating female spaces that help support women in the industry while being fre from overly-male culture that is the norm in our industry.

Here's a previous comment I've written in response to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5340455

Seriously? In the situations where people talk about microaggressions, it's one party acting in a certain way toward someone from an oppressed class that subtly devalues them in a way that ties into the oppression of that class. Out of context, one may see it as "not a big deal", but in the broader context of that class's oppression, and the frequency with which people of the oppressed class may experience microaggressions, it is a big deal.

In that case, there is one clear party who is being (subtly) aggressive.

There are some things people in these threads are chronically getting wrong.

First, lots of people are making the claim that this was a "private" joke. It was not. If it was a private joke and they shouldn't be punished for that reason, then they should have been able to say anything, and as long as everyone who was meant to be in the private conversation appreciated it, it would be wrong to punish them because it was private.

So here's an example: What if they made a joke wherein they said, "Let's lynch a <n word>"? They likely would have been kicked out, could easily have been fired, and no one would have much sympathy for them. Why? Because it's not in private. They were at a conference, which is a community gathering with community standards to make sure that everyone feels welcome, and they were talking when literally surrounded by attendees they don't know. What they say absolutely has an effect on how welcome others feel. We've decided that it's important enough that all feel welcome that we've made codes of conduct.

So once we've established that there are things they could have said that would make their behavior unacceptable, you're now saying "that comment didn't warrant this response", not "this was a private conversation! how could they ever kick them out or fire them for that?"

And at that point, we get to all the arguments that this joke "wasn't sexist". It is true, that the joke itself was not sexist; it did not objectify women, suggest that they are less than men, etc.

But it was contributing to aspects of the tech industry's culture that make it less welcoming to women, and for that reason, it is unacceptable at a professional conference. (It's also just crude and might make some men uncomfortable, and so is unacceptable for that reason too.) In nearly every context that a woman in tech finds herself, she is surrounded by men. This can often make them feel somewhat unwelcome or uncomfortable. Even little things, like a few people who make comments suggesting that they're nontechnical, or a few people asking them out at every single meetup they go to, can make them feel less comfortable and less valued for what they came to the conference to do--be technical.

Anything that contributes to the feeling of the conference being a boy's club, or sexualizes the environment, can make this worse.

Finally, many people ask, "Why didn't she just say something to them?" While I don't think going straight to twitter was the best she could have done, I also don't think people understand how difficult it can be to approach someone and call them out on behavior that makes one feel uncomfortable, especially in a space where one already does not feel especially welcome or taken seriously. If everyone yells, "you should have just talked to them!" every time a woman immediately complains to organizers about inappropriate behavior, you're just encouraging more women to silently feel unwelcome, and likely drop out of the community, rather than speaking up and helping make the community better. I agree that, when comfortable, directly speaking with the offending party is best way to deal with these problems, but those who have been made uncomfortable have absolutely no responsibility to do so, and shouldn't be pushed to do it even if they are not comfortable with it.

There's already a lot of negativity on this thread, suggesting that they only care about this because they're facing bad PR and lawsuits.

I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They made a reasonable engineering and product tradeoff to increase their system's scalability, decrease it's latency, and allow new kinds of applications that are able to serve more than one request at once (eg. node.js servers holding onto tons of idle websockets).

Given an increasingly large infrastructure (which makes stronger queueing much harder if you don't want to add a lot of latency) and strong requests from customers to allow other languages that don't fit into the "one fast request per process" paradigm, I can absolutely see making that tradeoff. It makes the infrastructure simpler (and thus more robust), cuts some latency, and makes the many loud customers who wanted to run things like node.js happy.

Doing so, I would have been aware that in some cases, this would lead to suboptimal routing that increased latency, but I never really would have thought it would have as devastating effects on an application's overall performance as Rap Genius saw.

So yes, they do care a lot more about this issue now that there has been a big stir about it, but I think it's reasonable to assume that this may be more because they've realized it can have a huge impact on overall latency rather than a moderate one, and that it's come to their attention that some of their messaging and docs hadn't been updated reflecting the routing change.

But given how great of a company Heroku usually is, the fact that it is not in their interest to decrease their quality of service, and that there are very legitimate reasons to move away from intelligent routing (namely, the facts that it doesn't really make sense for applications that can do multiple requests concurrently and that it is extremely difficult to scale), I'm inclined to believe that this is more a mistake than a malicious lack of concern for their customer's well-being that they are only addressing due to vocal outside pressure.

This is a common argument, and while it has some merit, it also reeks of illusion of control bias. Guns make people feel safer because they feel more in control of their safety.

In reality, if someone is armed and has broken into my house, I want it to be absolutely clear to them that I am unarmed. I want them to know that they have no need to attack me, and that they should just take some of my stuff and get out (by far the most likely reason they're there), leaving me unharmed. The alternative possibilities sound much worse to me.

This is true in almost every situation where people talk about guns being useful against crime. I think I am more likely to harm myself, to incite the other party to harm me, to harm a bystander (maybe someone in my household), or to harm someone that I perceive as a much more serious and dangerous criminal than they actually are, than I am to successfully be a "good guy with a gun who stops a bad guy with a gun".

It depends on the stage of the business. For a small business that might be running off of one or two VPS's, you're probably much better off paying a few hundred dollars a month for a machine that is up 99.99% of the time instead of 99.9% of the time than to spend significant engineering time trying to setup database replication and failover (and either relaxing consistency or adding significant latency to your site) in the hopes of getting an 99.999%.

This is especially true given that more often than not, within the first 5 times you use it, you'll experience some bug in your HA setup that leads to some complicated, slow-to-diagnose-and-fix failure.

No one is trying to make the overall industry more hostile to men. Some people are trying to make certain spaces that feel safe and encouraging to women, which often means minimizing the maleness of the space.

Most don't fully exclude men, but they have legitimate reasons to want to make it feel like a female space, and if that means taking measures that prevent some men who would like to attend from attending, that's not necessarily a problem.

I say this as a male who has attended campus women in CS dinners and talks. These events are open to all, but aimed at giving women interested in computer science a community, role models, etc. When I go, I am always prepared to leave if I feel that my presence is hurting the overall atmosphere, because I realize that the events are a powerful force against inequalities in society, and the least I can do is stay out of the way. And when you ask the organizers if men can come, they say yes, but they do mention that it's important for it to feel like a female space, and that if it got to the point that so many men attended that this compromised that feeling, they would start discouraging men from attending.

Not every event needs to serve everyone in the industry. There are probably some language-focused meetups where you wouldn't feel especially comfortable or welcome because you don't know the language, or maybe even actively hate it. I understand that you feel it is different because you'd at least be allowed to attend a meetup for a language you don't know, but it still illustrates that not all events in the industry have to cater to you. When they're catering toward a disadvantaged group, they deserve even more leeway to make sure they achieve their goals. As long as the network of women-focused events doesn't become so large and meaningful that it is systematically disadvantaging men, I don't see any problem with some events excluding men in various ways.

You're concerned about sexism in the small--in this one event. Others are more concerned with sexism in the large--the pervasive social environment that systematically discourages women from entering an extremely rewarding and lucrative industry. Both are suboptimal. In the ideal world, there wouldn't be any women-only tech events. But in the ideal world, there wouldn't be any cultural problems in the industry that make women feel less welcome and free to speak at an event with significant male attendance than at an event that is all or nearly all women. Understand that if organizers choose to, say, split the tickets so that at most 25% of tickets may go to men, they're not doing it because they want to discriminate against men, but because they worry that allowing too many men to attend will make their event less effective at correcting an injustice that we all believe is worth fixing.

If you're actually running a business off of a VPS, where the cost of downtime far outstrips the monthly bill, it's absolutely worth paying more.

I have a VPS I found on lowend box. $5/month for a 512MB OpenVZ. It's a pretty good deal, and it does what I need it to do; I have full control over it, I can give other people access to it, I can run any kind of website on it as long as I don't care too much about performance or uptime.

But there's no way I would run any service that was bringing in money on it. It basically has downtime every single month. Usually only for a few minutes at a time, and they tend to scrape by just barely exceeding 99.90%, but still. There also was one time when they emailed me saying there had been a power loss or some other reason that the rack my server was on went down, and I actually ended up having to go into the console to start my server back up and get everything working.

I've also found their support ... not particularly supportive.

Sure, Linode is 4x as expensive for the "same thing" (though to get Xen from my provider is only about 3x cheaper than Linode), but the amount of total money is negligible. $15/month. Maybe if I needed more resources it would be a difference of $100/month, but if I need a 4GB VPS for a service that's meant to make me money, that should still hopefully be trivial. For a service provider with much better uptime and support, that's a no-brainer.

Except that for a lot of businesses, it's actually that any dollars an employer does not give to his employees, it keeps as profit. Then maybe it pays that out as dividends, but those mainly go to rich people who are likely to reinvest them rather than immediately spending them, because that small increase in dividend receipts doesn't make a huge difference on their overall financial situation.

Whereas extra dollars going to a minimum wage earner will almost entirely be spent, because people that poor tend to spend nearly all of their income.

It's the same reason why tax cuts to the poor are more stimulative than those to the rich.

I wonder what the anonymity implications would be if that usecase became predominant, especially if one exchange wins out. Correlating purchase of n BTC and conversion of n BTC to real currency could reveal who was paying whom.

This is why I use GitHub pages. Jekyll is good enough, and with GH pages it's super simple. If GitHub were to ever do something weird with it, I can get any static hosting and do the jekyll stuff myself and still control it.

And a static site is much simpler than, say, a Rails-based site (the other thing I was considering when setting it up). Any hosting will do, and I only have to worry about exploits in the web server, not the framework.

That seems unlikely. They already have a rough time that's not too far off and a publisher lined up.

Also, DHH tweeted about writing a book a few weeks ago: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/292360292430647296

Without further explanation this is not relevant. There is no contradiction in simultaneously believing that it is worth it to provide one's in-office workers the best office money can buy and that to find enough excellent talent, one should accept that not all employees will live within easy commuting distance of the office.

I strongly second the last point.

I was a lot like you (I'm addressing this post at the person the whole thread is about, not Thomas) for the second half of high school. I had a lot of fun hacking on various projects, was quite sure that CS was my future, and thought my classes--though I did find parts of most of them interesting--were mostly wasting my time. I talked about wanting to quit, and if I had a successful project that started bringing money in the door, I might have.

One trick is that I did care very much about my grades. So after some wavering about whether I wanted to go to college or push it off indefinitely, I decided to go to Stanford. And for reasons that I can't entirely explain, I signed up for a program where I spent freshman year reading a sizable portion of the important Western writers of the past 2500 years. And I realized that I actually really like the humanities when done well.

But I was still pretty set on a career in tech startups, took mainly CS aside from that program, and flirted with dropping out a couple times.

Now it's my junior year, and I've slowly realized that there are a lot more options out there that interest me. I gained an appreciation for the academic side of CS. And I realized that I really do like and care about thinking and writing about social issues, philosophy, and some other things.

I've pretty much determined that my dream job is professor because it would let me do everything I like doing (innovate technically, communicate, teach people, mentor people). However, I'm also probably not going to go down that track because of the hazing (grad school + difficulty of finding academic jobs afterward) and inflexibility (in the good case, you probably only have one great job offer in one place, and you'll pretty much be there for life), but if you had asked me freshman year, I would have said I had no interest in research.

I'm also not sure that I want to stay in tech forever. There are a lot of interesting problems, one person's contributions can be meaningful in some settings, and it's very flexible and well-compensated. However, a lot of what people are doing is pretty boring to me on most levels (most companies don't need innovative technology, and even most of the ones that are innovating aren't particularly doing anything for society that I care about). After a decade or two, there's a good chance I'll want to do something more interdisciplinary and with more social value. I definitely am not convinced startups are the thing for me; the vast majority of startups just seem banal at this point, though there are some gems.

This also ties into the fact that I expect the world to change a lot in my lifetime. Tech is important to me now, but as the world changes, that could change too, and the more freedom I have to do that, the happier I'll be.

I've learned a lot about what there is in the world and what I care about in the last five years thanks to being in school. And I have a great foundation that will make it easier for me to follow my interests as they develop.

As a side note, college has been an extremely important time for me as a person. I felt pretty adult as a senior in high school, and in many ways, I was; I was far more responsible and better at avoiding stupid decisions than most of my classmates. But I still had a lot of growing up to do, especially socially. I don't think college is necessarily the optimal environment for that development, but it's a very good one. Make sure that you have friends about your age, whom you frequently see in person, and spend significant time with. Get close to some of them.

Finally, writing well is extremely important and useful no matter what you do. It is worth the investment, and the earlier you invest, the more it will pay off.

I've been reading more about security lately, and one thing I don't understand is how buffer overflows allow for true RCE these days. I believe all modern processors support having non-executable pages; why is any program-writeable page executable? Especially in C, where there's no JIT. It also seems like address space randomization would make RCE pretty hard.

Obviously they can still arbitrarily write the instruction pointer, which is very bad and possibly bootstrappable into fully RCE, but I still see more conventional RCE described in recent books and wonder if and why it's still doable.

It's ~$5 when you add tip to the regular taxi ride.

It doesn't mean that they think someone would buy the company for $1B now. It means that they purchased some stock for a price equivalent to buying all of the stock for $1B, and that they believe that this is a good bet to make given their risk tolerance, the possible outcomes for the company, and the likelihood of those outcomes.

That's just not true. Many, many engineers severely undervalue themselves for a variety of reasons. For some, underconfidence. Even for those that are confident in themselves, for many there's a fairness issue. ("Do I really need more than 100K?") Also, if they're in one underpaid job, the anchoring effect is pretty strong. I know someone who was in DC for <70k, applied to work remotely for a Valley company, and when they said yes, he asked for a big raise to 90k. They valued retention enough that they decided to actually pay him what he was worth and what comparable teammates got, tens of thousands a year more.

People are socialized to try to make others happy, not inconvenience someone by asking for more than they feel is necessary and fair, etc. This does not speak to their competence, though it might also mean that they're less effective at making you realize how competent they are once you hire them (because they're also the type of people who don't flash all of their accomplishments in front of you).

Women also tend to fall into this even moreso because of gender socialization.

I'm not sure it's as insane as you think.

First, interns at big-name tech companies are highly overpaid for the work the company gets now; it's seen more as a hiring cost than a salary. The company pays ~$50k (~20k is three month's salary; add in housing stipend, taxes, and overhead) per intern in the hopes that a decent proportion of them will be back. Those that are back are solid engineers that are known quantities; false positives should be much more rare than in your general hiring process because you get to see them work in your company for three months before deciding whether to make a full-time offer. Given how hard and expensive engineer recruiting is, this is an ok deal for a lot of companies. But regardless, comparing to intern salary isn't meaningful because few companies actually believe that they are paying for what the intern will produce in their three months when they pay top dollar for elite interns.

Furthermore, while higher salaries are certainly available, those salaries don't seem absurdly low for the stage of company they were (tiny staff, no product released). Most companies at that early of a stage do expect employees to accept a nontrivial cut from their market rate in return for more interesting work, more autonomy, and fairly significant (if high-risk) equity.

He's trying to eradicate polio. That would be incredible lasting good.

Research does serious lasting good as well. Research funding built the Internet, for example.

Yes. Otherwise an attacker could serve a page that looks just like your page, but has different javascript that ships them the credit card numbers.

If you're not using SSL, you should just assume that an attacker can break your page in every conceivable way.

What are you actually asking for? Employment in the US is at will by default, unless the employer and employee sign a contract explicitly agreeing to change something about that relationship. What do you actually want in that contract to give you? A guaranteed huge severance package that incentivizes them to keep you? Something that fully makes them unable to fire you without demonstrated cause? Do you also want to lose some of the freedom you have to walk away if they sell and massively change company culture, start hiring worse people, change what they work on or what technologies they use in a way that moves away from your interests, etc?

Also, remember that if you want a company's default employment contract to be different, it will also be different for all of your coworkers. Eventually, the company will make a hiring mistake; no process is perfect. In that event, you want the company to fire the person as quickly as it becomes clear that a mistake was made, not hang onto them until they have unquestionably demonstrated incompetence. Do you want to work at a company that will dilly dally about firing bad people?

Talk to anyone who has worked at various government agencies, which basically can't fire anyone after two years, and you will gain respect for at-will employment.