mklim

>there are some really obvious things we could do which would cure a lot of people

I agree with a lot of your bigger complaints re: the labor market, but I don't think this is necessarily true.

Let's say that for a lot of people, their symptoms of depression are a direct response to external circumstances, and that these external circumstances are overwhelmingly job-related. Even if you assume that this is true (which AFAIK is a assumption, research hasn't definitively demonstrated this), changing their situation for them to have a meaningful career doesn't necessarily magically fix the depression developed as a result of their situation--it might, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's an automatic solution. Some people diagnosed with depression see reduced or even eliminated symptoms with lifestyle changes, and some people don't respond to them at all. Even if the depressive symptoms were caused by external circumstances, they could be like a broken bone: caused by external trauma, but needing additional intervention to treat even after the violence has ended. Or a closer analogy, like PTSD: removing someone from the traumatic situation that gave them the disorder in the first place is necessary to treat their symptoms, but it's definitely not sufficient on its own. We don't understand enough about depression/mental illnesses in general to be able to offer any clear or universal cures, or suggest any clear and universal causes.

The fundamental problem is how cripplingly little we understand about neurobiology. "Depression" is a label given for a common cluster of symptoms, not a single disease originating from a few well-understood causes. We aren't able to objectively test for or treat it the way we can X-ray a broken bone and set it or swab a throat for strep and prescribe antibiotics. There are no methods that are guaranteed to help the vast majority of sufferers and no clear understood root causes. All we can do is ask for the patient to report their subjective experiences and try to tick some boxes in the DSM, find a label that describes at least N/N+M of their symptoms, and then work through an associated checklist of wildly different methods of "treatment" that reduce symptoms in some, but not all (or even a majority, AFAIK) of patients.

I personally think that many (if not most) of the mental illnesses listed in the DSM will eventually be understood to be multiple completely unrelated root conditions that all manifest similar symptoms, each with different methods of treatment. Unfortunately research initiatives tend to be shackled to the DSM's set of superficial symptom groupings in order to get funding, so a deeper understanding of them is probably a long time coming.

(Related read: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/why-depres...)

Maybe there should be a widget that biases for less dense areas or does it proportionally, but the results aren't necessarily wrong as-is. A 2M+ population city with 20 <special interest group> meetups on a given weekend doesn't have more proportional interest in the topic than a 200K+ city with 2 <special interest group> meetups, but it still has 10x the total amount of activities for a resident to go to. I guess it depends on if the person is trying to figure out the absolute amount of activities available to them or the extent to which that activity dominates the culture of the area. I'd personally want to use the tool to figure out the absolute value.

I'm saving much more month to month after moving out to SV than I was making in the Midwest, even though my rent doubled. My compensation is >2x what it was, and all my other expenses outside of rent stayed around the same (my auto insurance actually got cut in half). Granted I did get a job at Google, so the comp is very good.

And the Bay Area is roughly 6,900 square miles vs the 3,806,000 square miles of the US as a whole. Put another way, Silicon Valley is where you can find 10% of the total number of US developers despite it being only ~0.002% of the country's landmass. I get the general point the author is trying to make, but 10% in such a small region is still an extraordinarily high number.

Term taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique meaning a short period where you're working hard. The basic idea of the technique is that you dedicate 25 minutes to strictly working, and then explicitly give yourself a 5 minute break to do whatever. The idea is if you carve out frequent break time you'll be more efficient and focused than if you're trying to sustain 8 hours of solid focus.

As a counter anecdote, I'm from the Midwest and one of the biggest boons about moving from Metro Detroit to the Bay Area is that I don't get harassed in the street for being visibly gender non-conforming anymore. I very much agree with GP, being able to live in a liberal city is one of the biggest bonuses of tech being huge in the Bay Area.

There's socially liberal islands in my home state, like Ann Arbor, Ferndale, and to a lesser extent Grand Rapids, but get too far outside of those towns and you'll have people asking you to leave their store because you're holding hands with your same-sex significant other, yelling slurs at you out of their car windows, telling you unprompted that they're going to pray for your soul, etc. I have a friend that was exorcised and then disowned when he came out, my high school principle gave me a talk about how me being out was reflecting negatively on the school and I needed to change my wicked ways, etc. It's a huge load off my mind to be somewhere where it's a non-issue.

In my experience, yes. One of the biggest boons about moving from Metro Detroit to the Bay Area is that I don't get harassed in the street for being visibly gender non-conforming anymore. Detroit consistently votes Democrat but that's more to do with the unions than the social values.

It's really interesting how much the writing process differs among people. I could never see this working for me. 95% of my writing is getting to know my characters and accurately recording what they do, 5% is actually having a plan on what I want to happen to drive the plot. Getting to know a character is like getting to know a person, except instead of interacting with them and hearing their words IRL I'm "watching" them go through experiences in their life and "hearing" their thoughts instead of just their spoken words. Me writing the story feels more like me just channeling these imaginary people and recording what's happening to them, sometimes recording it in their own words. It's almost like running a tabletop campaign, where I'm setting up the environment and the major problem but then leaving it up to my players to drive the action and give me hooks to use.

This leads to a lot of pacing problems that I have to solve when editing, and a really inconsistent rate of progress on the initial draft (lots of days spent just trying to "hear" what happens next) so I've tried a lot of plans like this to make myself a better writer. But every time I've tried I've come up with nothing. I don't know the characters, so how can I possibly plan out what they're going to do? I can't fill out a spreadsheet about them either, because I don't know anything about them yet, how do I know what the right answers are to put down? The only exception I've found is when I write a bunch of short stories and/or scenes outside of the longer novel from their POV and get to know them that way, then I can fill in the character worksheets and figure out what they would do and write down the scenes in one sentence or less summaries a long time ahead of time. I get that writing scenes involving them is logically making stuff up just as much as picking personality traits to fill in the blank in a worksheet is, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I'm an observer.

Disclaimer: never had anything past a short story published by anyone other than myself, so I'm not exactly an authority. It's definitely not an efficient style, but it's how it works for me.

> It may not have hand tracked controllers yet

This is a huge technical difference. "VR" without being able to reach out and touch the thing in front of you is barely VR at all. The difference between roomscale + motion controls and just having a ~180* tracked HMD and a gamepad is almost as wide as the gap between VR and flat monitors themselves. Once Touch comes out the only substantial difference will be that Oculus doesn't encourage devs to use games that depend on 360* tracking over multiple square meters of space while Valve does, which is a little more grey, but at launch I'd very much agree that the Vive solidly beat out the Rift technically. It's not disingenuous to say it at all. You can artificially constrain your comparison to just the HMDs and then find basically no difference, but if you compare the entire Vive VR system to the entire Rift VR system at launch, the Vive is clearly technically superior.

Disclaimer: own a Vive, love it. I have tried both motion controlled/roomscale/seated/gamepad experiences pretty extensively on it, every time my reaction circles back to this.

Whedon's "Dollhouse" series was a pretty good take on this topic. The show opened with the premise that brains could be saved, generated, and overwritten digitally. The focus of the show was on a company that hired people to upload their consciousnesses to a drive, and then exist as "dolls" that had their minds written over with both synthesized and real consciousnesses and rented out to clients by the hour, as whoever the clients wanted them to be. Did a good job of exploring the broader implications of the tech from a relatively narrow application of it. Impressive acting from the main cast as well, each of the "dolls" had to demonstrate a huge range.

Really? That seems weirdly low, even with a lower COL taken into a account. In Southeast Michigan a new grad would expect to start somewhere around 60, and that's enough to buy a decent to huge house depending on where you end up living.

Some games purposely designed for both or originally designed for monitors and then ported to VR might be able to, but the vast majority of them are going to rely on the headset's position in real life to move the player character in the game. If it's developed for the Vive or Touch it'll also rely on motion controllers to interact with the game world. You could look at the game on the monitor, but you'd have no way to move or actually do anything in the game.

It's an extremely complicated peripheral, but it's still a peripheral. It's a monitor with an intricate tracking system that allows it to tell the PC powering it its exact location and orientation within a limited area. Playing a VR game is nothing like playing a game on a 3D monitor, it feels like you've been transported to another dimension, but the hardware itself isn't doing anything to execute the game and is still "just" a peripheral like a keyboard, monitor, or gamepad. It's just being fed what it should display by the PC and feeding the PC back information about its location and orientation. That's why Oculus initially needed to put a hardware check into their DRM to block shims like this, there's no real technical reason you can't use one in place of the other once you translate its I/O.

VR headsets aren't platforms in their own right with their own operating systems like consoles are, they're hardware peripherals. It would be like a company refusing to launch their game unless it detected the "right" controller plugged in to the computer. All of the game's code is being executed by the PC itself--that's why a shim like this was almost instantly thrown up to allow Oculus Store games to be played on the Vive, all they needed to do was translate the I/O from the Vive to the protocol that the game was expecting from a Rift. It's along the same lines as x360ce, a wrapper that lets you use any gamepad you want with games that only have official support for Xbox Controllers.

There are real differences in the Rift/Vive systems right now in terms of what they're capable of (Vive has touch controllers, Rift won't get them until a few months down the road), but hardcoding a check into your DRM that makes sure that you're using the correctly branded headset is just asinine. There's no real differences between the headsets themselves that justify it, it's just artificially trying to cut out competition.

>I (maybe I am wrong) have been intending to treat team-members as "some dudes with bumps on their chest that may have various after hours habits that are none of my concern".

FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.

>what should I do to be better?

I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.

If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.

This blog post is well cited and worth a read, it has a few good suggestions IMO: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

And this personal anecdote is a positive story, which I think is just good to keep in mind (that not all individual women necessarily feel or have been through the standard negative Women in Tech narrative): http://lea.verou.me/2015/12/my-positive-experience-as-a-woma...

No problem, glad my anecdotes are interesting/helpful!

To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could have been (probably was? your anecdote brings N up to 2, anyway) completely irrational, like the above poster was wondering.

Hah. Reminds of the story about the time Eisenhower reportedly tried to root out lesbian members of the armed forces: https://books.google.com/books?id=HO7IKU79zgAC&lpg=PA47&ots=...

I couldn't tell you if I was irrational or not without knowing the number of tech bosses conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh at their desk and strike up pro Tea Party/anti liberal discussions as a way of making casual conversation, and then the number of those that would fire a developer over their sexual orientation. I don't know what that percentage looks like, so I can't say whether or not I justified in my concern. I know I was wrong in this specific instance thankfully, but I don't know what the real probability looks like given my boss' behavior. I had gone through some negative prior experiences that could have made me jumpy, admittedly.

Maybe the methodology was incorrect or the sample unrepresentative, my only personal experience with it is the one friend.

If you're in the US, there are already several universally protected classes (race, gender).

Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...)

Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.

>I guess my question is this: Is ignoring gender when interacting with co-workers wrong? Should I be doing something different when I interact with female co-workers?

Me being sexed female doesn't really qualify me to answer this question--I'm just some random person and have no formal power to speak as the official representative for Women Everywhere (I'd be a very bad choice for that, too--I am so masculine that I tend to be perceived as male, that's part of what I meant when I called myself a "living edge case" in my earlier comment).

That disclaimer out of the way, two points to your question:

1. It's highly unlikely that you are treating women identically to men, even though you genuinely believe you do. I'd bet hard money that you don't, actually, because a) almost nobody does, myself included despite my best efforts b) I can already name an instance where you didn't--you specifically asked me this question based on my sex and only my sex, by your own admission. I don't know how much you've read about unconscious bias, but it's a very well-studied and documented phenomenon and I recommend looking into some of the research on it that's been done. Hiring managers are more likely to extend offers to identical resumes that have male names, and the offers they extend to the male-named resumes tend to be higher. Startup pitches given by male actors are rated as more convincing and more likely to earn investment by VCs than the exact same pitches given by female actresses. Women are interrupted much more frequently than men in group discussions, and a group will perceive that women have talked "most of the time" if they talk for >=30% of the time. Men are perceived as more technically competent than women. Women are perceived negatively (too aggressive, "not a team player") for negotiating their salary, in general, whereas men are not. Even if you specifically are 100% egalitarian and have no mental shortcuts that you apply towards women whatsoever, the vast majority of the people they're interacting with are not truly gender blind. This is from people who really believe that they are unbiased, in a lot of cases, and aren't aware of the subconscious stereotyping that's driving their behavior--that's the unconscious part, and it's insidious. So, consciously saying "well I believe the genders are equal and I treat everyone the same and that's what we should do in the workplace, not take sex into account at all and just be buds" can just leave subtle sexism totally unchecked and rampant, instead of truly promoting equal behavior. Harvard hosts a couple free online tests to check your implicit bias, if you're curious to check yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html (I come off as biased on gender, for the record, most people do, regardless of their sex.)

2. I think this question, like affirmative action, comes down to whether you think it's more ethical to prioritize equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Women in general are socialized to defer to the people around them, be more caring, be less assertive, be less confident. That has already happened by the time you're hiring them. If you and everyone in your workplace somehow do overcome your socialization and years of mental heuristics and manage to treat women in the field exactly the same as you do men in the field, the women will still have lower salaries (don't want to be confrontational and negotiate aggressively), apply to your job openings less (women do not apply to a job unless they meet the majority of the listed qualifications, unlike men), be less likely to voice their opinions in meetings, etc. Note here: I'm not saying all women act like this or every individual woman is more likely to than every individual man, I don't as far as I'm aware, but I'm saying that a random sampling of women are in general more likely to than a random sampling of men are. I'm sure you've seen that internet argument half a dozen times already, but in general the argument for treating everyone the exact same way is that you're treating everyone equally and that's the best you can do, even if there's disparate outcomes we shouldn't treat people differently, we should just control our behavior and make sure that's egalitarian. The argument against is along the lines of: we don't tell people confined to wheelchairs "the stairs are open to you too, stop fussing", we build ramps for them--the starting points for the two groups are not equal, therefore treating them the same isn't really egalitarian in the first place, it's just keeping the (unequal) status quo.

I can tell you that I personally would be extremely unhappy if my coworkers decided to behave in specific ways towards me because of my sex, but I'm, like I said, an edge case. And, on the contrary, I've had coworkers (correctly) guess that I am attracted to women and make awkward non-sequitor statements about their lesbian relative/friend and how happy they are for her--I actually am really pleased when this happens, even though it's always extremely awkward and we both know why they're bringing this up out of the blue. It lets me relax about it and just act normally without it affecting my career. (An aside: my first internship, my boss was big on listening to Rush Limbaugh in his cubicle, I wasn't working in a state where sexual orientation was a protected class, and I wasted a huge amount of mental energy agonizing over him potentially firing me over it, 0/10 internal conflict would not recommend.) So even an individual can have conflicting feelings about their minority status being explicitly accounted for by their coworkers, you can't really generalize.

>anecdotally I happen to be an extreme introvert, and the excessive socializing and advice or notion that if we have an environment where we can all be super girly like omg together is the vibe I get from alot of female focused events in tech. It's actually overwhelming and makes me feel more out of place than not.

I'm just one more anecdote and a bit of a living edge case, but this has been painfully true for me as well. I deliberately avoid women in tech events/blogs/etc now because of how uncomfortable they tend to make me. Hearing "tech" talks about how it's important for women to get hired because we're just like, so in touch with our feelings and therefore we make great UX--incredibly demoralizing and othering for me.

I wouldn't compare it to mobile. IMO, current gen VR is best described as a new content medium. VR is to video what video is to recorded audio what recorded audio is to written language. Written language describes an event to an audience's imagination, recorded audio lets them hear it, video lets them see it (scaled either smaller or larger than real life, and viewed through a flat, square window), and VR astrally projects them there, for lack of a better phrase (I'm hesitant to say "takes them there" until we have haptic feedback). The immediate applications have mostly been gaming-related, but it goes beyond that. Think films that are more like stage plays where the audience member can float around and see events unfold from any angle, conference calls that give you the ability to see body language, CAD modelling done by actually walking around the object in question you're designing and manipulating it with your hands, the ability to walk around on stage at a concert next to your favorite band, to scuba dive or mountain climb or go on a safari without leaving home or being in danger.

That's part of the reason that so many people talk about needing to try VR to understand it. The experience just cannot be fundamentally conveyed via a flat screen (though I think this ad for the Vive does a great job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYfNzhLXYGc).

I disagree with the idea that the musical is painting Hamilton as a blameless hero of the people and glossing over his Federalist policies. For an example off the top of my head, you've got Jefferson (who is not portrayed as a villainous contrast to Hamilton's "goodness" in the musical--not sure how the author came to that conclusion) directly calling him out as an ambitious man vying for Wall Street power in "Washington on Your Side":

    I get no satisfaction witnessing his fits of passion
    The way he primps and preens and dresses like the pits of fashion
    Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration
    As Wall Street robs ‘em blind in search of chips to cash in
    This prick is askin’ for someone to bring him to task

The same character calls Hamilton out for not wanting to come to France's aid in "Cabinet Battle #2":

    He knows nothing of loyalty
    Smells like new money, dresses like fake royalty
    Desperate to rise above his station
    Everything he does betrays the ideals of our nation

    [...] do we not fight for freedom?

    Have you an ounce of regret?
    You accumulate debt, you accumulate power
    Yet in their hour of need, you forget

Hamilton is shown as a man who came to power from an immigrant background against the odds. As far as I've been able to read up on him, though, that's historically accurate--and the play goes into the details of his policies and his personality flaws as well. Coming out of it and thinking that Hamilton is a purehearted hero for liberty seems like an overly simplistic and reductive reading of the play to me.

Disclaimer: I'm definitely onboard with motion controllers in general, and would hesitate to definitively say that Vive > Rift+Touch without trying more things for both of them (that being said, I cancelled my Rift preorder and do have a Vive on hold right now). The subject matter of the Star Wars demo was much more compelling than the Rift+Touch demo I tried, which I'm sure influenced me subconsciously. But the main things that I consciously noted during both experiences:

1. Better tracking in the Vive. I dropped an arrow on the ground in the Touch demo (a longbow shooting game) and the controllers lost track of my hands when I crouched on the floor to grab it. It was really disorienting to be "grabbing" it and have the game have no idea where my hands were, sort of like when you're in a dream where your body just refuses to move how you tell it to. I had to just give it up and stand, wait for my "hands" to adjust to the right position, and then reach for another one at eye level. Similarly, I kept having to reach a little farther than I was expecting to to actually pick anything up despite being able to see my "hands" in the game. It was like all the distances were just a little off from reality. I'm a lot shorter than the average person (5'), I don't know if that contributed or what. In the Vive demo the controllers always felt 100% 1:1, even when I was whipping the lightsaber around, crouching on the ground examining R2, etc. Tracking did not even surface as a concern at all to me there, felt exactly like my body.

2. Freedom of movement in the Vive demo really made me feel like I was in the world. I could easily walk around, kneel, stand, and was encouraged by the experience to lunge and flail around, like I said. It felt like I was there in the desert 100%, free to do whatever I wanted. I did trigger the transparent Chaperone grid, and felt a little annoyed when it happened, but I trusted the grid to save me from hitting a wall, and the demo's layout encouraged my movement well enough that most of the time I forgot that I couldn't run off into the sunset if I really wanted to. Most of the interesting things were within six feet of me so in general I forgot about the limitation and just felt like I was there. In the Rift demo I felt very constrained and was concerned about hitting anything IRL. It was a longbow shooting game, with me stuck between two parapets. IRL there was a TV displaying what I was doing for the benefit of the people behind me in line. It was positioned in the space between parapets in the game world, and I was super concerned about headbutting it accidentally as I leaned forward to try and see over the wall. No Chaperone, so even though I was trying to be careful I almost did hit it and the woman giving the demo warned me to step back. In the game there was also a bow rack right next to me, and I felt nervous about tipping it over, too (this is silly, as it's not real--just goes to show how immersive the experience was).

Seconded. I've been lucky enough to try the Vive Pre with the Trials of Tatooine demo, Rift Crescent Bay + Xbox controller on a seated experience, and Rift + Touch on a standing experience. Vive was far and away the most compelling for me. I don't know how to describe it other than being dropped into a fictional world. Being able to walk around R2D2, kneel and examine the landing strut of the Falcon, having to physically lunge forward a few feet to deflect a blaster bolt with my lightsaber, actually gripping said lightsaber hilt in my hand and being able to bring it up to my face and inspect it, it really felt like I was there. My only major complaint is that I couldn't stop grinning/laughing, and that pushed the headset up on my face enough to leak in light. Just having a headset and a controller does not at all compare, even with the limited walking space. It's the difference between looking through a porthole and scuba diving.

The title is correct. That sentence just means that they're predictors, not necessarily that they're positive predictors. As in, if you know one you can predict the other.

In the results section:

> There was a negative correlation between EQ-C and the Calculation Skills composite score with greater empathizing predicting lower math achievement (r(110) = −0.22, p = 0.02).

That was a deeply informative read, thank you for linking it.

The current presenter just said (paraphrased): "Sorry, we don't have any huge announcements this year on the scale of React Native."

Yeah, this is a common problem in genre fiction unfortunately. The best one I've read is "The Magicians" series by Lev Grossman. The writing is clean, concise, everything is shown and nothing told. The series is a great deconstruction of a lot of classic YA fantasy tropes and has a solid magic system. Can't recommend this series highly enough, both my literary and scifi/fantasy fan friends have all really enjoyed it.

I'd also recommend Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, very close to literary fiction.

It steps a little outside of the bounds of what we think of as "fantasy", but the magical realism genre has a lot of amazing pieces, and the genre is based around fantastical elements. My favorite example of this is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino is another good one.

Oh, I didn't realize the visualization was adjusted like that. That makes more sense.