mklim

There's enough women in the profession to have female -> female lines originating out of them, though. The implication is that there's a huge majority of queer women in them, to the point where heterosexual ones won't even show up on a visualization despite how much of a minority GLBT people are in the general population. (Or, alternatively: heterosexual women in those professions don't marry for whatever reason, and queer ones do.)

EDIT: Nevermind, some commenters further downthread pointed out that the visualization was adjusted to always show same sex lines.

For me it was some of these jobs not having heterosexual lines in both directions. "Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers", "Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters", and "Welding, Soldering, and Brazing Workers" don't have any female -> male lines at all if I'm reading the charts right, just male -> female and female -> female. "Miscellaneous Office Support Workers", "Receptionists and Information Clerks", and "Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers" are the reverse.

It makes sense given that gay people are more likely to be gender nonconforming and all of those jobs are gendered very strongly, but still interesting to see the extent of it.

My point was more along the lines of—failing a course is goes beyond being just a "minor academic setback" for a lot of people. It's really only that if one of the following applies to you: [there are multiple thousands of dollars available to you to retake the course, you don't need the specific course to graduate and have a GPA that can handle the F, you have some sort of future worked out for yourself where you don't need a college degree to make a living]. I knew people on scholarships where an F in a course was absolutely the end of a chance at a college degree (and thus, in their minds, the end of their shot at a middle class lifestyle) because of the terms of the scholarship and their inability to pay for classes otherwise. One girl was on a particularly stringent scholarship that she would have lost if she ever earned below a B- in any of her classes, regardless of her overall GPA—I could see her being hysterical over a C and I don't think her emotional fragility would be entirely misplaced. Her parents made too much to qualify her for government aid, but they weren't able/willing to pay for her classes.

Were people being entitled? Yes, definitely, almost everyone I knew felt entitled to a C- or above just for showing up to class every day, turning in the work, and paying the exorbitant tuition fees in the first place. But a poor grade was a multiple thousand dollar loss at best to people widely incapable of making more than minimum wage. I think the general emotional response is warranted in a lot of cases.

Anecdotal experience vaguely related to this—when I was in college (2010-2014) most people I knew weren't there to learn for the joy of learning, they were there to get a job they could support themselves with. Most of them believed there was no possible way to live above the poverty line without a college degree and were accordingly desperate in their efforts to earn one. A "hard" or "unfair" class was several thousand dollars down the drain and a potential future of eternal poverty, not a learning experience. I often heard the expectation stated by my peers that everyone should pass a class as long as they put in a good faith effort, because that was only "fair."

I don't know from personal experience, but I imagine it was much easier to be blase and accepting of failure when you could pay for two semester's worth of classes with one summer job (my summer job paid double minimum wage and still couldn't cover more than 4 credits, and I went to a public in-state university).

1. No it doesn't still stand. If a mother's presence is biologically necessary for her child's development in the same way her uterus is necessary for fetal development, then the OP is right and childbirth does innately biologically necessitate that women spend more time with their children than their male partners in the same way that it's a biological fact that fathers do not carry fetuses to term and give birth to them. If their presence is, instead of "ESSENTIAL", "optimal" then my question becomes: "optimal" for what compared to what and for whom? It becomes a case of people and the groups they form making decisions to optimize for certain goals by behaving in a particular way, not raw biology empirically operating.

2. Yes, I did. It didn't seem relevant to the point I was arguing, see #1.

3. For optimal, see 1, and for midwives—yes, and that's a societal trend rather than a biological fact.

4. True but still irrelevant, see #1.

I'm not arguing that biological mothers aren't generally inclined to want to spend more time with their children than their male partners, or that newly born infants aren't going to instinctively want to spend time with their mothers. It's just OP's original claim didn't logically follow from the evidence he presented—nothing about childbirth necessitates women having "the first choice to spend time with those children, and [...] bargaining power in relationships."

My impression that the first post I replied to was speaking of things in general, not locked to any kind of specific post-birth time frame. Even if it was though, I disagree with the mother's presence specifically being "ESSENTIAL" for the baby's health. Do babies' whose mothers die during childbirth suffer severe developmental disorders or other problems? What about babies that are immediately given to their adoptive parents instead of their biological mother after being born? My understanding is that as long as they receive love, support, and nutrition from an adult of either gender they grow up fine, with single parents being generally less effective than pairs.

I mostly agree with the idea that women in modern society are given general priority/encouraged to spend time with their children vs their male partners. What I disagree with is that this fact of modern society is biologically inherent to the ability to give birth itself. (Maybe related to biology in other ways, I could see an argument for hormone-based brain differences, but that wasn't what I was nitpicking in your first post.)

The multiplicity of options that women currently have (stay at home mom without shame and/or a career), is a result of how our society reacts to the biological fact of childbirth (among other things), not an innate result inherent to the fact itself. You suggest this yourself by saying "unless women are being enslaved or raped (not the norm in the first world), they control who gets to procreate." In other societies, the ability to give birth could result in widely different outcomes for women.

Additional edit: Even accepting your premise that women have more "bargaining power" than men in interpersonal relationships, that would again be a function of society's reaction to biology rather than biology itself. It's true that bearing a child to term takes several orders of magnitude more time and resources than the act of impregnating someone. But the idea that "limited resources have a price" and so the people who can become pregnant have leverage against the ones who don't isn't biological. Limited resources could just as well be seized and then redistributed by the government to the general population for free. The fact of childbirth is biological, but the reaction is societal.

> Whose belly do doctors put fresh-born babies on, their fathers?

I wasn't the one who downvoted you, but I think it's unfortunate that you're citing a social practice to try and establish biological fact and claiming to understand what I "know."

Nothing about a distinctly female presence is necessary for a child's proper development, much less the specific woman that birthed the baby originally. All the major psychological associations that I know of support gay adoption as healthy for children. The biologically necessary thing is a loving parental presence, gender non specific. Formula exists and can be given to children, midwives existed to feed babies before that.

> Women can bear children, men can't. This gives women the first choice to spend time with those children, and also gives them bargaining power in relationships.

Your second sentence doesn't follow from your first. There isn't anything inherent in the ability to give birth that gives mothers "first choice" of spending time with their children forevermore or more "bargaining power" in their romantic relationships than their partner. The only thing biologically inherent to childbirth is the ability to carry and birth children.

> That’s why you can now block specific email addresses in Gmail [...] Future mail will go to the spam folder (and you can always unblock in Settings).

It's nice to have a one-click button for it, but this was already available by configuring a filter. You just need to select all emails from a particular address and then choose to always mark them as spam or send them directly into the trash. From the headline I was thinking that they changed it so that you could keep email from an address from ever being delivered to your account in any form.

The current body of evidence suggests that we could and did, since Neanderthal DNA is present in some modern humans [1].

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33226416

From the article:

> Here’s what ends up happening. To game the system, applicants start linking to virtually empty GitHub accounts that are full of forked repos where they, at best, fixed some silly whitespace issue. [...] Outside of that, there’s the fact that not all side projects are created equal. [...] While awesome side projects are a HUGE indicator of competence, if the people reading resumes can’t (either because of lack of domain-specific knowledge or because of time considerations) tell the difference between awesome and underwhelming, the signal gets lost in the noise.

It looks like genuinely interesting side projects are a good indicator, but enough people list trivial repos on their resume that just having bullet points on the piece of paper on its own isn't a significant indicator of quality anymore. The only thing she was counting for her analysis is whether or not side projects were listed on the resume, she wasn't taking quality into effect.

1. I agree, this would be preferable and a great step for the initial screener. But that leaves the problem of the actual interview—the studies that I've seen test written resumes, because it's possible to ensure that two resumes are identical except for one variable in ways that you can't ensure that two interviews are identical. But it's highly likely that the bias would carry over to any interaction with the candidates, though I don't have any studies on hand that prove it.

2. Also agree that an objective method would be preferable, thanks for the link. Great read. IIRC, in the study I link in the third bullet point, forcing the person reviewing the resume to create a rubric before reading any of them greatly reduced the biased results. Having an objective process goes a long way. The point in the link about confident interviewers performing better in the traditional hiring process is definitely true, and also tied in a roundabout way to gender, funnily enough (women tend to be less confident than men: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-conf...).

It's definitely not the only problem—the pipeline is obviously skewed dramatically—but I don't see any reason why tech workers would be exempt from the biases of the general population as they've been studied. Maybe the drive to hire more women would counteract it, like in your example—that's the reasoning under which minority quotas are implemented, after all. The problem of subconscious bias is that it's not consciously recognizable by its very nature. It's just gut feeling. I know a site that uses association to try to test it for you, if you're interested: http://implicit.harvard.edu/.

The counter argument that I've heard most is that minorities are less likely to be hired than equally qualified members of the majority because of subconscious bias. Enforcing a quota is a sort of equalizer—formal discrimination in one direction in order to push back against informal discrimination in the other direction.

I'm not completely sold on the method, but the problem of subconscious bias in hiring is very well documented:

* Resumes with stereotypically White names receive 50% more callbacks than identical resumes with traditionally black ones. The addition of honors and special skills had a significant effect on the likelihood of White applications being called, but a statistically insignificant effect for the otherwise-identical African-American ones. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf

* Applicants with male names are rated as more competent and offered higher starting salaries than identical applications with female names. Identical resumes with male names are called back more often than female ones. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html, http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

* Initial subconscious bias is logically justified post-hoc—in the linked experiment, the qualities deemed necessary for a position would actually be redefined by the person reviewing resumes depending on the gender of the applicants so that the male applicant's traits fit the position better. http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20...

There's quite a few more papers on the subject, it's easy to search for them. Depressing read all around.

Just in case you're not being sarcastic—the level of resources you have access to as a child is much more tightly correlated to how much money you make as an adult than individual IQ, at least in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/12/american-meritocra...

Source Tree (https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) is great. Good visual layout of your diffs at any given point with the ability to stage/discard/unstage specific lines from within the program.

> But after I left school and started The Commute things got hairy.

> I switched to Google Fi about a week ago and the service is already much more incredible.

Do you mind explaining this further—you mean calls/texts were getting dropped while you were on the road with RW? I'm trying to decide between Republic Wireless and Project Fi myself, I've got about a 30 minute commute each way.

I grew up just reading whatever I could pull off the shelf from my local library—finding the SFF short story scene in my late teens was a huge and welcome discovery. Not sure why, and it could just be confirmation bias, but in my experience the quality of writing in short stories tends to be a lot higher than the writing in a novel, or series. Short form has some of my favorite works now, and I tend to read that first since it's much easier to make time for. It's really worth looking into it if you've only been exposed to published novels before. Tor.com is free and has a great collection. Clarkesworld and Asimov's both charge subscription fees but are completely worth the price.

What was your company doing before switching to Agile?

Adding to this, from going through their website, it's not as simple as "old" books are free and "new" books are a premium. I did a cursory look through their catalog and it looks like any book that is still selling well and under copyright has a price on top of the subscription fee. The DaVinci Code came out 12 years ago and is still $10 on top of a subscription, Storm Front (15 years old) is still $10 as well, A Game of Thrones (19 years old now) is $10 on top of a subscription fee, etc. Ten, twenty years is a relatively short period of time for a book to have existed, granted, but it's still a lot longer than the one year wait you'd get from Netflix.

The average cost of a public, 4 year university was $16k per year in 2012 [http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76]. It's expensive everywhere. You can definitely rack up higher bills at some places than others, but going to a public university isn't going to save you from having debt. I went to a public, in-state university, didn't live on campus, and it still cost me about $10k a year for tuition (including the $500 of miscellaneous registration fees that they would tack on each semester, and textbook costs). That's near impossible money to make if you can't work full time and can't get any jobs that require a degree. The only reason I didn't go into debt was because I lucked out and got a good scholarship, and had a mother who put away a fund for me while I was younger.

Reminds me a lot of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang (http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...). It makes sense that people would bond with AI specifically designed to act as a pet strongly enough to want to give it a funeral, but it's amazing to me that it's happening already.

> And it's also about trends.More and more users use addons that block javascript by default,just like more and more users use adblock.

Do you have any data to back that up? In my experience it seems like the number of people who turn JS off by default has declined since SPAs became so common. It looks like the search trend for Noscript has been gradually declining since 2009, while Adblock has risen: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=noscript%2C%20adblock...

Good catch, my mistake. Thanks.

> requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played

I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely exploit glitches or flaws with the game engine to trigger the final cutscene as fast as possible) still take incredible amounts of skill. More skill than playing the game as it was intended to be played, in a lot of cases. The current Ocarina of Time route involves exploiting several glitches that require pressing the correct button combination on a specific frame (N64 games run at 20fps), jumping at just the pixel perfect angle to slide through a model's corner/collision tracking, etc. Much more difficult stuff than beating the game straight through. Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube game) speedruns require pulling off maneuvers trickier than anything the levels were explicitly designed for, the difficulty of which is hard to overstate. That game is hard. Speedrunning a game with true RNG everywhere like Nethack is definitely a beast of its own since you can't memorize routes, but even runs with completely static routes are incredibly difficult to pull off.

You can also identify rings by dropping them down wells—different rings fall down (or don't fall down) the wells in different ways—and identify wands by writing on the ground with them. Definitely hard to pick up any of that on your own, though.

Aaron Reed and Emily Short are also both worth checking out also, two of my favorites. Blue Lacuna and Sand-dancer are my favorites from Reed (http://aaronareed.net/), and honestly everything from Short (https://emshort.wordpress.com/my-work/) is good, but Alabaster and Galatea are both particularly striking.

> you have to work hard, you have to do the tough job, you have to know every tiny part that can go wrong during the show

I absolutely agree. My intent wasn't to describe programming as magic in the sense that it's easy or as simple/nonsensical as waving a wand around. It's very much a discipline. I was drawing the parallel to magic in that it's an ethereal exercise—you describe what you want to happen, and then the letter of your description comes to pass. Getting this description to accurately model a moving system is a huge part of what makes the field so challenging.

dyeje was on the mark with their fantastic quote further up the thread:

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms."

> There's really no reason to otherwise, unless you like to gamble.

That's really not true. There's a ton of fantastic restaurants/coffee places that don't exist in the suburbs (Mudgie's, Slowe's, Great Lakes Coffee, etc), the Detroit Art Institute in Midtown (including famous works like Van Gogh's self portrait), a music scene ranging from the big pop stars at Fox Theater to the up and coming indie bands at the Magic Stick, there's all the sporting events, there's ice skating at Campus Martius during the winter and free music at Grand Circus during the summer, there's the Opera House, there's touring Broadway shows at the Fox, there's smaller but still professional theater at the Hillberry, and there's a few regular tech meetups that take place downtown (Detroit Google Developer's Group, Lambda Lounge, Detroit Craftsman's Guild). There's almost always something going on in the Downtown/Midtown area.

Midtown is doing well now as well. Lived there for three years and just visited again for the first time in 6 months or so for Noel Night. I saw a handful of businesses there that had all been established since the time I moved out. Lots of stuff to do, and it's pretty safe. Response time from the WSUPD is just a couple minutes, and they take calls for a few mile radius outside WSU's campus. http://www.livemidtown.org/ is a decent marketing site with more info on it.