In the past the ruling class could always count on the proletariat (literally "offspring producing") to reproduce itself no matter how abysmal its conditions. Yet today we find ourselves in a situation Malthus could not have expected: the proletariat is on reproductive strike! The ruling class response is to push an ideology of mass migration that no one dares question. Who will stand up and say they don't welcome immigrants? Not I. This solution seems to be working in the short term, but if birth rates decline in the developing world, there won't be anyone to mass migrate. Then what? Share the wealth?
If you want to feel that condemned for life by the capitalist caste system feeling, read the part in The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz where people are trying to stop them from hiring Mark Cranney, even though he is apparently the best sales exec they have ever seen, because he went to "a weak school". They even admit he could be the CEO of IBM instead of a sales guy at a floundering startup if he didn't have "those things wrong with him".
Well, I guess that opinion just depends on how well you did on standardized tests in 5th grade. I smoked all my peers on that test they give you at the end of elementary. It would have been great if some communist party bureaucrat swooped in and took me to a school full of high scorers. Too bad that was my peak academically. Ha.
Why put this on programmers? The guy making the decision to make Dragonfly is a Stanford MBA with a materials background. It's not some working class kid who made it through a Javascript bootcamp that is making decisions about the direction of future Google products. So, why don't we let the MBAs be the ones to form an ethical organization to police themselves.
There's a sobering book "The Great Leveler" that argues that the only time growing inequality is reversed is during large scale war or other mass death event like plague.
The other possibility is that they are going to hire internally, but for some legal reasons they have to make a public job post. Requiring some super specific thing like "Home Depot sales portal" sounds like a tipoff that this is going to be an internal hire. The place I currently work is like that. The decision makers already know who they want to give the job to before it's even posted, but they still make three other poor bastards come in and go through the interview process even though they have no chance. The interviewees will no doubt end up second guessing every answer, handshake, etc. when really it was just never going to happen. To be extra obnoxious the job listing is left up for months after it's filled.
Oh, is that why so many blogs seem to be bloated with filler content for what could have been a page? I always thought it was because those writers are hired guns with a word count to hit, but gaming the engagement metrics makes a lot of sense.
I got a kick out of Significant Locations when someone told me about it. It says I go to a liquor store every night at 7pm. Of course, this is the corner store on my block, but without context it looks like I drink a lot of beer. It didn't really bother me enough to turn it off.
Protected bike lanes are key. I commute to work by bike, and use biking as my main form of transportation. My city has created many bike lanes, and encourages bikers to prefer those roads. Unfortunately, bike lanes have really just become double parking zones for delivery workers, ride shares, and people just who don't feel like looking for a proper parking space while their partner shops. Having to go around people double parked in the bike lane feels much more dangerous than biking on a regular street, since I have to go out into the middle of the road to pass them.
I think that's true. Deadlines do have some pedagogical value. When I did Udacity, it was pay by month, so there was a sense of time pressure in that every extra month burned cash. I think they switched to the flat fee now because too many people were blazing through in 2-4 months which is too bad because it took out the admittedly low pressure time aspect of the program.
CS193P is a few lectures on Swift, a couple on MVC, and then the rest is just a different part of the iOS SDK every day. It's certainly good, and whenever they publish a new semester, I watch it, but it's not like there's some special Stanford magic there.
The projects are certainly as rigorous anything you will get in any undergrad degree. The difference is the grading system. With Udacity, you have to hit every deliverable as if it were a paid contract, but you can keep going 'till you hit them all, since there's no deadline. In college, there's a deadline, but you can skip that one thing you couldn't quite get working, and still move on with a 'B', etc.
The problem is if it's accredited then instead of just offering reviewed "iterate till you pass" programming projects, they will have to have high stakes "cram and regurgitate" style exams which are a staple of accredited higher ed. If you go for that stuff, why not just enroll in a university somewhere?
When you watch a class on youtube no one is reviewing your projects. Obviously that is the difference. Do you think someone who watches CS193P on youtube is going to get the same out of it as someone who does the iOS nanodegree?
There's a popular growth hacking and viral marketing book that talks about how to leverage outrage mobs to create publicity for your releases. The tactic described seems to be used regularly on many social media platforms, but the author went the extra mile and helped organize physical protests against the product he was tasked with marketing.
Location: NY Metro
Remote: No
Willing to relocate: Continental USA
Technologies: Swift, Kotlin, Java, iOS, Android, GIS
Looking to join a humble team of 996ers, not a rockstar
I like to tell myself that having a humanities or social science background will give me some kind of different insight into AI/ML, but other than knowing what a gerund is without having to look it up, or nodding knowingly when someone drops a Wittgenstein quote, it's really not helping. Then again, I can't be sure that I'm not stupid.
People encourage this stuff. I don't know how many times I've been told to get my masters in history so I can "teach credit classes". No. I made a mistake with my undergrad. I'm not doubling down on it.
Couldn't read due to paywall, but how many YC companies are NOT founded by people from elite colleges? Isn't that really the point of going to an elite college? That someone will give you money to start a company as soon as you finish, no matter how wacky your idea? It almost seems like the old "no one got fired for buying IBM", but updated to "no one got fired for funding Stanford grads". Of course, the defense will be that elite schools are a good "signal" of competency, but at the same time VCs shrug their shoulders and say a 90% failure rate is unavoidable. What a signal indeed!
I stopped reading that article when he implied that Gates' wealth should be considered or measured in relation to programming skill. Debates about meritocracy are important, but starting from flawed frame like that made me not want to invest more time reading that particular author. If he wanted to compare Gates to other technology entrepreneurs, that might have been worthwhile, but implying that we don't live in a meritocracy because there are better programmers than Gates shows the author is not interested in a rigorous look at the issue. I wasn't surprised to see Bill Gates clickbait at the top of the Apple News app, but I was a little bummed to also see it on the top of HN. Then again, I still clicked it and commented on it, so mission accomplished for Fast Company I suppose.
Interesting. I had mostly thought about the region in terms of language groups probably due to coming from a history background, which relies on written sources, rather than anthropology or archaeology.
Looking at the sources for that wiki article, this appears to be one of the largest and most recent DNA studies on ancient Egyptian remains: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694.
Edit: To stay on topic, my textbook in a two semester art history survey ("Janson's") said that the defacement of Egyptian statues was due to religious iconoclasm without further specifics. I'm going to accept this as the mainstream academic consensus in the early 21st century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this matches the general thesis of the parent article.
It's worth noting though that Arabs are not native to North Africa, so ancient Egyptians wouldn't necessarily look like many people today. They colonized the Maghreb around the 7th century. The indigenous people of that region are the Amazigh in the west and Copts in Egypt. Egypt today also has very light skinned people descended from European slaves the Turks brought in to aid their military.
In college I remember a professor saying something similar caused problems during the Great Leap Forward. The local cadres were overestimating their production numbers so the central government exported rice to Albania or other allies thinking they had a surplus when in fact there was a shortage. I'm sure that wasn't the only reason there were problems at the time, but it didn't help.