redthrowaway

>This sends the alt-right sewers of the Internet and their minions at publications like the National Review into fits of hysterics.

Calling the National Review alt-right is an affront to the English language.

ESPN would be in trouble without pushing progressive politics. The business model simply isn't holding up. But alienating half of your consumers probably isn't the best way to deal with a failing business model.

To the extent that's true, artificial constriction of supply does not escape "supply and demand".

Or just fix the US' broken immigration system, move to a points-based system like Canada or Australia uses, and get rid of the kludges like the H1B which exist to circumvent the current system.

If you had an immigration system that prioritized highly skilled immigrants, you wouldn't need special visas. And you'd relieve pressure on the bottom 20% of the population that's being hammered by competition from low-skilled immigration, both legal and illegal.

Or, rather, that a conviction is much more likely to go to appeal than an acquittal, and "the jurors were drunk" is the sort of thing the defence might reach for when they can't identity a miscarriage of justice in the trial itself.

>Those that wish to distract from the industry's systemic issues insist on evidence.

Insisting on evidence is verboten. On HN.

I'm quickly growing tired of this place.

So, progressives in SV have moved from trying to get you fired if you say something they don't like on twitter, to pressuring you to quit your job if an accusation is made against somebody at your company.

Great. This couldn't possibly end poorly.

This is an insane reaction. There is literally no other charge for which "I would like to see supporting evidence of this claim" is somehow problematic.

1. Lay off most of the workforce. There is absolutely no justification for them to have as many employees as they do.

2. Start charging people based on how many followers they have. Twitter isn't worth much for the average consumer, but it's hugely valuable for people with massive reach. Charge them for it.

People are giving lots of product suggestions, but the product itself isn't the biggest issue. Twitter spends too much and makes too little. Patch the holes in the boat before you try to row faster.

Yup. Some of our machines in us-east-1e dropped out of the load balancers.

Necroposting here, but that's an extremely interesting comparison. Would you be able to elaborate?

You've really nailed Wikipedia. That describes my experiences exactly, and it's a big part of why I left.

Elihu Yale was a slave trader, might as well rename the whole damned school.

Or we could stop freaking out that historical figures didn't have 21st century values, but that proposition is clearly too radical.

It's certainly contributed to the irreparable ending of the relationship between conservatives and the MSM (to the detriment of both, and society itself). But conservative journalists and pundits are no less shy about spouting off, provided they work for a conservative outlet. I think what you don't see is journalists at mainstream (read: liberal) outlets who happen to be conservative, instead of token conservative pundits like @DouthatNYT, expressing their views publicly.

There's a reason all of the Rust Belt manufacturing moved to the South East, and it ain't the weather. Who'd have thought that low taxes and right to work laws would lead to economic expansion, and their opposite would lead to contraction?

It's fascinating how effective the foreign ownership tax has been. It's only 15%, but it essentially halted the Vancouver property bubble in its tracks, and is now deflating it.

I'll admit to being one of those who thought Vancouver's real estate prices were due to an unwillingness to build. I was wrong. It was always just Chinese money fleeing uncertainty and trying to find a safe place to land.

Pretty sure any company with Thiel on its board is sitting pretty.

Toxicity, not harassment, has always been the glaring issue with the Wikipedia community. Of course there are the occasional miscreants who look to personally attack and harass people, but the entire site seems to be dedicated to finding the most lawyerly and acrimonious way to discourage contribution.

Some of that is certainly warranted. When political topics are the target of massive edit wars as each side seeks to enshrine their particular truth in the public record, you need rules and enforcers and arbitrators. But it can get extraordinarily toxic.

Will jQuery ever not be relevant? It's still the easiest way to accomplish most basic tasks, and 90% of the websites out there make use of it in some fashion or another. There are now a plethora of frameworks for building front end web apps, but for basic scripting I don't see anything replacing jQuery anytime soon.

Tabs are a todo list. I've currently got two pinned tabs open, JIRA and bitbucket tabs that act as placeholders, one unfinished email, one spotify playlist for work, one podcast, and 6 articles to read. And that's only because I recently restarted Chrome. I can easily have 20+ tabs open if Chrome has been running for a week or two.

Unfortunately, I find a lot of sites don't play nice with The Great Suspender. Lots of js-heavy sites would break when they were "resumed", resulting in my place in an article/podcast/video/etc being lost. I'm glad Google is addressing the issue; hopefully they'll do so in a way that's more transparent to the user.

>monoculture is undesirable.

I agree. I would also gently suggest that the Silicon Valley monoculture is not one of 50 year old Republicans.

It's not an assumption I'm making at all. It's an independent variable. I'm assuming that talent is more or less uniformly distributed among applicants. If that assumption is true, then an optimal hiring process will, with sufficient hires, produce a workforce that broadly resembles the pool of applicants.

More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.

>And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them.

If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.

This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from an outsider's perspective. Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it?

There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool:

1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.

2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse.

3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers.

All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time.

If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.

Silicon Valley is probably the most hyper-PC place on Earth. How is his statement false?

I must have missed something; why are people discussing Zuck serving in government?

>I'd expect the criticism to be more specific than what you said.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/the...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/17/either-edwa...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/5-ways-nsa-leaker-edward-snowdens...

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/snowden-lied-and-acted-out-of-piqu...

>hey want to take down the United States" thing is pretty extreme and a bit "InfoWars" sounding

USG, not US. There's a very specific sort of western libertarian/leftist that believes the US' foreign policy is evil, that the military-intelligence wing is a tool of evil, and that opposing it in any way possible is an unalloyed good. I put all three of them in that camp. You could add the likes of Chomsky to that mix. That doesn't mean they don't like their conception of what America is or could be, but they see America's actions in the world as evil and in need of opposing.

If this was ever a productive conversation, it is no longer.