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ryderm

172 karma · joined March 19, 2013

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ryderm··on Ask HN: How to accept that life is unfair?
Cracking jokes at the unfairness as a way to swallow it is very different than cracking jokes as a way to point out how unfair it is to others. I'm not exactly sure which you mean, but it seems like the former, and that is depressingly jaded.

I find the existential dread caused by acknowledging the unfairness a good motivator to try to improve things. There will always be randomness, but life doesn't have to be as deeply flawed as it is today

ryderm··on Ask HN: How to accept that life is unfair?
Don't accept it, try to to change it!
ryderm··on Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
> but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

ryderm··on Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?
> Doing the right thing — not what’s profitable or power enhancing — isn’t what business is about.

If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

ryderm··on Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
a bit?
ryderm··on Dopamine: An AI platform for designing human behavior
So, if you would love to clear up the misconceptions, actually answer all of the questions you listed? The only one you answered is about discounts for your product.
ryderm··on Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'
Sure, clearly that was hyperbole. All the evidence never points anywhere. This means the vast majority of actual peer reviewed science.
ryderm··on Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'
Obviously they are biologically different! That is not the question. The question is: Do these differences make women less interested in tech, or are there less women in tech because experiences they have had since birth make them feel unwelcome or unable.
ryderm··on Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'
> Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology?

If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but that is nonsense and all the evidence points to the former.

ryderm··on What happens when you swipe a credit card
This isn't quite true. It is up to your issuer if they decide to approve the transaction despite failing AVS or CVV checks. Often they will decline the authorization, but depending on their risk signals, might decide to approve it. Then, the merchant (or the processor they are using) can decide if they want to let the transaction go through despite the failed checks, or call it a decline and reverse the authorization, which removes the pending charge. Crappy terminals might cause the pending authorization to sit there for 1-3 days by delaying or not sending the reversal, but in general that shouldn't be the case.
ryderm··on Iranian MIT student goes home over break, denied return for spring semester
Anybody else seeing that the site is broken? It says 1 vote still, even after signing and confirming my email.
ryderm··on Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous
I can't speak for this book, but Michael Hartl's rails tutorial is what got me addicted to programming, and is largely responsible for me switching majors to CS during my undergrad and getting into the industry. He is a great technical author. Give him your money.
ryderm··on Mark Zuckerberg Will Take Two Months Off from Facebook for Paternity Leave
I doubt that either of these outcomes are likely
ryderm··on E. W. Dijkstra Archive: “Why is software so expensive?” (2009)
Part of being a good software engineer is knowing when to do the "wrong" thing (implement something poorly to ship fast). But you must be aware of the trade offs. For early stage companies/products that are struggling for a market it often makes sense to hack things, but at a company that has a large and growing customer base, it rarely does.
ryderm··on A Rust Contributor Tries Their Hand at Go
Interesting point of view to hear. RE: enums - There is an idiomatic way to do enums in go I believe:

  type MyEnum int

  const (
        A MyEnum = iota
        B
        C
        D
  )
ryderm··on Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design
Yeah, events. Which are message queues for most things, api calls if it really needs to be done synchronously
ryderm··on Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design
So you have short timeouts and retries that are load balanced to different nodes. But ideally your services are fast even in their 99 percentiles so this isn't an issue. This is much easier to achieve in a small service than a huge complex one.
ryderm··on Square Appointments
> Add a booking button to your email and embed the Square Appointments widget directly on your website or WordPress site. No coding required. It’s as simple as copy and paste.

End users do not need to install an app

ryderm··on With Lyft Line, Passengers Can Split Fares for Shared Rides
Wow, how do lyft and uber manage to launch the same thing at the same time?
ryderm··on Square Begins Offering Data Driven Cash Advances to Small Businesses
Square gets item level data on each merchant. That means exactly what was sold and when. Plus, they get info about who bought it and can see things like a buisness suddenly getting huge numbers of new buyers as opposed to returning, etc.
ryderm··on Ask HN: How To Dethrone Google?
I find Google Flights to be much better than Kayak, and so have the couple people I've talked to about the difference. What do you like more about Kayak?
ryderm··on WebCL – Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers
folding@home? hardly nefarious
ryderm··on Amazon EC2 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
I think you mean per month?
ryderm··on Textbooks Prices: Out of Control
I'm about to graduate from a US college, and I've never paid for a text book. Very few classes use them for more than supplementary reading or for homework problems. With a combination of learning things online, recorded lectures, finding PDFs of them online, borrowing from a friend, and checking them out from the library, it's been easy to not buy them. I don't think I've actually done either of the last two, which brings up the question: are they even needed? Personally, I think they are largely useless with the wealth of information that is available online.
ryderm··on Ask HN: How do experienced programmers learn new languages?
Many languages have a few "killer" features/libs/uses. I often start with a project that uses one of them. Eg:

ruby => rails

python => nltk,django,opencv,scipy

c++ => opengl,opencv

java => opencv

js => node,angular,ember

clojure => overtone

That way you learn the language and some specific good use cases of it.

ryderm··on iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang
same thing happened to me, except I saw the first two lines of the example. weird.
ryderm··on Jesse Jackson to take on Silicon Valley's lack of diversity
This. I don't think companies that are fighting for qualified employees are turning down candidates because of color. I'm in a CS program at a university and I can only think of a few CS students who aren't white/Asian/Indian. The issue isn't with hiring, but with early exposure and education to all races/genders/whatevers.
ryderm··on I am a young, tenured, female engineering professor. AMA
She is also raising money to research a new method of oil spill response:

https://experiment.com/projects/can-naturally-occurring-soap...

ryderm··on Show HN: Softcover – A publishing platform from the author of the Rails Tutorial
This is very well put together, and makes me excited about the possibility of writing in the future. mhartl, I did your rails tutorial a few years ago with very little programming background, and it singlehandedly got me interested in programming enough to switch majors and spend all my time learning and building things. Thanks, and congrats on the launch!
ryderm··on Minecraft, The Sims, And The Future Of Filmmaking
Having so many links strewn throughout the article makes reading it very distracting
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