I started to develop similar issues when I moved from the iPhone 5 to the 7 Plus. I sold that and got the 8 the next year, and I started using Popsockets and swapping hands and fingers more frequently, but I still have some numbness and pain in my right thumb joint. I really wish phones had stuck around the iPhone 4/5 screen size - even with fairly large hands, that felt just about perfect.
I don't actually think your second point is correct on either a historical or practical level. Historically, humans had a lot of what would now be considered downtime, especially in certain societies. And practically, nothing actually "requires" that except for the fact that we've set up society in such a way to allow some people get to grow wildly wealthy on the backs on the labor of most of the people putting in that actual work. That's the result of a series of choices, and could absolutely be changed. Nothing "required" about it.
Do you have any counter argument to the actual article? It cites a study of events that could be described as censorious and evaluates the political stance of the people being censored. Can you produce evidence showing that this is untrue?
- There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale.
- It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers.
- A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present.
Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me.
I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.
It's almost like...there's some sort of gendered power imbalance in society? That might make men comfortable disregarding this? But that might not afford women the same privilege?
There's an enormous gap between calling someone a sex worker and calling them a coal miner. There's an even-more-enormous gap between calling most of your team "bros" and calling the one woman on your team a sex worker. That is not in-group bonding, that's targeted, gender-based harassment.
Virtually every woman I know has stories like the ones in both this blog post and the original big Kotaku piece. The sheer pervasive depth of Riot's misogynistic culture is less common, but it's a difference in degree, not in kind.
For me, it's less about the ease of starting one thing than it is the ease of juggling a lot of things. I've got docker containers on my machine for multiple work projects and a few organizations I do volunteer dev work for. Between them, I'm running two versions each of Ruby and Python and a number of instances of Postgres and MySQL, plus local Redis containers for three separate projects. Shifting between them is as simple as docker-compose down/cd/docker-compose up. When I'm done developing for the day, I just take everything down and bring it back the next morning.
Your first point alone would make Docker worth it for me if that was literally all it did. I've on-boarded junior devs on several projects over the last few years, and being able to give them pull access, send them the instructions for installing Docker and docker-compose and then having a working dev environment on their local device an hour after they open their computer for the first time is invaluable. The whole universe of tools that have grown up around Docker are also fantastic, but erasing the friction of starting up is a killer application on its own (also, making it so I never again have to hear "Well it works on my machine!" is also, on its own, worth pretty much any pain Docker brings).
And what I've seen is that at some point, at least a few of the junior devs get interested in what's going on under the hood and ta-da, we have our candidates for dev-ops work. Erasing the initial friction doesn't mean they erase their curiosity.
Generally speaking, most instances of wage theft rely on an implicit threat that if workers complain about it, they will be fired, frequently from a job that may be the only thing keeping them fed or in housing. How is that not a threat of violence, especially since you're arguing that handing over a note without a weapon is just as violent as pointing a gun at someone?
I don't really care about the loading, I know that HN traffic can overwhelm sites. The scrolljacking, on the other hand, is infuriating, especially replacing the standard "swipe to go back/forward" with "swipe to go down/up".
Yeah, my brain tends to categorize things a little differently than Google does, so being able to tag something in Pinboard makes it much easier for me to find it later.
Take-home tests. Lower-stress environments for coding tests - working on their own hardware, working remotely, no panel interviews, no actively combative/aggressive interviews. Also, cool aspect of that: all of these options will make the interview process more appealing for everyone. And if the justification for angry/combative/aggressive interviewing is "well, that's how our culture is", I would say the company has a bigger problem to fix.
I mean, they're people. I'm still close friends with a few of them, and I didn't like some of them. It's no different than working with anybody with a disability or an illness (or kids, or elderly parents, or any of the million other human things that can make you a less-than-full-functionality worker bot) - you make the necessary accommodations, work around issues when they arise, and live with it. Specifically, it involved toning down a bro-y, combative work environment (which was a change that I really appreciated).
I think that we "benefitted" in some sense, because interviewees sometimes came up with better ways to solve some of those problems. Generally, we extended offers to those people, tho. I think it's just a slightly easier approach than trying to develop useful synthetic challenges - I haven't really seen a synthetic challenge that felt like it accurately approximated what day-to-day life is like in a company, which as an interviewee I am most interested in.
I know several really, really good programmers with pretty intense anxiety. Automatically ruling them out because of a poorly-formatted interview process would be a big mistake.
The best option I've seen were recently-solved small problems. We would roll back a few commits, take that code into the room with the candidate, and pair-program a solution or partial solution in a fairly tightly-scoped time period, and then review the solution with another interviewer. That way, we've got an idea of what to work towards, usually still a pretty solid sense of where the problem exists in the context of the overall app, and we hit a couple of crucial skillsets - collaborating on a project, reviewing code. It wasn't perfect, but it worked reasonably well.
I mean, programmers also don't go through a medical school equivalent or residency. We don't take boards. I'm married to a doctor and we were together through her time in medical school and residency. If I had to choose between skill checks in the interviewing process and the 8 grueling years of hell that was med school and residency, I will take option 1 without a second of consideration.
Also a teacher-turned-dev, and I completely agree. Teaching is such a labor-intensive, poorly-understood process that the idea of effectively automating it anytime soon is ridiculous. We still don't really have any consistent metric that measures what a "good" teacher is - if you can't even kinda measure performance in an accurate and consistent way, how on earth is the process going to be automated effectively?
I'm less worried about explicitly unethical people than I am about somebody just out of college in their first job whose boss asks them to build something ethically dubious. Professional ethics instruction would A) help determine if something was unethical ("My boss told me to add a feature to our social network app to vacuum up every call and text message made on a device that has our app installed. Should I do that?") and B) provide a framework for people to push back on and censure unethical requests.
My wife and I spent seven years going to school and working in Omaha. It's a nice little city, but if someone valued the benefits of urban life (restaurants, sports, social events, public transit, etc.), I think they would eventually be disappointed. We left Omaha feeling like we'd basically finished the city, like it was a level in a game - in the 3ish years after broke-college-student status, we had tried pretty much every interesting restaurant, checked out the social events that were available to people in the post-college, pre-kids bracket, and there just wasn't much novelty left. We moved to Chicago for work a few years back and we still haven't scraped the surface of life here. Are there problems with Chicago? Of course. But the quality of life is dramatically improved for this sample size of two.
I mean, there are social codes in any group. It's not unique to rich people, it's just how humans are. There are middle class equivalents to some of these. Growing up, we didn't shop at Nordstrom, but we certainly didn't shop at Goodwill. In most places, there are "middle class" grocery stores and clothing shops. It's just that, if you don't shift groups, you usually don't notice the rules and structures because you've internalized them so much. "What the hell is water?"[1] and all that.
Really? I grew up in the Midwest where chicken fried rice from the local Chinese place was about as exotic as it got, and our standard meals were some form of overcooked meat, potatoes, and a token green. The evolution of the food and restaurant scenes in the US is one of the things I'm pretty happy about. It can definitely be handled poorly, but for the most part I think it's been a positive.
I read that back in high school. I'd be interested to see how it holds up today, given the massive increase in overall inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class in the US.
Not the author of the parent comment, but my family shifted from solidly middle-class to members of the 1% over the course of a few years in the early 2000s (my teenage years) as our family business became significantly more successful. Here are some of the things I've experienced that strike me as examples of that:
- Talking specifically about money (how much high-ticket items specifically cost, how much anyone specifically makes) is gauche.
- Depending on the group and the location, there are functionally dress codes - you show up to brunch in sweats and sneakers and everyone else is in polos and boat shoes, you "dress up" in a shirt and khakis, everyone else is wearing a blazer and slacks, you put on a Macy's suit for a formal event and everyone else is wearing Tom Ford or Armani.
- What you do for leisure can be a fraught discussion - we eventually started traveling more, but I've met people who talked casually about summering in Ibiza or the Hamptons (and who used "summer" as a verb), or who have seasonal homes. "I stayed home and played X-Box" as an explanation for what you did on vacation earns a side-eye.
- What and how you eat, although that one has relaxed a little bit over the last few years as street food has been gentrified and made trendier.
I am 100% certain, based on 5 years of observation, that there is a significant portion of users on this site who absolutely believe that racial disparities are genetic and immutable.