Never put Minecraft pocket edition on a kidâ(TM)s tablet and let them play unsupervised. Theyâ(TM)ll play until it makes them sick. Itâ(TM)s a sandbox game that has some achievements and bosses to appeal to casual users. But the hardcore users will continue building on multiplayer servers for years and years. I love the game. But as an adult with a job and family, I have to strictly limit my time.
Well maybe not *every* time but this is nothing new. I remember multiple major iPhone OS updates in the past that caused battery drain that had to be fixed in a point release. Surprising they didn't catch it in testing, but who knows what weird combos of apps or weird file corruption people have.
BTW, why is it that clearing your history and cache is a common solution to browser problems? If a web browser is behaving poorly with bad data files, isn't it a but that it doesn't just realise the data is bad and ignore it? It's 2017; by now trusting that files are in the right format and not some kind of security exploit seems dumb. But then again there's Equifax.
Wow. Not good on the reading comprehension, eh? I'm biased towards them as a *result* of all the experiences I've had. I just described some of those experiences. Or are you going to back-pedal and then make some comment about "correlation not being causation"?
Consider the three girls in my machine learning class whose answers were *consistently* superior, and my TA (who was also male) and I both agreed about this. It's not like we just blindly accepted their answers. We always checked them. They were just consistently excellent. We didn't have some a priori assumption that they would be, and of course, it was only three of them. I also knew several of the men in that class already and had hired them to do research because they seriously kicked ass. If anything, I had expected THEM to produce the best work if only because I had seen excellent work from them in the past. Plus, there were lots of girls in this class. It was just three in particular that stood out, and this experience isn't much different from other courses I've taught.
When I was in industry, I didn't think a lot about it. I worked with women, and most were good at their jobs; some weren't, but they did well enough. But when I started teaching and observed that (especially among the undergrads), the performance among the females was distinctively towards the top of the spectrum, I talked to the graduate and undergraduate program directors, and they explained to me the self-selection bias. You can also find this with a little googling. Freshmen in the CS program could be all over the place, with men and women who are anywhere from very good to just terrible. As they progress through the semesters, students learn good study habits, and there's some attrition to other majors and dropping out. Well, more girls leave, and they tend to be the weakest ones.
I don't know. Maybe treating woman with respect as human beings is a good way to motivate them to work hard? I can say that both men and women seemed to try especially hard for me because I was nice to them and became someone they didn't want to disappoint. There have been multiple instances where students and subordinates have performed better for me than others "warned" me they would do. Indeed, there was more than one guy I hired for research whom I was told by the undergrad director was "lazy," but I didn't see it; I gave high-level instructions and answered questions, and then they would come back regularly with excellent work. What can I say? There was this one guy in the machine learning class who's a genius, and he's in a doctoral program at Stanford now. He did almost as well as the girls but was having some senior-itis. His answers were correct and easy to grade, and his code was good. If those three girls had not been there, he probably would have been one of the ones we used as reference. But when questions and coding projects are open-ended, you see a lot of individual variation. Those three girls also wrote code that was better-commented and easier to read.
This does make me wonder. Am I biased towards women because (as I generally believe) I have observed very good school and engineering results from them? Or have I observed good results from women because my bias towards them somehow motivated them to work harder? If it's the latter, why is it that I got the same from the top men I worked with as well? Another option is that I tend to subconsciously assume the best about people, men AND women, and any extra assessment I *think* I need to do about the men isn't something that I necessarily show or do in practice. I honestly don't know. What goes on in my head and what I actually do may be two different things -- whatever it is, I seem to work well with others and inspire them to work hard.
Keep in mind that just because I'm biased towards women doesn't mean I'm biased against men. Don't make this out to be some kind of dichotomy. Of course, the alt-right likes to do that a lot (as do the alt-left -- what is it with these al
I'm not sure how "getting right answers" and "writing good code that works" constitutes "gaming the system." In what way are those things as cheaty as you seem to be implying?
In the CS department where I work, we admit generally equal numbers of males and females. They are admitted because they have excellent SAT and GPAs and other assessment scores. By time they are senior, women are in the minority.
Why? Self selection bias. The CS program is tough. The less capable males are trained to be confident so they are more likely to stick around. Females are more self critical, so the less capable ones are more likely to change majors.
The result is that only the top notch females stick around to graduate. When I taught machine learning I got only juniors, seniors, and grad students. My TA and I quickly realized that we didn't need to bother writing answer keys in advance. We'd just take the answers from these three girls (two domestic, one from china), check them for correctness, and pick the best for each one. These gave us exemplary answers that were used to judge what would get maximum points.
Compared to them, the top males produced answers that were no less correct. But these girls especially wrote answers that were more concise, clearer, and easier to evaluate.
Teaching other topics to grads and undergrads, I've generally seen similar patterns. Teaching computer architecture, my best student was a girl in more than one semester, and the girls tended to work harder, with the majority of them in the top half of the class. And once again, I saw similar patterns among engineers while I worked in industry.
I work at a good school but there are lots of higher ranked schools. Google should be careful hiring me into a management, because if a female engineer graduated from a decent school I'm going to assume she is like the ones I have taught first hand and not be prepared to think less unless I see undeniable poor performance that can't be explained by things beyond her control. Most of the males are also amazing I'm sure but my experiences have taught me that less capable ones manage to graduate and get hired, so each one would have to prove himself to me individually before I'm willing to take some of the same risks with their work assignments.
If you want to bitch and moan about how women get an unfair disadvantage or advantage, all of y'all can kiss my ass unless you have had years of experience managing and teaching. Everyone else is by definition speaking from ignorance.
Today, the PhD is what a bachelors degree was 50 years ago. People who can't get jobs go back to school. Academia is also flooded with new applicants like it never was before. Peer review venues are also swamped with absurd numbers of papers submitted by students needing to graduate and faculty needing tenure, and the competition is absurd. It's very hard now for people to distinguish themselves.
It should come as no surprise that with increased numbers of scientists in completition with each other that the average scientific output per scientist would decline.
True unless they're google in which case they don't hire older people for not being "googly" enough.
I *thing* I know what this "googly" thing is. Younger geniuses will externalize all the alternative solutions they think of and the steps to get to ends. Older brilliant engineers will think through things quickly in their heads, automatically skip through the bad ideas, and jump straight to the end. The mostly 20 something's doing the evaluation can't understand it and reject it. It is not intentional discrimination. Just ignorance.
I am an expert and well accomplished in software engineering, digital circuit design, computer graphics, CPU architecture, and several other things. One time I had a recruiter tell me I should write one software and one hardware resume because companies won't believe that I could be good at both. Even after I'd had like 15 years of experience. It just shows you how cookie cutter hiring practices usually are.
On the other hand after I had been working as a professor for a while, these combos came in handy to get side work as an expert witness. I guess it's okay after your reach some level or amount of experience.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that men and women do have different interests that may account for gender disparity in tech. (Even if you only look at research cited by Damore, plenty of research has shown that more fundamental gender differences can only account for PART of the disparity, but let’s put that aside for a moment.)
Question 1: Let’s say that, all OTHER things being equal, we’d still have fewer women in tech jobs. This would just be a statistical bias. What women are interested in, on average, is not really relevant to the individual women who decide to go into tech, despite perhaps a majority of other women not wanting to do the same. *How could this have any impact on recruiting women into tech?* What could possibly be wrong with encouraging women to get into these professions (even aggressively)? I’m not talking about biased hiring or career advancement, just going out there and making it not difficult for women who ARE interested in tech to apply for those jobs and demonstrate their competence.
Question 2: Based on Damore’s memo and things he cites, I infer that workspaces have evolved to suit the needs of MEN. (And based on some other recent discussions about ageism at Google, they have evolved to better accommodate YOUNG men.) *But what could possibly be wrong with giving employees the ability to adapt their work environments to better match the needs of WOMEN?* Ideas in the memo touch on things like making the environment more social, and pairing people up to do coding together instead of always giving people isolated cubes or offices. Not only might this benefit women, but I know plenty of very social men (such as myself) who might enjoy doing pair-coding and other kinds of more cooperative approaches to engineering. Ultimately, it may be best to approach workspaces in a way that facilitates *anyone* adapting the space to their needs, and the fact that current work environments are statistically less suited to women is only a vehicle to highlight a more general problem with cookie-cutter workspaces. (At the same time, we should not try to generalize women out of the discussion. Men have dominated for a very very very long time. It’s about time women got the chance to make some demands and mold things to their tastes.)
Question 3: Finally let’s put gender bias back into the discussion. We’re not denying it exists. It’s just that people like Damore are tired of feeling accused of having unconscious biases and being made to feel bad about them. But what Damore’s memo does is cast doubt upon the extent to which bias is a factor in disparity relative to other factors. Ok, so there are lots of factors besides bias. *Nevertheless bias exists, so what could possibly be wrong with working to eliminate the bias?* Even if it were only 25% of the problem, it still sucks!
There is a lot about gender differences known to biologists, anthropologists, and other sciences. And that’s great, and we should avail ourselves of that knowledge.
This is something Damore DID NOT DO. (I did read the manifesto, BTW.) He *speculated* about the impact of fundamental differences, without citing any evidence, and then like some fucking propagandist, he *assumed* his speculations and went on to make groundless recommendations. This is bullshit of the highest order, and it’s a TRICK that is actively used by people trying to mislead others. I don’t think Damore is smart enough to be doing this intentionally, though. He’s just stupid, but it still pisses me off when people use tactics like this (intentionally or otherwise). His recommendations are based on more unsupported assuptions than that. All these training programs and efforts to maximize deversity, *might* make Google inefficient, but the extent to which Google would be inefficient was also left entirely vacuous, even if you were to make the mistake of taking his speculations as fact.
There was no scientific debate here. NONE. Because there was no science. Indeed, something conveniently left out here is any evidence *against* biological differences being a significant contributor to gender disparity. A simple google search reveals plenty. How about "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/“? You don’t want me to spam you with all the publications I’ve found on this topic that contain ACTUAL EVIDENCE. No. We don’t have scientific debate here. Just some moron looking for an excuse to not have to show women respect equal to men or silence the people talking about diversity, which apparently offends him. Damore feels offended because his point of view is being disparaged, but people who believe in a flat earth will feel similarly, and they should not be given equal voice either.
Maybe there are some differences between men and women that, all other things being equal, might make fewer of them enter tech professions. The problem is that all other things are not equal. Not even by a long shot. The inequalities imposed by society may be improved compared to what they were 60 years ago, but we still have a long way to go before half the population (women included) subconsciously question a woman’s qualifications more than a man’s. Or a black person’s more than a white person’s. We’re just not that far removed from the civil rights revolution, and the civil rights revolution has not reached everyone. Biological gender differences *plausibly* have some impact on the disparities. But only plausibly, in that we have not totally ruled it out, and for sure there is no evidence in favor of this postulate that isn’t drowned out by other factors.
Even if you disagree with me there, it’s also not the role of HR employees and hiring managers to make decisions on the basis of gender differences. They do not research these things, they are not educated in them, and it’s really not their job to know them anyway. Their job is to facilitate evaluation of potential employees based exclusively on skills relevant to the jobs, by evaluating resumes, checking references, and collecting feedback from interviewers. (There are very few other reasonable criteria, with the exception of maybe a few things like criminal background and the relevance of that to the specific position being applied for, and even that has to be handled carefully.)
Once people are hired, the next thing we need to so is foster a comfortable work environment. If Damore were do damn concerned about “efficiency,” he would consider the impact of sexism (regardless of biological differences) on women working at Google and the impact of that on their work productivity. People who actually give a shit about the feelings of others besides themselves don’t feel “oppressed” when they have to curb their behaviors and langua
It is important that we all have the right to hold ideas that are inaccurate and also state them as being our beliefs. If not, we would have to condemn scientists who held to theories that got updated when new discoveries were made. So the court case will primarily test whether or not he should have been allowed to publish what he wrote without being punished by his employer AND whether or not an employer should be allowed to fire someone over beliefs they don’t want their employees to express.
Damore’s attorneys will argue that he is being discriminated against for exercising his constitutional rights, but that will fail because employment is at-will and it wasn’t some protected thing like race or religion that resulted in him being fired but instead his on-the-job “behavior." Google’s attorneys will attempt to argue that his ideas are harmful on the basis of their scientific merits, but that will fail since, there is no crime in expressing incorrect ideas. Damore’s manifesto also did not enter into the realm of hate speech, since he did not recommend harm against anyone, only that Google scale back “inefficient” programs that promote ideas of equality that Damore believes are not scientifically supported.
So it’s going to fall upon the journalists to pick apart the ideas he expressed. It will be educational for the rest of us to have some of these ideas about “genetic differences” retested. It’s not that we haven’t tested them before many times, but many people do not learn history and could benefit from a refresher.
I’ve read the memo, and it’s not the evil manifesto that people are making it out to be, at least not at the beginning. In fact, it generally seems like all it’s trying to do is just challenge the status quo for the sake of keeping scientifically valid ideas fresh in our minds, in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way. Are there biological differences? Most certainly. You can find these things at the DNA level. (Mind you, they’re extremely small, but small genetic differences can make huge phenotypical differences.)
Here’s where I think he goes wrong:
He begins with *speculations* about gender differences that may be due to genetics, which are certainly good questions to ask. But then be promptly forgets about the cultural biases that we KNOW about that affect how men and women are differentially trained. At a minimim, we have a massive uncertainty about what is causing the gender disparity. Nevertheless, he transitions from speculation to assumption and then makes recommendations based on that. This is a bad leap of logic.
Then he suggests that, given his assumed fact that these differences are fundamental, Google is being inefficient, wasting money on training programs for underrepresented groups. Other things he doesn’t like are making diversity a moral issue, empathy, and unconscious bias training.
Let’s assume for a moment that his assumptions have validity, and that the choices made by Google impact efficiency. If we were talking about a small business that was on the edge of failure, then MAYBE this would apply (but they wouldn’t have diversity or unconscious bias programs anyhow, and everyone would be focused on just getting the job done).
Google, on the other hand, is a huge company that can afford a little inefficiency for the sake of giving everyone an equal chance. From the manifesto, it is not clear how empathy, for example, makes engineers less efficient or less able to be objective about facts. This is just another of his assumptions he doesn’t substantiate. Of all companies, it is those like Google and Microsoft that should be leaders in cutting through the culural barriers that have kept certain people out of tech jobs. Perhaps once those are dealt with, we’ll finally be able to measure the real genetic differences in isolation. But even then, there’s no particular reason anyone, regardless of their genetics, shouldn’t be encouraged to learn technology and get into these kinds of jobs.
As someone who has worked in the tech industry for a LONG TIME, let me give you my opinion and observations. Low level things like coding are just mechanical jobs. Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to read or write. Some people may enjoy it more than others, and some may be faster or slower, but coding is just drudge work. In that regard, the women I have known generally worked harder, even in environments where it was clear that the men never questioned their abilities.
The next level above coding is debugging and basic problem-solving. People who are sloppy and over-confident will write bad code and then get lost when they can’t figure out their bugs. People who worry more about mistakes are more inclined to code carefully and build in ways to test and debug from the get-go. This is an area where the women have an advantage, because they are not granted the automatic confidence that men are. (One common disadvantage is that there are environments where men feel free to ask for help but women don’t, and there should be no shame in asking for help! Some empathy could help here.)
Above that are things like product design, project planning, management, and some of the creative aspects of the tech profession. At this point, it is almost entirely a people thing where, according to this guy’s manifesto, women should once again have the advantage. Below, this level, it’s just mechanical work. AT this level, diversity is an advantage, because
As long as ultra-liberals make views like in this essay taboo to express, then these ideas will simply be driven under ground, and people who hold those views will just feel unfairly suppressed. I think it’s a problem that people who hold these views feel the need to express them anonymously, because they know that the reaction will just be one of unmitigated vitriol. Seriously, if that Google employee openly expressed those views, they would just be fired.
Now that this anonymous essay is out, this is an opportunity to critique it carefully. For instance, there are indeed lots of people who think that men and women and people of difference “races” have such significantly different intelligences that it’s okay to utilize stereotypes as part of hiring decisions and such. Well, now we can take this opportunity to revisit the scientific evidence. Surely there ARE differences, but what differences are genetic, and what are the result of culture and socialization? And for any of these differences, what impact do they have (statistically) on engineering talent? And how much does “talent” matter when combined with hard-earned skills?
We do not want to turn gender and racial equality into dogma. First, we should be completely honest and open about scientific research on this matter. Let’s say it became taboo to talk about skin color. Then if you really liked the skin tone of some person of African descent, then you might risk backlash from just complementing someone. Or more neutrally, if you’re trying to make someone look really good in their clothing, then we need the ability to be matter-of-fact about it; the color of your skin, hair, and eyes and the shape of your body do have a real impact on what clothing styles are best for you. Or biologically, it’s important to recognize the relationship between melanin content and sun exposure.
But establishing that diferences do exist an it’s okay to talk about them, what impact do those differences have on things like job effectiveness? Let’s say we unfroze a population of early humans from 500K years ago. They were not quite as intellectually advanced as us, but they had language and other characteristics that we would recognize as human. How should the be treated? Should they be enslaved? Or just relegated to the menial jobs? What if one wanted to study engineering—should we stop them? Why? And what harm would it cause you if one of them went to college, got a degree, and got hired? White men vary in engieering talent VASTLY and are not hired on the basis of simply being white men, so why should a woman, a black man, or a Neanderthal be excluded simply on the basis of one of these labels? And why the hell would you care to try to force people to be judged on those bases?
Although I haven’t met any neanderthals, I have met people with mental disabilities who were capable enough at math and engineering skills that they could hold down an engineering job and be *productive*, without “special treatment.” And of course, I have known lots of downright brilliant people who were female and/or with skin color darker than a norwegian. Are they less common than brilliant white men? If so, that’s interesting for the anthropologists, but not something that HR people should worry themselves with. BESIDES, even if there were some genetic bias that made them “10% less likely to be at skill level Z,” or something like that, the artificial prejudices from our society’s past have a FAR greater impact. We have a long way to go to get those people up to parity with their true underlying abilities. And the longer we take to do that, the longer we keep shooting ourselves in the foot for not benefitting from their ability to contribute.
I believe a lot of the criticism that women and minorities face often comes from confirmation bias. People make mistakes in their jobs or are sloppy. For some reason, when white men make mistakes, t
So we acknowledge that black offenders are statistically more likely to reoffend than white offenders.
But why is that? I know a lot of people assume that this is “just how black people are.” But the image media paints of “black” is far more socioeconomic than anything else. Do poor blacks commit more crimes than poor whites? What about in the middle class? Upper class? If poor whites and poor blacks have differences in recidivism, is this due to a cultural or genetic difference in how these people handle the stresses and challenges in their lives? And if so does this difference conver advantages in other circumstances?
Something we need to be mindful of is that people often conform to the roles that others assume for them. If you’re black and everyone assumes you’re going to be a criminal, and one day you get an immoral impulse (like ALL humans do), the negative self-image that was handed to you will be a strong influence over how you decide to give in to that impulse or not.
My dad always had this attitude that women were less intelligent than men. He would never admit to that, but there are assumptions he made that had an effect. My sister had dyslexia and she’s female, so there was always this belief that she wasn’t more than “average” intelligence. And once people develop a belief, it is common for them to only notice the things that confirm that belief, while things that contradict it get automatically filtered out. It turns out that she is extremely bright, just not in areas that my father recognized. Long story short, I’m betting that if she had been recognized for her intelligence, she could have channeled that positively. Instead, she turns into a manipulative sociopath.
Other people’s beliefs about you can fuck you up.
The biggest impediment for blacks to get out from under this higher recidivism trend is what people assume to be the cause of the trend. It’s chalked up to something inherent about being “black.” Commonly, when a white male makes mistakes, people are apt to blame it on stress or other external factors, and they’re working hard, and they mean well, and they’re doing the best they can. Only after someone has evidence of nefarious intentions do we change our opinion. If we were to treat everyone else the same way, it would make a world of difference.
As far as interpreted languages are concerned, Ruby is by far my favorite. I can code in that language far faster than any other, despite having decades more with the likes of C and C++. It’s nice for quick-and-dirty prototypes and things that don’t require a lot of processing power. But for serious tasks, it’s just too damn slow. I have tried, for instance, to write parsers in Ruby because its string and array manipulation are really convenient, but for most data sources, the Ruby programs just can’t keep up. And I’m no slouch at playing “golf” with intricate Ruby expressions. What’s worse is that with the global interpreter lock, I can’t get more throughput from threading.
I’m not a huge fan of Python in terms of syntax, but although general Python code is of comparable things, Python has some tools that make it invaluable. I’m thinking specifically of sympy and numpy. Simpy is an amazing symbolic algebra library. I can’t tell you how nice it is in machine learning to be able to have it automatically compute partial derivatives of arbitrarily complex expressions. And when you can organize your data into vectors and matrices, numpy can use GPUs to get incredible throughput. This is the only reason I bothered to learn Python, and it’s one reason Python is eating Ruby’s lunch.
Why do urban legends propagate? They're always described in exciting but plausible ways and often contain just a grain of truth. Moreover, occasionally an urban legend is true, as you can see from a minority of entries on the Snopes database.
Interest in quack medicine stems from a variety of factors, different for different people, including:
- People with real health problems who were let down by real MDs. This happens a lot, because not every MD can diagnose every illness. Meanwhile, so many alternative practitioners claim to be willing to help in ways that MDs "won't." - Various paranoid delusions about the government or "establishment" doctors trying to control or poison us. - Actual instances of governments letting us down (e.g. Flint, Michigan). - People with mental instability or who have been convinced they have some nebulous malady. - People with very minor health problems (e.g. a mild dairy sensitivity) who self-diagnose as something much worse. - People who read too much into what they got from 23andme and nutrihacker. - People who fall victims to charlatans who want to make money from your real or perceived illnesses. - On and on.
What keeps people sucked in is that what the charlatans are saying have a grain of plausibility and truth.
Take toxins for example. So many of these weirdos go on and on about toxins, but they're almost never specific about it. My MD (who has her degree from Yale) has a list of common ones. If someone telling you about toxins can't cough up something like that, you should tell them to fuck off.
However, there are indeed toxins in our environment. Plus, things you eat and byproducts of pathogens also bring toxins into or bodies. In fact, most plants produce toxins as an adaptation against predation, and as consumers of those organisms, we are also counter-adapted to efficiently denature those toxins. Aside from some of the nastier ones (e.g. like an arsenic overdose), a healthy liver does a good job of cleaning that up, and you excrete them as waste. I don't recommend exposing yourself to too many environmental toxins, and I would suggest avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that absorb higher amounts of pesticides, but pretty much, most people are going to be okay and should just focus on good exercise and a balanced diet (although there is plenty of confusion out there on what constitutes a balanced diet).
What's unfortunate is that there are indeed people who have problems with toxin build-up. But those people have some other underlying condition that scientifically explains why their livers aren't doing such a good job. An obvious one is alcoholics who have wrecked their livers over decades of overconsumption. Another example is people with untreated thyroid function, because there are aspects of detoxification that are regulated by thyroid hormones. I am highly skeptical of "detox programs," because toxin accumulation is never the root cause. If you fix the underlying condition, then your body will detoxify itself. So taking a bunch of crap meant to "stimulate" detox is likely to cause you more harm than good.
I actually have a bunch of symptoms that those people would associate with toxification problems. My MD figured out, for instance, that my thyroid function was not up to par and prescribed T3 supplementation. It is helping because there isn't anything broken about my liver itself.
I have encountered one detox protocol that I didn't think was utter shit. It's called ProtoClear, and all it is is vitamins and other nutrients you already need, but in their biologically active forms. For instance, instead of cyanocobalamin, it contains methylcobalamin. One ingredient I recall that fell short is that it contains folic acid instead of methylfolate. I actually have the MTHFR A1298C mutation, heterozygous, so my body's conversion may not be 100% efficient; it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Anyway, the idea is that if you take these chemicals that you need in their active forms, t
If we had fusion power, we could economically grow crops in vertical farms. If we did this, then we could house many times the whole planet’s population JUST along the coastlines in tall buildings and give every person ample personal space.
Even if we didn’t do that, there’s plenty of uninhabited space on earth that we could utilize as long as we brought water in and improved farming efficiency.
While I agree that we’re wrecking our environment, any other place in the solar system will be far more inhospitable.
What we have here is a bunch of average coders who have nothing better to do than take surveys, and we find that among them there is a correlation between the use of spaces and a *slight* boost in salary.
What about the rock stars? What do they do? And what about the people who don’t consider themselves “programmers” who can code rings around those survey-takers? I know electrical engineers whose code looks like shit to me but beats the hell out of most of the stuff I see on github. Some use tabs, some use spaces. Who cares! These people make a minimum of $150K/year, putting them outside of the range of this sample.
In my history of doing software engineering and digital circuit design, I have used tabs, spaces, and combos. After a while, I gravitated to using spaces in order to ensure that the code formatting would not change for different people. But what I actually use varies with the language.
In C and C++, I use four spaces to indent. In Ruby, my two editors (vim and TextMate) do not have the same settings, so some code is indented 2, some 4. For Python, I use Jupyter, which I *think* defaults to 4 spaces, but I’m not totally sure, but I don’t care because I hate Python and only use it for sympy. For Java, I mostly use Netbeans, which I *think* uses 4 spaces. My Verilog code looks like a C programmer wrote it, because I can’t stand to put “begin" on separate lines, so I end up with things like “end else begin”, and I use four spaces to indent instead of the usual 2; I’m a maveric. I can read VHDL just fine, but I avoid writing it as much as I can. Assembly generally isn’t structured, so its indenting is really unimportant. I haven’t programmed Fortran since the days when you had to start in column 7. My Javascript code is indented like my C code; same with PHP. I can code in other languages too most of them require very little reading to get competent with the basic syntax, but the libraries can take a while to really master, so instead of investing time into “learning” them, I just google what I need as I go along.
My favorite code-oriented job, however, is “expert witness.” There, I get to pick apart other people’s code and show how it does and does not match patent claims. I don’t have to write a single line of code, and I make $250/hour or more. The free trips to Washington, DC are nice too. Of course, this is no cake walk either. It takes a lot of concentration and energy to interpret patents and make sense of mazes of horribly structured code, which is why it pays that well. I keep getting called because I’m an expert in both graphics and digital circuit design, so the lawfirms always get a bargain.
The security measures we put in place in IT systems aren’t just about keeping out malicious users. They’re also about granting access only to those who understand how to use them properly. You don’t give guns and knives to toddlers, and people who do are the ones responsible for the carnage.
That being said, I recall one time that a friend wanted to back up his hard drive before upgrading his OS or something. He had lots of music and photos and stuff, so that made sense. So he asked our sysadmin to help, and the sysadmin used some disk imaging software to do it, to copy from one drive to the other. Unfortunately, he got the drives backwards.
Hillary lost because the democrats pushed through a weak candidate with lots of strikes against her. Despite all her mistakes (some serious ones, like the email server debacle), I liked Hillary and was and still am very afraid of Donald Trump and the alternative-fact culture currently dominating the Republican party. But she was far from squeaky clean, and voters were also angry over the Democrats nominating someone who was not their strongest candidate. She was nominated because she was a woman. Admittedly, I believe she’s a strong woman with the constitution to be president, and I think that America really needs to have a female president in order to create a historical precedent that gender is not really a factor in what it takes to make a good president. I think she could have done a decent job of it, better than Trump anyhow, although we’re still at a point where women will get more flak than men for exactly the same mistakes.
Anyhow, bottom line is that American voters felt they were let down by the Democrats and went and voted for Trump. DNC IT infrastructure may have sucked, but that’s not why she lost the vote.
Ok, is Switzerland, so maybe they have different laws from what I’m used to. But in the civilized world, we value free speech. The right to free speech often translates into the right to be a total asshole, but that’s the price we pay to ensure that well-meaning people don’t have their rights stomped on by a fascist government.
Now, speech can be INVOLVED in criminal behavior. For instance, libel and slander. These come down not to the speech but the consequences of the speech. You can “defame” a fictional character all you want, and you can say really asshole things about non-specific people.
In this specific case there’s this “third party” who said defamatory things about an animal rights activist — who are THEY? Why aren’t we hearing more about this third party? Why aren’t they in trouble? Why is some moron with a like button fined $4000 when the original defamer is left unscathed?
I’m really liberal, but this sounds like some of that SJW shit the conservatives are always going on about.
Slashdot Mirror
Never put Minecraft pocket edition on a kidâ(TM)s tablet and let them play unsupervised. Theyâ(TM)ll play until it makes them sick. Itâ(TM)s a sandbox game that has some achievements and bosses to appeal to casual users. But the hardcore users will continue building on multiplayer servers for years and years. I love the game. But as an adult with a job and family, I have to strictly limit my time.
Well maybe not *every* time but this is nothing new. I remember multiple major iPhone OS updates in the past that caused battery drain that had to be fixed in a point release. Surprising they didn't catch it in testing, but who knows what weird combos of apps or weird file corruption people have.
BTW, why is it that clearing your history and cache is a common solution to browser problems? If a web browser is behaving poorly with bad data files, isn't it a but that it doesn't just realise the data is bad and ignore it? It's 2017; by now trusting that files are in the right format and not some kind of security exploit seems dumb. But then again there's Equifax.
Whatever, dude. :)
Wow. Not good on the reading comprehension, eh? I'm biased towards them as a *result* of all the experiences I've had. I just described some of those experiences. Or are you going to back-pedal and then make some comment about "correlation not being causation"?
Consider the three girls in my machine learning class whose answers were *consistently* superior, and my TA (who was also male) and I both agreed about this. It's not like we just blindly accepted their answers. We always checked them. They were just consistently excellent. We didn't have some a priori assumption that they would be, and of course, it was only three of them. I also knew several of the men in that class already and had hired them to do research because they seriously kicked ass. If anything, I had expected THEM to produce the best work if only because I had seen excellent work from them in the past. Plus, there were lots of girls in this class. It was just three in particular that stood out, and this experience isn't much different from other courses I've taught.
When I was in industry, I didn't think a lot about it. I worked with women, and most were good at their jobs; some weren't, but they did well enough. But when I started teaching and observed that (especially among the undergrads), the performance among the females was distinctively towards the top of the spectrum, I talked to the graduate and undergraduate program directors, and they explained to me the self-selection bias. You can also find this with a little googling. Freshmen in the CS program could be all over the place, with men and women who are anywhere from very good to just terrible. As they progress through the semesters, students learn good study habits, and there's some attrition to other majors and dropping out. Well, more girls leave, and they tend to be the weakest ones.
I don't know. Maybe treating woman with respect as human beings is a good way to motivate them to work hard? I can say that both men and women seemed to try especially hard for me because I was nice to them and became someone they didn't want to disappoint. There have been multiple instances where students and subordinates have performed better for me than others "warned" me they would do. Indeed, there was more than one guy I hired for research whom I was told by the undergrad director was "lazy," but I didn't see it; I gave high-level instructions and answered questions, and then they would come back regularly with excellent work. What can I say? There was this one guy in the machine learning class who's a genius, and he's in a doctoral program at Stanford now. He did almost as well as the girls but was having some senior-itis. His answers were correct and easy to grade, and his code was good. If those three girls had not been there, he probably would have been one of the ones we used as reference. But when questions and coding projects are open-ended, you see a lot of individual variation. Those three girls also wrote code that was better-commented and easier to read.
This does make me wonder. Am I biased towards women because (as I generally believe) I have observed very good school and engineering results from them? Or have I observed good results from women because my bias towards them somehow motivated them to work harder? If it's the latter, why is it that I got the same from the top men I worked with as well? Another option is that I tend to subconsciously assume the best about people, men AND women, and any extra assessment I *think* I need to do about the men isn't something that I necessarily show or do in practice. I honestly don't know. What goes on in my head and what I actually do may be two different things -- whatever it is, I seem to work well with others and inspire them to work hard.
Keep in mind that just because I'm biased towards women doesn't mean I'm biased against men. Don't make this out to be some kind of dichotomy. Of course, the alt-right likes to do that a lot (as do the alt-left -- what is it with these al
I'm not sure how "getting right answers" and "writing good code that works" constitutes "gaming the system." In what way are those things as cheaty as you seem to be implying?
In the CS department where I work, we admit generally equal numbers of males and females. They are admitted because they have excellent SAT and GPAs and other assessment scores. By time they are senior, women are in the minority.
Why? Self selection bias. The CS program is tough. The less capable males are trained to be confident so they are more likely to stick around. Females are more self critical, so the less capable ones are more likely to change majors.
The result is that only the top notch females stick around to graduate. When I taught machine learning I got only juniors, seniors, and grad students. My TA and I quickly realized that we didn't need to bother writing answer keys in advance. We'd just take the answers from these three girls (two domestic, one from china), check them for correctness, and pick the best for each one. These gave us exemplary answers that were used to judge what would get maximum points.
Compared to them, the top males produced answers that were no less correct. But these girls especially wrote answers that were more concise, clearer, and easier to evaluate.
Teaching other topics to grads and undergrads, I've generally seen similar patterns. Teaching computer architecture, my best student was a girl in more than one semester, and the girls tended to work harder, with the majority of them in the top half of the class. And once again, I saw similar patterns among engineers while I worked in industry.
I work at a good school but there are lots of higher ranked schools. Google should be careful hiring me into a management, because if a female engineer graduated from a decent school I'm going to assume she is like the ones I have taught first hand and not be prepared to think less unless I see undeniable poor performance that can't be explained by things beyond her control. Most of the males are also amazing I'm sure but my experiences have taught me that less capable ones manage to graduate and get hired, so each one would have to prove himself to me individually before I'm willing to take some of the same risks with their work assignments.
If you want to bitch and moan about how women get an unfair disadvantage or advantage, all of y'all can kiss my ass unless you have had years of experience managing and teaching. Everyone else is by definition speaking from ignorance.
Today, the PhD is what a bachelors degree was 50 years ago. People who can't get jobs go back to school. Academia is also flooded with new applicants like it never was before. Peer review venues are also swamped with absurd numbers of papers submitted by students needing to graduate and faculty needing tenure, and the competition is absurd. It's very hard now for people to distinguish themselves.
It should come as no surprise that with increased numbers of scientists in completition with each other that the average scientific output per scientist would decline.
True unless they're google in which case they don't hire older people for not being "googly" enough.
I *thing* I know what this "googly" thing is. Younger geniuses will externalize all the alternative solutions they think of and the steps to get to ends. Older brilliant engineers will think through things quickly in their heads, automatically skip through the bad ideas, and jump straight to the end. The mostly 20 something's doing the evaluation can't understand it and reject it. It is not intentional discrimination. Just ignorance.
I am an expert and well accomplished in software engineering, digital circuit design, computer graphics, CPU architecture, and several other things. One time I had a recruiter tell me I should write one software and one hardware resume because companies won't believe that I could be good at both. Even after I'd had like 15 years of experience. It just shows you how cookie cutter hiring practices usually are.
On the other hand after I had been working as a professor for a while, these combos came in handy to get side work as an expert witness. I guess it's okay after your reach some level or amount of experience.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that men and women do have different interests that may account for gender disparity in tech. (Even if you only look at research cited by Damore, plenty of research has shown that more fundamental gender differences can only account for PART of the disparity, but let’s put that aside for a moment.)
Question 1: Let’s say that, all OTHER things being equal, we’d still have fewer women in tech jobs. This would just be a statistical bias. What women are interested in, on average, is not really relevant to the individual women who decide to go into tech, despite perhaps a majority of other women not wanting to do the same. *How could this have any impact on recruiting women into tech?* What could possibly be wrong with encouraging women to get into these professions (even aggressively)? I’m not talking about biased hiring or career advancement, just going out there and making it not difficult for women who ARE interested in tech to apply for those jobs and demonstrate their competence.
Question 2: Based on Damore’s memo and things he cites, I infer that workspaces have evolved to suit the needs of MEN. (And based on some other recent discussions about ageism at Google, they have evolved to better accommodate YOUNG men.) *But what could possibly be wrong with giving employees the ability to adapt their work environments to better match the needs of WOMEN?* Ideas in the memo touch on things like making the environment more social, and pairing people up to do coding together instead of always giving people isolated cubes or offices. Not only might this benefit women, but I know plenty of very social men (such as myself) who might enjoy doing pair-coding and other kinds of more cooperative approaches to engineering. Ultimately, it may be best to approach workspaces in a way that facilitates *anyone* adapting the space to their needs, and the fact that current work environments are statistically less suited to women is only a vehicle to highlight a more general problem with cookie-cutter workspaces. (At the same time, we should not try to generalize women out of the discussion. Men have dominated for a very very very long time. It’s about time women got the chance to make some demands and mold things to their tastes.)
Question 3: Finally let’s put gender bias back into the discussion. We’re not denying it exists. It’s just that people like Damore are tired of feeling accused of having unconscious biases and being made to feel bad about them. But what Damore’s memo does is cast doubt upon the extent to which bias is a factor in disparity relative to other factors. Ok, so there are lots of factors besides bias. *Nevertheless bias exists, so what could possibly be wrong with working to eliminate the bias?* Even if it were only 25% of the problem, it still sucks!
There is a lot about gender differences known to biologists, anthropologists, and other sciences. And that’s great, and we should avail ourselves of that knowledge.
This is something Damore DID NOT DO. (I did read the manifesto, BTW.) He *speculated* about the impact of fundamental differences, without citing any evidence, and then like some fucking propagandist, he *assumed* his speculations and went on to make groundless recommendations. This is bullshit of the highest order, and it’s a TRICK that is actively used by people trying to mislead others. I don’t think Damore is smart enough to be doing this intentionally, though. He’s just stupid, but it still pisses me off when people use tactics like this (intentionally or otherwise). His recommendations are based on more unsupported assuptions than that. All these training programs and efforts to maximize deversity, *might* make Google inefficient, but the extent to which Google would be inefficient was also left entirely vacuous, even if you were to make the mistake of taking his speculations as fact.
There was no scientific debate here. NONE. Because there was no science. Indeed, something conveniently left out here is any evidence *against* biological differences being a significant contributor to gender disparity. A simple google search reveals plenty. How about "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/“? You don’t want me to spam you with all the publications I’ve found on this topic that contain ACTUAL EVIDENCE. No. We don’t have scientific debate here. Just some moron looking for an excuse to not have to show women respect equal to men or silence the people talking about diversity, which apparently offends him. Damore feels offended because his point of view is being disparaged, but people who believe in a flat earth will feel similarly, and they should not be given equal voice either.
Maybe there are some differences between men and women that, all other things being equal, might make fewer of them enter tech professions. The problem is that all other things are not equal. Not even by a long shot. The inequalities imposed by society may be improved compared to what they were 60 years ago, but we still have a long way to go before half the population (women included) subconsciously question a woman’s qualifications more than a man’s. Or a black person’s more than a white person’s. We’re just not that far removed from the civil rights revolution, and the civil rights revolution has not reached everyone. Biological gender differences *plausibly* have some impact on the disparities. But only plausibly, in that we have not totally ruled it out, and for sure there is no evidence in favor of this postulate that isn’t drowned out by other factors.
Even if you disagree with me there, it’s also not the role of HR employees and hiring managers to make decisions on the basis of gender differences. They do not research these things, they are not educated in them, and it’s really not their job to know them anyway. Their job is to facilitate evaluation of potential employees based exclusively on skills relevant to the jobs, by evaluating resumes, checking references, and collecting feedback from interviewers. (There are very few other reasonable criteria, with the exception of maybe a few things like criminal background and the relevance of that to the specific position being applied for, and even that has to be handled carefully.)
Once people are hired, the next thing we need to so is foster a comfortable work environment. If Damore were do damn concerned about “efficiency,” he would consider the impact of sexism (regardless of biological differences) on women working at Google and the impact of that on their work productivity. People who actually give a shit about the feelings of others besides themselves don’t feel “oppressed” when they have to curb their behaviors and langua
“Threadripper” is obviously a compound word. I know what a “dripper” is, but what is a “threa”?
It is important that we all have the right to hold ideas that are inaccurate and also state them as being our beliefs. If not, we would have to condemn scientists who held to theories that got updated when new discoveries were made. So the court case will primarily test whether or not he should have been allowed to publish what he wrote without being punished by his employer AND whether or not an employer should be allowed to fire someone over beliefs they don’t want their employees to express.
Damore’s attorneys will argue that he is being discriminated against for exercising his constitutional rights, but that will fail because employment is at-will and it wasn’t some protected thing like race or religion that resulted in him being fired but instead his on-the-job “behavior." Google’s attorneys will attempt to argue that his ideas are harmful on the basis of their scientific merits, but that will fail since, there is no crime in expressing incorrect ideas. Damore’s manifesto also did not enter into the realm of hate speech, since he did not recommend harm against anyone, only that Google scale back “inefficient” programs that promote ideas of equality that Damore believes are not scientifically supported.
So it’s going to fall upon the journalists to pick apart the ideas he expressed. It will be educational for the rest of us to have some of these ideas about “genetic differences” retested. It’s not that we haven’t tested them before many times, but many people do not learn history and could benefit from a refresher.
I’ve read the memo, and it’s not the evil manifesto that people are making it out to be, at least not at the beginning. In fact, it generally seems like all it’s trying to do is just challenge the status quo for the sake of keeping scientifically valid ideas fresh in our minds, in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way. Are there biological differences? Most certainly. You can find these things at the DNA level. (Mind you, they’re extremely small, but small genetic differences can make huge phenotypical differences.)
Here’s where I think he goes wrong:
He begins with *speculations* about gender differences that may be due to genetics, which are certainly good questions to ask. But then be promptly forgets about the cultural biases that we KNOW about that affect how men and women are differentially trained. At a minimim, we have a massive uncertainty about what is causing the gender disparity. Nevertheless, he transitions from speculation to assumption and then makes recommendations based on that. This is a bad leap of logic.
Then he suggests that, given his assumed fact that these differences are fundamental, Google is being inefficient, wasting money on training programs for underrepresented groups. Other things he doesn’t like are making diversity a moral issue, empathy, and unconscious bias training.
Let’s assume for a moment that his assumptions have validity, and that the choices made by Google impact efficiency. If we were talking about a small business that was on the edge of failure, then MAYBE this would apply (but they wouldn’t have diversity or unconscious bias programs anyhow, and everyone would be focused on just getting the job done).
Google, on the other hand, is a huge company that can afford a little inefficiency for the sake of giving everyone an equal chance. From the manifesto, it is not clear how empathy, for example, makes engineers less efficient or less able to be objective about facts. This is just another of his assumptions he doesn’t substantiate. Of all companies, it is those like Google and Microsoft that should be leaders in cutting through the culural barriers that have kept certain people out of tech jobs. Perhaps once those are dealt with, we’ll finally be able to measure the real genetic differences in isolation. But even then, there’s no particular reason anyone, regardless of their genetics, shouldn’t be encouraged to learn technology and get into these kinds of jobs.
As someone who has worked in the tech industry for a LONG TIME, let me give you my opinion and observations. Low level things like coding are just mechanical jobs. Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to read or write. Some people may enjoy it more than others, and some may be faster or slower, but coding is just drudge work. In that regard, the women I have known generally worked harder, even in environments where it was clear that the men never questioned their abilities.
The next level above coding is debugging and basic problem-solving. People who are sloppy and over-confident will write bad code and then get lost when they can’t figure out their bugs. People who worry more about mistakes are more inclined to code carefully and build in ways to test and debug from the get-go. This is an area where the women have an advantage, because they are not granted the automatic confidence that men are. (One common disadvantage is that there are environments where men feel free to ask for help but women don’t, and there should be no shame in asking for help! Some empathy could help here.)
Above that are things like product design, project planning, management, and some of the creative aspects of the tech profession. At this point, it is almost entirely a people thing where, according to this guy’s manifesto, women should once again have the advantage. Below, this level, it’s just mechanical work. AT this level, diversity is an advantage, because
As long as ultra-liberals make views like in this essay taboo to express, then these ideas will simply be driven under ground, and people who hold those views will just feel unfairly suppressed. I think it’s a problem that people who hold these views feel the need to express them anonymously, because they know that the reaction will just be one of unmitigated vitriol. Seriously, if that Google employee openly expressed those views, they would just be fired.
Now that this anonymous essay is out, this is an opportunity to critique it carefully. For instance, there are indeed lots of people who think that men and women and people of difference “races” have such significantly different intelligences that it’s okay to utilize stereotypes as part of hiring decisions and such. Well, now we can take this opportunity to revisit the scientific evidence. Surely there ARE differences, but what differences are genetic, and what are the result of culture and socialization? And for any of these differences, what impact do they have (statistically) on engineering talent? And how much does “talent” matter when combined with hard-earned skills?
We do not want to turn gender and racial equality into dogma. First, we should be completely honest and open about scientific research on this matter. Let’s say it became taboo to talk about skin color. Then if you really liked the skin tone of some person of African descent, then you might risk backlash from just complementing someone. Or more neutrally, if you’re trying to make someone look really good in their clothing, then we need the ability to be matter-of-fact about it; the color of your skin, hair, and eyes and the shape of your body do have a real impact on what clothing styles are best for you. Or biologically, it’s important to recognize the relationship between melanin content and sun exposure.
But establishing that diferences do exist an it’s okay to talk about them, what impact do those differences have on things like job effectiveness? Let’s say we unfroze a population of early humans from 500K years ago. They were not quite as intellectually advanced as us, but they had language and other characteristics that we would recognize as human. How should the be treated? Should they be enslaved? Or just relegated to the menial jobs? What if one wanted to study engineering—should we stop them? Why? And what harm would it cause you if one of them went to college, got a degree, and got hired? White men vary in engieering talent VASTLY and are not hired on the basis of simply being white men, so why should a woman, a black man, or a Neanderthal be excluded simply on the basis of one of these labels? And why the hell would you care to try to force people to be judged on those bases?
Although I haven’t met any neanderthals, I have met people with mental disabilities who were capable enough at math and engineering skills that they could hold down an engineering job and be *productive*, without “special treatment.” And of course, I have known lots of downright brilliant people who were female and/or with skin color darker than a norwegian. Are they less common than brilliant white men? If so, that’s interesting for the anthropologists, but not something that HR people should worry themselves with. BESIDES, even if there were some genetic bias that made them “10% less likely to be at skill level Z,” or something like that, the artificial prejudices from our society’s past have a FAR greater impact. We have a long way to go to get those people up to parity with their true underlying abilities. And the longer we take to do that, the longer we keep shooting ourselves in the foot for not benefitting from their ability to contribute.
I believe a lot of the criticism that women and minorities face often comes from confirmation bias. People make mistakes in their jobs or are sloppy. For some reason, when white men make mistakes, t
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-22147
So we acknowledge that black offenders are statistically more likely to reoffend than white offenders.
But why is that? I know a lot of people assume that this is “just how black people are.” But the image media paints of “black” is far more socioeconomic than anything else. Do poor blacks commit more crimes than poor whites? What about in the middle class? Upper class? If poor whites and poor blacks have differences in recidivism, is this due to a cultural or genetic difference in how these people handle the stresses and challenges in their lives? And if so does this difference conver advantages in other circumstances?
Something we need to be mindful of is that people often conform to the roles that others assume for them. If you’re black and everyone assumes you’re going to be a criminal, and one day you get an immoral impulse (like ALL humans do), the negative self-image that was handed to you will be a strong influence over how you decide to give in to that impulse or not.
My dad always had this attitude that women were less intelligent than men. He would never admit to that, but there are assumptions he made that had an effect. My sister had dyslexia and she’s female, so there was always this belief that she wasn’t more than “average” intelligence. And once people develop a belief, it is common for them to only notice the things that confirm that belief, while things that contradict it get automatically filtered out. It turns out that she is extremely bright, just not in areas that my father recognized. Long story short, I’m betting that if she had been recognized for her intelligence, she could have channeled that positively. Instead, she turns into a manipulative sociopath.
Other people’s beliefs about you can fuck you up.
The biggest impediment for blacks to get out from under this higher recidivism trend is what people assume to be the cause of the trend. It’s chalked up to something inherent about being “black.” Commonly, when a white male makes mistakes, people are apt to blame it on stress or other external factors, and they’re working hard, and they mean well, and they’re doing the best they can. Only after someone has evidence of nefarious intentions do we change our opinion. If we were to treat everyone else the same way, it would make a world of difference.
As far as interpreted languages are concerned, Ruby is by far my favorite. I can code in that language far faster than any other, despite having decades more with the likes of C and C++. It’s nice for quick-and-dirty prototypes and things that don’t require a lot of processing power. But for serious tasks, it’s just too damn slow. I have tried, for instance, to write parsers in Ruby because its string and array manipulation are really convenient, but for most data sources, the Ruby programs just can’t keep up. And I’m no slouch at playing “golf” with intricate Ruby expressions. What’s worse is that with the global interpreter lock, I can’t get more throughput from threading.
I’m not a huge fan of Python in terms of syntax, but although general Python code is of comparable things, Python has some tools that make it invaluable. I’m thinking specifically of sympy and numpy. Simpy is an amazing symbolic algebra library. I can’t tell you how nice it is in machine learning to be able to have it automatically compute partial derivatives of arbitrarily complex expressions. And when you can organize your data into vectors and matrices, numpy can use GPUs to get incredible throughput. This is the only reason I bothered to learn Python, and it’s one reason Python is eating Ruby’s lunch.
Why do urban legends propagate? They're always described in exciting but plausible ways and often contain just a grain of truth. Moreover, occasionally an urban legend is true, as you can see from a minority of entries on the Snopes database.
Interest in quack medicine stems from a variety of factors, different for different people, including:
- People with real health problems who were let down by real MDs. This happens a lot, because not every MD can diagnose every illness. Meanwhile, so many alternative practitioners claim to be willing to help in ways that MDs "won't."
- Various paranoid delusions about the government or "establishment" doctors trying to control or poison us.
- Actual instances of governments letting us down (e.g. Flint, Michigan).
- People with mental instability or who have been convinced they have some nebulous malady.
- People with very minor health problems (e.g. a mild dairy sensitivity) who self-diagnose as something much worse.
- People who read too much into what they got from 23andme and nutrihacker.
- People who fall victims to charlatans who want to make money from your real or perceived illnesses.
- On and on.
What keeps people sucked in is that what the charlatans are saying have a grain of plausibility and truth.
Take toxins for example. So many of these weirdos go on and on about toxins, but they're almost never specific about it. My MD (who has her degree from Yale) has a list of common ones. If someone telling you about toxins can't cough up something like that, you should tell them to fuck off.
However, there are indeed toxins in our environment. Plus, things you eat and byproducts of pathogens also bring toxins into or bodies. In fact, most plants produce toxins as an adaptation against predation, and as consumers of those organisms, we are also counter-adapted to efficiently denature those toxins. Aside from some of the nastier ones (e.g. like an arsenic overdose), a healthy liver does a good job of cleaning that up, and you excrete them as waste. I don't recommend exposing yourself to too many environmental toxins, and I would suggest avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that absorb higher amounts of pesticides, but pretty much, most people are going to be okay and should just focus on good exercise and a balanced diet (although there is plenty of confusion out there on what constitutes a balanced diet).
What's unfortunate is that there are indeed people who have problems with toxin build-up. But those people have some other underlying condition that scientifically explains why their livers aren't doing such a good job. An obvious one is alcoholics who have wrecked their livers over decades of overconsumption. Another example is people with untreated thyroid function, because there are aspects of detoxification that are regulated by thyroid hormones. I am highly skeptical of "detox programs," because toxin accumulation is never the root cause. If you fix the underlying condition, then your body will detoxify itself. So taking a bunch of crap meant to "stimulate" detox is likely to cause you more harm than good.
I actually have a bunch of symptoms that those people would associate with toxification problems. My MD figured out, for instance, that my thyroid function was not up to par and prescribed T3 supplementation. It is helping because there isn't anything broken about my liver itself.
I have encountered one detox protocol that I didn't think was utter shit. It's called ProtoClear, and all it is is vitamins and other nutrients you already need, but in their biologically active forms. For instance, instead of cyanocobalamin, it contains methylcobalamin. One ingredient I recall that fell short is that it contains folic acid instead of methylfolate. I actually have the MTHFR A1298C mutation, heterozygous, so my body's conversion may not be 100% efficient; it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Anyway, the idea is that if you take these chemicals that you need in their active forms, t
If we had fusion power, we could economically grow crops in vertical farms. If we did this, then we could house many times the whole planet’s population JUST along the coastlines in tall buildings and give every person ample personal space.
Even if we didn’t do that, there’s plenty of uninhabited space on earth that we could utilize as long as we brought water in and improved farming efficiency.
While I agree that we’re wrecking our environment, any other place in the solar system will be far more inhospitable.
What we have here is a bunch of average coders who have nothing better to do than take surveys, and we find that among them there is a correlation between the use of spaces and a *slight* boost in salary.
What about the rock stars? What do they do? And what about the people who don’t consider themselves “programmers” who can code rings around those survey-takers? I know electrical engineers whose code looks like shit to me but beats the hell out of most of the stuff I see on github. Some use tabs, some use spaces. Who cares! These people make a minimum of $150K/year, putting them outside of the range of this sample.
In my history of doing software engineering and digital circuit design, I have used tabs, spaces, and combos. After a while, I gravitated to using spaces in order to ensure that the code formatting would not change for different people. But what I actually use varies with the language.
In C and C++, I use four spaces to indent. In Ruby, my two editors (vim and TextMate) do not have the same settings, so some code is indented 2, some 4. For Python, I use Jupyter, which I *think* defaults to 4 spaces, but I’m not totally sure, but I don’t care because I hate Python and only use it for sympy. For Java, I mostly use Netbeans, which I *think* uses 4 spaces. My Verilog code looks like a C programmer wrote it, because I can’t stand to put “begin" on separate lines, so I end up with things like “end else begin”, and I use four spaces to indent instead of the usual 2; I’m a maveric. I can read VHDL just fine, but I avoid writing it as much as I can. Assembly generally isn’t structured, so its indenting is really unimportant. I haven’t programmed Fortran since the days when you had to start in column 7. My Javascript code is indented like my C code; same with PHP. I can code in other languages too most of them require very little reading to get competent with the basic syntax, but the libraries can take a while to really master, so instead of investing time into “learning” them, I just google what I need as I go along.
My favorite code-oriented job, however, is “expert witness.” There, I get to pick apart other people’s code and show how it does and does not match patent claims. I don’t have to write a single line of code, and I make $250/hour or more. The free trips to Washington, DC are nice too. Of course, this is no cake walk either. It takes a lot of concentration and energy to interpret patents and make sense of mazes of horribly structured code, which is why it pays that well. I keep getting called because I’m an expert in both graphics and digital circuit design, so the lawfirms always get a bargain.
I would agree, but I use goto in just about every C++ program I write.
The security measures we put in place in IT systems aren’t just about keeping out malicious users. They’re also about granting access only to those who understand how to use them properly. You don’t give guns and knives to toddlers, and people who do are the ones responsible for the carnage.
That being said, I recall one time that a friend wanted to back up his hard drive before upgrading his OS or something. He had lots of music and photos and stuff, so that made sense. So he asked our sysadmin to help, and the sysadmin used some disk imaging software to do it, to copy from one drive to the other. Unfortunately, he got the drives backwards.
Hillary lost because the democrats pushed through a weak candidate with lots of strikes against her. Despite all her mistakes (some serious ones, like the email server debacle), I liked Hillary and was and still am very afraid of Donald Trump and the alternative-fact culture currently dominating the Republican party. But she was far from squeaky clean, and voters were also angry over the Democrats nominating someone who was not their strongest candidate. She was nominated because she was a woman. Admittedly, I believe she’s a strong woman with the constitution to be president, and I think that America really needs to have a female president in order to create a historical precedent that gender is not really a factor in what it takes to make a good president. I think she could have done a decent job of it, better than Trump anyhow, although we’re still at a point where women will get more flak than men for exactly the same mistakes.
Anyhow, bottom line is that American voters felt they were let down by the Democrats and went and voted for Trump. DNC IT infrastructure may have sucked, but that’s not why she lost the vote.
Ok, is Switzerland, so maybe they have different laws from what I’m used to. But in the civilized world, we value free speech. The right to free speech often translates into the right to be a total asshole, but that’s the price we pay to ensure that well-meaning people don’t have their rights stomped on by a fascist government.
Now, speech can be INVOLVED in criminal behavior. For instance, libel and slander. These come down not to the speech but the consequences of the speech. You can “defame” a fictional character all you want, and you can say really asshole things about non-specific people.
In this specific case there’s this “third party” who said defamatory things about an animal rights activist — who are THEY? Why aren’t we hearing more about this third party? Why aren’t they in trouble? Why is some moron with a like button fined $4000 when the original defamer is left unscathed?
I’m really liberal, but this sounds like some of that SJW shit the conservatives are always going on about.