Many years ago from now, I also ran a MUD. Being able to spy on other players, and also cheat in favor of your friends, were the main reason players WANTED to become immortals. For those who don't yet know how boring and predictable others are, yeah, the pull is too strong.
google "silicon valley age bias", there are plenty of good articles describing the situation and giving accurate explanations.
my short version is that a company needs to play a special game to keep the younglings happy, and part of the game is so that the company can only employ people who buy into that game. since the older folks wouldn't, a mix is not really an option, and out of the two possibilities, guess which one is the easiest.
(my experience with the Valley is from when I worked there between 2009 and 2013, and some things may have changed since then)
Then why do older programmers have issues getting jobs?
various reasons. one is difference in culture, another is inflexibility that sometimes comes with age, for some is lack of love for various PHBs.. you can google around, https://www.usatoday.com/story... etc. I personally witnessed a few very talented engineers walk out of a decent job because the way they were "managed".
But they apparently have issues getting any position.
"good but not exceptional" category is basically shorthand for "30-ish white guy". these are fine, problems start at 40+
In the UK, a fairly senior level position would be around $60 to $70k, although healthcare costs might make that worth $70 to $80k. So $120k seems pretty damn good.
at forex rates, sure, but at purchasing power parity, especially if you consider rent and real estate prices, chances are the picture is different.
for a reference, when you calculate how much funding a startup needs, the quick estimate is headcount x number of months x 10K. that covers not just the salary but everything the employer pays for - medical insurance plans, payroll taxes where appropriate etc.. should give you a good idea of what kind of comp you should be expecting.
there is a huge shortage of decent programmers. I have personally witnessed more than one phone "interview" that went like "have you done this? what about this? do you know what this is? um, can you start Monday?" (120K-ish salary range)
partly because there are way more people who got their stupid ideas funded than good coders willing to stain their resume with that. partly because if you are funded, and cannot do all the required coding solo, here's your conundrum:
- top level hackers can afford to be really picky, so on one hand it's hard to get them interested, and if you could get that, they often want some ownership of the project. the plus side is that they are happy to work for lots of equity if they have faith in the idea, but that can be a huge "if".
- "good but not exceptional" senior engineers aren't usually going to be super happy, as they often have spouses and children and mortgages, so they'd favor job security over exciting ideas and startup lottery.
- that leaves you with fresh-out-of-college folks, which are really really a mixed bunch. some are actually already senior level of understanding without the experience, some are absolutely useless, with varying degrees in between, and there's no easy way to tell which is which early.
so the not-so-scrupulous folks realized what's going on, and launched multiple coding boot camps programmes, to essentially trick both the students into believing they can become a coder in a month or two, and also the prospective employers that said students are useful. so far it's been working, to a degree, in part because in such companies coding skill evaluation process is broken. but one can only hide their lack of value add for so long, even if they do manage to bluff their way into a job.
* how big of an advantage it provides if implemented correctly * how easy it is to get it implemented correctly in practice
That second part is really all the difference. I've seen pretty amazing results of agile methodologies in my practice with the right crowd, but most of the time it's not even about *hiring* the right crowd, it's about *having stakeholders buy* into agile first, a step that is often conveniently skipped by agile evangelists.
well if Valve provided this information for everyone for free, that's where the first interested party might kick in. perhaps Valve doesn't want any negative consequences in relationship with game publishers, and perhaps street cred gained from doing something to "the industry at large" is not enough for them as a compensation.
in theory, Valve could be selling this kind of service. I don't know if they do, but if that is the case, they certainly have good reasons to shut down a free service that would give away this same information. which doesn't contradict what they did in their new privacy policy:)
you have a good point. whether or not that consideration went into Valve's decision making with regards to Steam, we don't really know, but it certainly helps in this regard. me, personally I'm more lamenting the loss of a valuable red-pill source of market size info:) well at least vgchartz is still there.
(I work in game industry, completely unrelated to Valve.) reading the comments so far, it seems there's quite a lot of misunderstanding or misinterpretation what happened here. spoiler alert: it's about user privacy, but not exactly the sharing-with-others-for-commercial-purposes kind.
SteamSpy is a valuable resource to learn what the real popularity of a game is like, because it draws on (previously) open Steam APIs to estimate how many people do actually own the game, and how much it is being played. it is valuable because it allows one to get a good estimation on existing market size of a particular game genre segment. now, there are two parties who don't like this kind of transparency.
first, there are publishers who would very much love to hide lackluster performance of these titles, and keep the hype that "everyone is playing this HOT!! new title" in media through paid articles and ads. naturally SteamSpy breaks this kind of false narrative.
second, as a few folks correctly mentioned here, Steam's profile/friend system makes too many things public by default, and users ARE unhappy about it - since there is still a lot of stigma around playing computer games, and also sometimes you simply don't want to broadcast the fact that you're playing something to the world, or just want to be left alone. Steam friends feature is rather dated, as it was built with sharing and playing games together with your friends in mind, mostly for teenagers in 00s, so it offers relatively few ways to regulate what you want to make public and what you do not. in part, the information that you made available publicly is also available via Steam APIs, which allowed services such as SteamSpy to exist, although that wasn't really its original purpose.
so Steam is actually doing a good thing for its users by tightening up privacy controls, and restricting ways to access someone's status both inside the system and in the APIs. incidentally, this kills services such as SteamSpy, and also inadvertently helps game publishers to hide real numbers related to their titles' performance. oh well.
This is pretty much the blessing and the curse of Ruby - its philosophy works excellently for the best programmers (who are able to write clean and DRY code etc.), but is not really a good fit for mediocre ones, unlike Python or JS. And since there are always only so many best programmers, and majority is always average or worse, Ruby is sort of destined to be niche'y, which may ultimately spell its failure, or it may not. Personally I am enjoying coding in it, even though I am far from the "best programmers", but whether the language is going to last, I cannot be so sure.
Did you actually read the article at the link? There are plenty of links to sources there - Time, Twitter, The Guardian etc. You can't really disregard them simply because they happened to appear in an article on a website you do not like or do not consider reputable.
Makes me wonder if it's technologically possible to digi-sign video as it is being filmed with a digital camera so that at least it can be traced back to a device with a degree of certainty. If there is a relatively cheap way to do this, all major camera brands would incorporate one.
It is apparent that you do not live in Russia, as Putin's support at home is genuine. He does not need any rigging to win. http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/...
Oh, I did not know about the UN and ICANN - good thing they did, too. And I agree about every country having their own DNS is also good.
From what I read in the published protocols of the Russian Security Council meetings a couple years ago, it has been stated that the country must be prepared for all kinds of possible shenanigans regarding internet connectivity on all levels, from traffic routing and DNS to actual internet services. I have no idea how much Russia relies on the non-Russian servers to route their traffic, but setting up their DNS is certainly a logical step in this direction.
My guess Russian logic goes like this: it is not improbable that relationship between the US and Russia could deteriorate to a level where the US would use control of the root DNS as a weapon. Unfortunate as it may be, but this move appears to be an adequate reaction to this possible threat.
The Wikipedia URL mentioned should have ended with a %27 which capitalist Slashdot decided to change into a apostrophe outside the link for some reason. Nekharasho.
>please advise me if I should feel guilty about laughing at this horrible depiction of Russians, and the cultural appropriation it surely embodies
No SJW, but a Russian here. The "maybe do not eat insecurity potato" is pretty much against the core principle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...' and thus very un-Russian. Perhaps cultural misappropriation is of better describings here, comrade.
Here's another example from Russian vernacular. "If you have a bottle of vodka that looks weird, has label badly glued on and turned sideways, not sealed tightly, there is something floating at the bottom, and emits unpleasant odor, REMEMBER - you should drink it VERY CAREFULLY."
Indeed, there is the part of the "intellectual elite" who is basically either naively enamored with the West, or simply bought by it, that would essentially like to sell the country on the cheap to the Western business because of its alleged love for the European values and/or culture, and so willingly or unwillingly contributes to the psy-ops. These are, indeed, marginalized, and are irrelevant in the big picture; the majority, however, is neither that myopic nor hypocritical. Just because Russians believe European culture to be superior to theirs doesn't necessarily infer they feel compelled to voluntarily surrender their economy as vassal to whatever modern governments rule said Europeans today, the way countries like Bulgaria, Greece, ex-Yugoslavia, now Ukraine did.
As for the acceptance as Europeans, allow me to illustrate my train of thought with an analogy. If you paint your car red, and someone likes that color and copies it to the extent of their ability, they will still consider their car red, regardless of whether you think theirs is pink or brown, and whether you would admit them to the red car club. For the purposes of this particular topic - the Great China Firewall, - this is all that matters, and not what Europe thinks about Russians.
What you are saying is really beside the question here, whether correct or not, as what West thinks of Russians doesn't matter that much in this particular topic. I was pointing out that Russians do look westward culturally, and the oligarchs running the country also look westward in terms of where their economic interests like. My conclusion is that these two factors make Chinese Firewall scenario in Russia highly unlikely.
How successful or unsuccessful Russians are in their attempts to be accepted in the West has really little bearing on the fact that Russians perceive themselves as Europeans.
Slashdot Mirror
Many years ago from now, I also ran a MUD. Being able to spy on other players, and also cheat in favor of your friends, were the main reason players WANTED to become immortals. For those who don't yet know how boring and predictable others are, yeah, the pull is too strong.
google "silicon valley age bias", there are plenty of good articles describing the situation and giving accurate explanations.
my short version is that a company needs to play a special game to keep the younglings happy, and part of the game is so that the company can only employ people who buy into that game. since the older folks wouldn't, a mix is not really an option, and out of the two possibilities, guess which one is the easiest.
(my experience with the Valley is from when I worked there between 2009 and 2013, and some things may have changed since then)
Then why do older programmers have issues getting jobs?
various reasons. one is difference in culture, another is inflexibility that sometimes comes with age, for some is lack of love for various PHBs.. you can google around, https://www.usatoday.com/story... etc. I personally witnessed a few very talented engineers walk out of a decent job because the way they were "managed".
But they apparently have issues getting any position.
"good but not exceptional" category is basically shorthand for "30-ish white guy". these are fine, problems start at 40+
In the UK, a fairly senior level position would be around $60 to $70k, although healthcare costs might make that worth $70 to $80k. So $120k seems pretty damn good.
at forex rates, sure, but at purchasing power parity, especially if you consider rent and real estate prices, chances are the picture is different.
for a reference, when you calculate how much funding a startup needs, the quick estimate is headcount x number of months x 10K. that covers not just the salary but everything the employer pays for - medical insurance plans, payroll taxes where appropriate etc.. should give you a good idea of what kind of comp you should be expecting.
there is a huge shortage of decent programmers. I have personally witnessed more than one phone "interview" that went like "have you done this? what about this? do you know what this is? um, can you start Monday?" (120K-ish salary range)
partly because there are way more people who got their stupid ideas funded than good coders willing to stain their resume with that. partly because if you are funded, and cannot do all the required coding solo, here's your conundrum:
- top level hackers can afford to be really picky, so on one hand it's hard to get them interested, and if you could get that, they often want some ownership of the project. the plus side is that they are happy to work for lots of equity if they have faith in the idea, but that can be a huge "if".
- "good but not exceptional" senior engineers aren't usually going to be super happy, as they often have spouses and children and mortgages, so they'd favor job security over exciting ideas and startup lottery.
- that leaves you with fresh-out-of-college folks, which are really really a mixed bunch. some are actually already senior level of understanding without the experience, some are absolutely useless, with varying degrees in between, and there's no easy way to tell which is which early.
so the not-so-scrupulous folks realized what's going on, and launched multiple coding boot camps programmes, to essentially trick both the students into believing they can become a coder in a month or two, and also the prospective employers that said students are useful. so far it's been working, to a degree, in part because in such companies coding skill evaluation process is broken. but one can only hide their lack of value add for so long, even if they do manage to bluff their way into a job.
As soon as Slashdot userbase becomes 1/100 the size of Facebook's, people start to care, and Slashdot will have to change. So don't you worry...
actually, "tovarishch [rank]" (i.e. "comrade [rank]") is still the standard form of address in the russian army :)
There are two success criteria for a methodology:
* how big of an advantage it provides if implemented correctly
* how easy it is to get it implemented correctly in practice
That second part is really all the difference. I've seen pretty amazing results of agile methodologies in my practice with the right crowd, but most of the time it's not even about *hiring* the right crowd, it's about *having stakeholders buy* into agile first, a step that is often conveniently skipped by agile evangelists.
GMail Offline works just fine for me, you only need to be connected to the internet every once in a while.
also, speaking of redesigns, I kinda prefer GMail Offline's to the online one. apparently they had to come up with a third one :)
well if Valve provided this information for everyone for free, that's where the first interested party might kick in. perhaps Valve doesn't want any negative consequences in relationship with game publishers, and perhaps street cred gained from doing something to "the industry at large" is not enough for them as a compensation.
in theory, Valve could be selling this kind of service. I don't know if they do, but if that is the case, they certainly have good reasons to shut down a free service that would give away this same information. which doesn't contradict what they did in their new privacy policy :)
you have a good point. whether or not that consideration went into Valve's decision making with regards to Steam, we don't really know, but it certainly helps in this regard. me, personally I'm more lamenting the loss of a valuable red-pill source of market size info :) well at least vgchartz is still there.
(I work in game industry, completely unrelated to Valve.) reading the comments so far, it seems there's quite a lot of misunderstanding or misinterpretation what happened here. spoiler alert: it's about user privacy, but not exactly the sharing-with-others-for-commercial-purposes kind.
SteamSpy is a valuable resource to learn what the real popularity of a game is like, because it draws on (previously) open Steam APIs to estimate how many people do actually own the game, and how much it is being played. it is valuable because it allows one to get a good estimation on existing market size of a particular game genre segment. now, there are two parties who don't like this kind of transparency.
first, there are publishers who would very much love to hide lackluster performance of these titles, and keep the hype that "everyone is playing this HOT!! new title" in media through paid articles and ads. naturally SteamSpy breaks this kind of false narrative.
second, as a few folks correctly mentioned here, Steam's profile/friend system makes too many things public by default, and users ARE unhappy about it - since there is still a lot of stigma around playing computer games, and also sometimes you simply don't want to broadcast the fact that you're playing something to the world, or just want to be left alone. Steam friends feature is rather dated, as it was built with sharing and playing games together with your friends in mind, mostly for teenagers in 00s, so it offers relatively few ways to regulate what you want to make public and what you do not. in part, the information that you made available publicly is also available via Steam APIs, which allowed services such as SteamSpy to exist, although that wasn't really its original purpose.
so Steam is actually doing a good thing for its users by tightening up privacy controls, and restricting ways to access someone's status both inside the system and in the APIs. incidentally, this kills services such as SteamSpy, and also inadvertently helps game publishers to hide real numbers related to their titles' performance. oh well.
This is pretty much the blessing and the curse of Ruby - its philosophy works excellently for the best programmers (who are able to write clean and DRY code etc.), but is not really a good fit for mediocre ones, unlike Python or JS. And since there are always only so many best programmers, and majority is always average or worse, Ruby is sort of destined to be niche'y, which may ultimately spell its failure, or it may not. Personally I am enjoying coding in it, even though I am far from the "best programmers", but whether the language is going to last, I cannot be so sure.
Did you actually read the article at the link? There are plenty of links to sources there - Time, Twitter, The Guardian etc. You can't really disregard them simply because they happened to appear in an article on a website you do not like or do not consider reputable.
Makes me wonder if it's technologically possible to digi-sign video as it is being filmed with a digital camera so that at least it can be traced back to a device with a degree of certainty. If there is a relatively cheap way to do this, all major camera brands would incorporate one.
so rigging one's primaries is no concern, only the fact that someone leaked said rigging is?
that's why we can't have nice things.
It is apparent that you do not live in Russia, as Putin's support at home is genuine. He does not need any rigging to win. http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/...
Oh, I did not know about the UN and ICANN - good thing they did, too. And I agree about every country having their own DNS is also good.
From what I read in the published protocols of the Russian Security Council meetings a couple years ago, it has been stated that the country must be prepared for all kinds of possible shenanigans regarding internet connectivity on all levels, from traffic routing and DNS to actual internet services. I have no idea how much Russia relies on the non-Russian servers to route their traffic, but setting up their DNS is certainly a logical step in this direction.
Or, rather, if the US disapproves of something Russia does.
My guess Russian logic goes like this: it is not improbable that relationship between the US and Russia could deteriorate to a level where the US would use control of the root DNS as a weapon. Unfortunate as it may be, but this move appears to be an adequate reaction to this possible threat.
The Circle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And it's not like paid services don't necessarily sell your data, either - after all, revenue is revenue.
The Wikipedia URL mentioned should have ended with a %27 which capitalist Slashdot decided to change into a apostrophe outside the link for some reason. Nekharasho.
>please advise me if I should feel guilty about laughing at this horrible depiction of Russians, and the cultural appropriation it surely embodies
No SJW, but a Russian here. The "maybe do not eat insecurity potato" is pretty much against the core principle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...' and thus very un-Russian. Perhaps cultural misappropriation is of better describings here, comrade.
Here's another example from Russian vernacular. "If you have a bottle of vodka that looks weird, has label badly glued on and turned sideways, not sealed tightly, there is something floating at the bottom, and emits unpleasant odor, REMEMBER - you should drink it VERY CAREFULLY."
You keep confusing culture and politics.
Indeed, there is the part of the "intellectual elite" who is basically either naively enamored with the West, or simply bought by it, that would essentially like to sell the country on the cheap to the Western business because of its alleged love for the European values and/or culture, and so willingly or unwillingly contributes to the psy-ops. These are, indeed, marginalized, and are irrelevant in the big picture; the majority, however, is neither that myopic nor hypocritical. Just because Russians believe European culture to be superior to theirs doesn't necessarily infer they feel compelled to voluntarily surrender their economy as vassal to whatever modern governments rule said Europeans today, the way countries like Bulgaria, Greece, ex-Yugoslavia, now Ukraine did.
As for the acceptance as Europeans, allow me to illustrate my train of thought with an analogy. If you paint your car red, and someone likes that color and copies it to the extent of their ability, they will still consider their car red, regardless of whether you think theirs is pink or brown, and whether you would admit them to the red car club. For the purposes of this particular topic - the Great China Firewall, - this is all that matters, and not what Europe thinks about Russians.
What you are saying is really beside the question here, whether correct or not, as what West thinks of Russians doesn't matter that much in this particular topic. I was pointing out that Russians do look westward culturally, and the oligarchs running the country also look westward in terms of where their economic interests like. My conclusion is that these two factors make Chinese Firewall scenario in Russia highly unlikely.
How successful or unsuccessful Russians are in their attempts to be accepted in the West has really little bearing on the fact that Russians perceive themselves as Europeans.