Supreme

Since "of color" is inclusive of all non-whites, yes, I do.

>All I read from it was the claim that racism/sexism does not exist, and a request against affirmative action.

I'm actually making the argument that prejudice is alive and well and that that is the whole problem. We should be blind to who prejudice is directed at and attempt to reduce it as a whole, not "fight fire with fire" or "racism with racism."

Yes, that is what I am asserting. The quoted paper says the same thing:

> A more troubling question, the authors acknowledge, regards the white students whom these black students displaced.

Perhaps a better way to put it is "be consistent in what you do, be inconsistent in where you go."

Being consistent in your actions is of paramount importance if you want to master anything. You have to practice day in and day out.

Being inconsistent in your movements matters because what is around us is in a constant state of motion, and we must learn to dance with it.

>How is this racist or sexist?

It's discriminating based on the color of skin and sex.

>If you have a way of addressing the fact that there are few women of color in the tech space, please post your link.

Here's one - provide equal opportunity to all races, colors and creeds and disallow discrimination in any way, shape or form. Share with people who have less. Exclude nobody.

If you'd like to cut out the personal insults, I'd appreciate it.

Cool, more "reverse racism" and "reverse sexism". Remember folks, if we want to be unified we need to segregate. Love is hate. Peace is war.

Orwell must be rolling in his grave - doublespeak is truly the language of the future.

EDIT: Since the view that affirmative action is positive is so prevalent, and that I hadn't previously given it an in-depth look, I've been reading around the subject.

From the horse's mouth (http://www.mat.jhu.edu/~sormani/affirm-impact.html):

> As an illustration of what that would mean, they constructed a rough profile of 700 black students admitted in 1976 under race-conscious policies. Of the 700, 225 obtained professional degrees or doctorates; 70 are now medical doctors, 60 are lawyers, 125 are business executives and more than 300 are civic leaders. Their average annual earnings are $71,000.

As expected, getting people into higher level education substantially improves their quality of life.

> A more troubling question, the authors acknowledge, regards the white students whom these black students displaced. Would society have been better off if they had attended instead of the blacks?

> "That is the central question," the authors write, "and it cannot be answered by data alone." It is a clash of "principle versus principle, not principle versus expediency." They come down firmly on the side of admitting the blacks, saying that society needs them because of the scarcity of black professionals.

> "In the case of universities and colleges, race turns out to be very relevant because we are interested in what students can teach one another and race is a part of that in an increasingly diverse society. Well-prepared minorities have a special leadership role because there have been so few in the past. So what is fair involves the question of the purpose of a university. And, ultimately that question is not soluble with data."

In summary, a subset of people are earning substantially more than another subset, where both were equally qualified for the position, because their skin was a particular color. The justification for this is that the minority is a minority. The proponents assert that whether this is right or wrong is a question of principal. They assert that this causes a minimal impact on the majority population and a significant benefit for the minority population. They do not apply concrete numbers to this last assertion and instead state percentages. Ofcourse, those percentages translate into living, breathing human beings who, in the absence of race-based discrimination would be living a very different life.

Fairness is not an obvious thing, it seems. Fairness depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If your target is making sure that the year book photos have the right balance of color, by all means discriminate. If your target is giving people a fair opportunity based on their abilities then a meritocracy might suit you better.

Can't we all just be equal? Can't we just share with people who have less than us and help them get on their feet without disenfranchising someone else? Can't we make room for everyone, no exclusions? Call this idealistic but I'm just being real about it.

Well gee, sorry I didn't refute your argument in the form of a DH6 retort in the form of refuting the central point. What most people on the internet seem to miss is an incredibly profound insight.

We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.

Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.

In my experience it has nothing to do with evidence. People are emotional creatures and said emotion pervades every choice they make, whether they think themselves to be rational or not. Incidentally, the rational ones have the most trouble accepting their emotions which in the grand scheme of things makes them among the most ignorant of society.

I think that the changing attitudes are simply due to the old guard dying from old age and disease. When there are sufficiently few people who grew up in the era of hardcore anti-drug propaganda then there will be a policy change.

Oh right, that's why it's not working. So if we all take drugs on the streets then the law will change. Will try this weekend and report back, assuming that I won't be in jail for the next 5-10 years.

>Should not unjust laws be protested, if perhaps also disobeyed?

I, and millions of people around the world, have been disobeying the draconian drug laws for years and it's getting us nowhere. What advice do you have?

A thousand times this. I used OSX at one job where everyone else was too and was appalled at how bad it is for getting work done. It's pretty and shiny but broken by design in terms of usability. Switching windows is a pain in the ass (different shortcuts to 'alt-tab' between windows of the same application), maximizing a window doesn't work properly, no way to change the window manager. Those are just my gripes with the GUI. As parent pointed out, the best way to do *nix-based work on OSX is to run linux on a VM. This throws the 'is unix-like' argument out the window.

So a crap GUI, crippled CLI, very questionable company policies and politics and to top it off it costs twice as much as everything else. You have to be out of your mind to buy into this.

It's equally hilarious that the western governments use terms like free speech in the same sentence that they announce censorship. I'd lump them in the same category as far as contradictions go.

How cute, the same guy who wrote a programming language in order to solve a trivial problem is going to be chairman of the App Developers Alliance.

See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

I don't think that I'll ever be able to take this guy seriously.

Optimization #4:

alias play="sleep 120 && ..."

Two minutes should be enough for the craving to pass :-)

Optimized version:

# turn on

sudo rm /etc/hosts

sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.work,}

# turn off

sudo rm /etc/hosts

sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.play,}

Optimized further (in your ~/.bashrc):

alias work="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.work,}"

alias play="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.play,}"

Optimization cubed (lets you define a base hosts file):

alias work="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo cat /etc/hosts.base >> /etc/hosts && sudo cat /etc/hosts.work >> /etc/hosts"

alias play=...

The number of upvotes, the fact that you thought this was necessary and the fact that this application exists all made me facepalm hard. I can't even see right now.