alxp

"Our ancestors died because as Germany built towards genocide, companies like IBM powered & profited from their persecution

https://twitter.com/NeverAgainActn/status/116974370768966860...

China’s sexist culture – from the point of view of a Chinese girl

http://telcontarrulz.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/chinas-sexist-...

> Now, you have an object file, but to run the app you will need to link it first. Press ‘L’ at the Workshop prompt (it’s a hidden option)

Ouch.

So I don't actually know, does Uber flash up a big red warning when you're about to book a cab that your usual $10 ride is going to cost you a lot more? One of the reasons people dislike the surge pricing is that it was taking people by surprise.

If Uber wanted to still please the people with more money than time they could just add a 'bribe' button to add $5 or $10 or more to your ride request so drivers will be more likely to accept that request.

Girls? Like 8 year olds? Who says 'girls' anymore?

Yep, no one who used Windows 3.1 extensively would put up with losing at Minesweeper on the first click. MS was actually pretty nice about rearranging the map so that the first click would not be a losing move.

I looked into those, but my preference for not ever leaving the home keys is trumping using the scroll wheel for now.

I recently switched from NetBeans to Emacs, and while NetBeans did support split windows, it involved carefully dragging a tab to just the right place in the application, then adjusting, then reaching for the mouse any time you wanted to scroll. With Emacs, it's not just split windows, it's split windows accessible via one key command, and a shortcut key to scroll the _other_ window without switching that really boosts my productivity.

The thing I thought I'd miss the most was not being able to use the scroll wheel in the text terminal, but using 'go to next function' and 'go to previous function' key combos, along with making very liberal use of inline search has done a pretty good job replacing how I previously navigated documents.

I didn't think that not having to leave the home row keys was such a big deal but now I have to do it so much less often taht I can feel how jarring it is to my rhythm of working.

It's a shibboleth in social media to show that you travel by air often. It's even sillier when Canadians do it because what the everloving crap does YYZ or YUL tell you if you don't already know what they mean.

> It solves all the same problems as Basic Income, but with far lower disincentive for work, and at far lower cost.

There is a basic assumption people make that a basic income would result in masses of people lazing about doing nothing just because they can. Canada experimented with a minimum income in the 1970s in a Manitoba town, and here's what happened: http://disinfo.com/2013/02/the-forgotten-history-of-a-canadi...

"Only two segments of Dauphin’s labor force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families."

More sources at Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

A study by UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto actually showed that luxury car owners were by far the most aggressive drivers, and the least likely to stop for other road users.

http://www.bankrate.com/financing/cars/study-bmw-drivers-are...

For whatever reason BMW stood out most of all as the worst of the worst in this study, but 'expensive car drivers are better drivers' has been proven to not be an assertion you can make from common sense or intuition.

A lot of the old announcements were due to "we finally squeezed a few more MHz out of the G4/G5, thank god." variety.

If someone is "less than productive" you let them go. If they could use some improvement, encourage them to spend their 20% non-core work time learning and improving their basic abilities. Better to grow a less-productive employee who could improve than to roll the dice and try someone else, or expect anything to change while piling on a full workload of critical tasks.

And Atlantic Canadian cities are still great places to live because Canada has invested in social safety nets, sane urban development, and not abandoning entire cities. 'Detroitification' is a not-even-wrong way to describe how any population centre in Atlantic Canada has fared.

> What incentive does a waitress have to give you good service if she's making a standard wage and no tips?

Does your boss pay you a few extra dollars if you were extra productive and cheerful today? No? Would that be kind of demeaning, actually? Do you do a good job because it it's what you want to do?

Careful, if you get Shards of Honor you'll quite likely find yourself plowing through dozens more books in the Vorkosigan series.

On /r/askhistorians someone asked about this idea that universal education was brought about to raise a nation of docile factory workers.

Here's the thread, the idea gets debunked pretty hard http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hbezd/was_th...

I feel kind of gross for creeping on his old resume, but the idea of having "jobs@mydomain.com" as an e-mail address is a really good one I hadn't thought to do before.

> from what I've seen, the increased pay more than offsets the increased cost of living

Only if you're willing to downsize. Some people are, but it's a tough sell to lots of people.

Obligatory Vimes quote:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Source: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...

There's a fable warning about the problem of throwing out a suggestion because you think one needs to be made, and then everyone going along with it because it's what they think the group wants, when no individual actually wants to do that thing. It's called the Abilene Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

An advocacy group for other minorities in tech probably just got a great idea of something they can lobby for themselves, and are very thankful to the Ada Initiative for the idea.

You might not realize it but the thing you're complaining about? That's the Patriarchy to a t. No one thinks 'patriarchy' means 'all men oppressing all women.' except people constructing straw men. Patriarchy is the force that both tells women they belong at home and tells men that it's honourable to die in war. It's all around us.

HN doesn't like sarcastically pointing out mansplaining, that's pretty clear.

I deleted the original reply because I made it in haste and it was rude.

But you do need to put in the practice time to be able to be productive when you need to be. If your process involves a lot of procrastinating with intermittent bursts of brilliance ,you won't be able to be relied upon when things get tough. Stephen King became the writer he did because his wife would tell him to write a story, the baby needs diapers, and he did.

So before you can work smart, you have to know how to work hard. Otherwise you're just goofing off.

> It isn't always reasonable, being called out for shitty behaviour is step one, step two is either you apologize because you realize you were in the wrong, or you have a discussion and hopefully both parties understand each other better at the end.

The idea that women have a hot branding iron with them where ever they go that they can use to permanently stamp the word 'sexist' onto whomever they like at the slightest offense is utterly silly - doubly so when it reverses the actual power dynamic that women deal with when in a room full of men.

Dick jokes may or may not be misogynistic depending on the intent and the context. The default assumption that a woman's actions are to attract attention? That's misogynistic. Stop doing that.

> There could just as likely have been a strong, dangerous reaction to the men who made the comments.

'dangerous'? Really? Are people who fight against sexism really 'just as likely', is in, have displayed a pattern of the same behaviour in the past? Or is this a false equivalency?

OK, let's give it a try:

"How can it be not cool to make a penis joke in a room where a few people may overhear it"

Since it is against the PyCon CoC, pretty easily.

> How can it be a fireable offense to make a penis joke in a room where a few people may overhear it

You should take that up with the people who did the firing. The only thing that happened at PyCon was that the organizers told them to knock it off and they did.