externalreality

I agree with you, but I don't have too much more to add. From birth non-blacks (and blacks alike) are classically conditioned by numerous socio-environmental stimuli to believe that blacks are inferior. I believe that all other issues discussed in this thread are based that unfortunate foundation. And that foundation is, of course, based on the tragic history of our country with respect to race relations.

istjohn, I deeply appreciate your question. I've been sitting here for over an hour trying to answer so I'll just answer simply. Yes, I would rather have gone to a school in my neighborhood. I would have rather been around other African American and LatinX students than to have learned what it is to be neglected and to feel inferior @ 4.5 years old. No question.

Please don't use my response as an argument in support of segregation. That would be purely evil and disgusting.

If I was to setup such a service I would have a simple text bot scanning popular sites for occurrences of my brand name and when a hit occurs it would make an Amazon Mechanical Turk ticket so that workers in Nepal could log a system that cycles accounts to that service so that they can leave a good review to counter the bad one. 10 cents a "counter" review. Why spend a bunch of money for in-organic robo-reviews when you can have real people writing reviews for dirt cheap.

A second service would be to have Americans pressure a site to have detrimental user content removed. For example, if someone starts a thread about how the name of my product was stolen from an indigenous community's recipe, our service would nip that in the bud.

Your brand management department would love us. These services already exist.

It's not just Amazon its everything. Companies spend large quantities of money on media control, we all know this. I probably a hand full of media companies in the USA, China, and India that are selling a review control service.

This a good thing! I am 100% in support of James' endeavor here. However, students doing better when put in a better environment should not be surprising. I was a lower income student who was shipped across town to a majority white school as a anti-segregation program that was brokered with a federal oversight committee. The African Americans in that school were treated quite bad. My first day at school I was labeled "<my first name> Brown" by the kindergarten because there was a student who already had my first name in the class. My last name isn't "Brown" that's my skin color. That was my first minute in school and I'm only 36 years old not 66 years old.

You really didn't describe the tool or its intended audience all that much. It looks like some kind of idea map. What is the innovation? Why would I pick this tool over any other such tool (there are many of them).

However, I think you can make something happen here. Perhaps you can find a specific use-case and specialize. When there are many competitors in a market the only real thing to do with a new product is to find one particular and popular use case and specialize the product for that use case. After that there is no need to worry about competitors from an innovation standpoint because there is nothing more you can do.

I agree with you. However, without trying to take your points down a slippery slope, your points don't apply to safety concerns. We can't have robo-cars hitting black people because the designers neglected to test the pattern recognition libraries on dark-skinned people. That, you can probably admit, is different from a bar of soap making peoples' skin a bit dry, or lotion not taking into account melanin, or the game designer neglecting the Linux community.

This may be a bit off topic, but the world needs more people like you. From what you've described I say you are tougher yet more realistic than most. Fearless. I don't know why the job you left didn't realize that. Most would kill to have employees like you given those employees are also productive.

I agree with Trexen though. Your application will likely fail. Most successful applications I've seen succeed (and companies) are never cold start like that. They always seem to come from an established business approaching someone and professing need for their idea/passion/tool and agreeing to be an early adopter/customer. Maybe you can try finding your early adopter/customer before beginning development on your next project. It's a good way to bring in money earlier and a good way to attract investors. It's hard to develop a tool in isolation without a customer guiding you with use-cases and real world need.

> The computer vision systems could still beat real human vision systems.

For pattern recognition, No, the computer vision system can't best a human.

I heard about different research like this about six years ago. So the algorithm wasn't tested on dark-skinned people. Is this really something new? Product developers in a wide variety of markets still neglect to take into account dark skinned peoples when developing their products. Why should it come as a shock that facial recognition product developers suffer from the same bias?

Well, as a software developer, I don't mind my work being monitored as long as I am unaware that the employer is monitoring me. If I know the employer is monitoring me I will become self-conscious and the employer would then, in essence, destroy my productivity. However, like writers, coders think about what they are going to write next and web search stuff a lot more than they code so monitoring a developer in real time would probably be pretty boring - and employers would probably be dismayed at how much they pay us to google/cut/paste/modify/test.

In all seriousness though the situation is that, privacy concerns be damned, if valuable data can be collected it will be collected. Absent laws protecting worker privacy, employers will collect as much information about you as they can and use it in whatever way the deem necessary. It's a sad and unfortunate truth.

From what I understand individuals and groups are, in support of Assange, disrupting the lives of average people. The above link shows not the downed server of a some political organization but that of a high school (and a military high school at that). Please stop this behavior of hacking attempts that affect people's lives and education.

Forgive me if I sound as if I am against foreign investment. I am not. The degree of control that something like Jumia, a foreign entity, would have over these emerging economies is what is troublesome.

Sound advice but when you read a comment the tone is generally dictated by whether you agree with the comment or not, since voice inflection is absent. I do agree, you have to word thing more carefully in the absence of voice inflection.

You shop on Jumia because it's convenient. It's also convenient for foreign interest to setup an Amazon like business to skim millions off the top of an economy that can scarcely afford it. The point is, Jumia is not good for Ghana, a domestic company would create more jobs and keep hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth from leaving the country. Its not about whether or not you get your 1st world products delivered on time, its about pulling yourself out of the 3rd world and Jumia is not helping you with that.

Many people forget that when Japan first started producing cars they were so bad at it some models didn't even operate in the rain. Or that American steel, originally, was supremely subpar to British steel. Its about doing whats best for the country - and having some foreign entity control a good portion of the commerce in the country (especially when it is so easy to build your own) is not a good idea for an emerging economy.

Remember, also, that Jumia will have the same control over market that Amazon does which is immense power and why the United States is considering limiting Amazon's power over the market. Basically, if Jumia begins to not only control the market but participate in the market as well it will be bad for these small nations.

I think this comment misses the point by speaking of Ubuntu in the face of the incompatible idea of capitalism. The company is not an African company in the sense that it is not owned (and thus likely not operated) by Africans. Africa is almost entirely owned by foreign entities in the most exploitative fashion. Ubuntu is a enlightening concept of fundamental good and sharing but it should not be used as a tool to allow foreign interests, who follow no such concept, to take more than they are giving back. I am really skeptical as to whether you are really an African. If you are an African I would go as far as to say your "Ubuntu mentality" is not an Ubuntu mentality at all but a neo-colonial one.

> Canada's largest chain of coffee shops (Tim Hortons) is owned by a Brazilian company.

You are comparing apples and oranges. In many cases larger countries are able to conduct fair trade agreements. In the case of smaller countries they usually don't have the resources (military/political influence) to enact fair agreements and are "ripped off" by companies offering jobs.

It seems "Africa’s largest e-commerce company" is not African at all. It always pains me to see this when I visit small countries. Jobs are one thing, but if small countries find that massive resources are leaving the country in the name of those jobs then what's the point - it can be considered some form of trade at best and in the worst case colonization.

There's a lot of fantasy in this article. Most programmers today do very little actually - we don't wield major influence. We basically glue together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings. The most critical skill is that ability to move fast by practicing with our Free Open Source offering tools. We pay (MS, Google, or Amazon) to host our applications. And we perform maintenance on these applications for years. Nothing special, anyone can do it. More and more people enter the work force every years. Since all things are becoming automated there will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future. We get to wear nerd clothes and act smart but generally all one has to do is be able to read documentation and use a computer. I would reckon that the average 13 year old who has a good reading comprehension can do what most programmers do these days. It's like playing a video game. They would probably be better at it too.

How is concerns about net neutrality and the absence of net neutrality party politics. Aren't all politics party politics in the USA.

As far as the topic concerns. It just goes to show how much power big business has. Clearly net neutrality is what caused the USA to become leaders in internet technology. Why not keep things fair. Who are our politicians supporting by not adopting this bill.

> You can't refactor code without tests

See this is where the conversation goes south. You will use the phrase "unit tests" when it suits you, and then, like a magician using indirection, generalize to the word "tests" when it suits you.

Why are you listening to Uncle Bob so much?

I mean you can do as you like. However, the strong "Uncle Bob" style assertions should probably be left out of most articles in favor of a more humble "this is what worked for me/us" approach. Universal rules for any discipline are very hard to come by. Sharing what worked for you on your projects is great but it becomes somewhat obnoxious when you try to generalize it to universal rules that works in all environments for everyone.

Also, I think that large unit test suites, where most of the tests are redundant, come about in competitive environments where if you try to make a commit without a test some other competitive coder will try to use it as a "I know better" stepping stone and call you out on the change - "Where is the test". After 3 years of this behavior what do you think your going to have. A nice clean suite of tests or a monstrous big ball of stubs, mocks, faked, copy pasta that resulted from defensive social coding.

Honestly, write a light suite of tests that get to the point, and keep your ability to code swiftly and make changes quickly. As the code matures you'll find the trouble spots and focus testing on those areas. Don't blindly follow methodologies that are going to have you writing large test suite for version pre-alpha 0.0, and now your updating a large test suite for every micro-change just to make it to beta 1.

Here is an old article by DHH where he rails against unit testing dogma. Ironically it was ideas from the Ruby community that formed a lot of the basis of the mad dog McCarthyan style unit test dogma. https://dhh.dk/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html

Functional purists are the only one's who hate it. OOP by its very nature encourages developers to make bold abstractions prematurely (where prematurely is interchangeable with unnecessarily) and subjectively. Mean while the procedural programmer (Golang) has already finished the segment of the program having written one big function. If a piece of that big function is needed elsewhere she factors it out. Most of her program are simple loops and conditionals. Programs are easy. Programs are easy, why complicate something that is easy.

The machine should also guide the programmer as much as possible. I wish Golang had refinement types like Liquid Haskell or ATS. Some simple static analysis to cut down on crufty slow runtime test suites.

The author does a good job painting propaganda in its awesome and terrible social media incarnation. The analogy between ISIS with the NZ maniac is a bit troublesome however and I'll tell you why. When I served in Afghanistan, as a mere child myself in the very early 2000's, I saw children in the street (if you can call it a street), dirty, unfed, walking over to a dirty stream washing what appeared to be glass out of the smallest one's foot - all in a town destroyed by whatever. Those children are adults now, how can I blame them for the hatred they must carry around. The western world created the hatred that is (was) ISIS, in the name of big oil. And we were warned of the consequence before stepping a figurative foot in the middle east. The Christchurch shooter, I don't know his story, but I'm sure his hatred didn't come from seeing an occupying force's unmanned aerial vehicle kill his loved ones at the tender age of 4. The NZ shooter's madness and the madness of ISIS are not the same. So My advice to the author is next time you want to preface 4 paragraphs of ISIS talk with a sentence about the a white supremacist to make yourself look less biased, remember that audiences are waking up to the theme of your article - propaganda.

Programming is simple. Domains and interfaces are difficult. People over engineer stuff. People like to think they found the key to hidden wisdom. I believe I just summed up 90% of the difficulty with programming.

Just for the record procedural programming and functional programming are the only two styles of programming to me that make sense. Procedural because its how the machine model works and functional because its how a mathematical description of computation works. WTF is OOP (how the over active imagination of a child works I would reckon).

> breaking something critical that you may have missed in your acceptance tests.

So you can miss things in your acceptance tests but can't miss them in your unit tests? Why do you feel more confident with unit tests than with acceptance tests? Maybe because unit tests break more often so they are providing you with a false sense of security? Do you know that when a test fails for a reason other than the specified assertion its a called a false negative and the failure is meaningless? Do you know if your tests fail and no functional or non-functional requirements of the program has changed the failure is also meaningless (you are testing implementation)? Ask yourself how often does your group give you time to do these hypothetical large refactoring that give merit to large unit test suites? How many times, even, do you do small refactorings and find all the test have to go away or significantly change anyway because they made some implementation assumption that is no longer true? How many times have you gone into a test suite and have seen that its been patched up so many times that you can swear its testing something but you just don't know what? I know that Uncle Bob tells us about test for refactoring and this and that, but I just don't buy it any more. The emperor is naked god dammit. Uncle Bob and the like are very famous because people swallow their anecdote without due scrutiny.

I agree with this article. Good stuff. One minor gripe:

> if you care about the code, you need to have unit tests for it.

That's not really true. You can test at a differently granularity and still have the same confidence in your code. Scores of brittle unit tests crowding your productivity is not what you do to code you care about. I wish people would just stop propagating this detrimental rumor that is backed by zero evidence. I prefer to keep my unit test suite lite and sweet (try to test what is very sensitive at the unit level - easy to miss or algorithmic things) and then try to get the most out of my acceptance test suite. Sorry, but I just worked on too many systems where the unit tests suite breaks no matter what you touch and you spend more time updating the tests than actually getting shit done.

IBM replace 30% of HR with this algorithm. I mean I can't say I miss them. HR is worthless. They do nothing. If you want to retain employees find out the patterns that indicate that an employee is about to leave and find out the patterns that make those employees stay. IBM is doing this. HR, and their condescending, faux professionalism doesn't actually help employees with anything. Most of them act like they are trained behavioral analyst, diversity experts, what have you when they poses barely any training at all and are just talking nonsense. Semi-automated machine assisted AI is the way of the future.

You can read Chiba's thesis which explains exactly how they are able to detect the systems calls made by the ELF using static analysis and code flow execution analysis (the techniques all seems very simple and ingenious - you can even try to write a little program yourself that uses their algorithm if you don't believe them). The thesis explains that there are edge cases and how they work around them. Remember they have to handle all of the system calls or the program would suffer from run-time errors.

> Why are containers any more dangerous/vulnerable/prone to leaks than deploying say... a standalone REST API not in a container?

Its not about one service, its about n services running on the same resource partitioned hardware. If one gets compromised how likely is that to affect other services running on other partitions. Containers (High, shared kernel), Unikernels (Lower, different kernel, hardware supported isolation - almost like running n different physical machines).

So here is what I have learned over the years from working for, dealing with, starting my own, and studying consultancy companies. It really quite simple.

Every successful consultancy company I know had several things in common.

1) The founders weren't concerned about money. The could afford to spend time bootstrapping the business because they had some source of fallback that most people don't have. For example, their parents/brother/sister may have been very well off and they knew that even if they "blow it all" it wouldn't mean starvation.

2) A guaranteed client. Most startup consultancies I have encountered had a guaranteed client. That is, a client that is already willing to work with them and throw contracts their way giving the company time to bootstrap itself while paying a few salaries.

3) Sales. Your consultancy is not different than any other consultancy. The only difference is nobody trusts you (see 4) and most prospects will likely go to a more established consultancy. You are going to be spending most of your time doing sales. Don't get discouraged, get some cheap email campaign software, get some cheap lead generation software and keep doing sales. Going to conferences and networking doesn't work in the boutique software consultancy game. It just doesn't.

4) No body trust you. You have to build the most professional web site you can afford and make yourself look trust worthy. Don't build something you can't afford but you need something.

5) (Warning: unethical) Most boutique software companies I know have some unethical gimmick. Basically if you are a white male you can hire cheap labor from India, China, South America, eastern europe and market yourself as the white western world's interface to cheap 3rd world software development expertise. You can hate me for saying that so bluntly, but google it and see how many consultancies ACTUALLY DO THAT. I know of software consultancies (several) that completely bootstrapped themselves this way thriving off of the cheap labor of the 3rd world for years to undercut competitors. This is such a popular technique that new startups are actually giving away months of there cheap labor for free in order to compete with other cheap labor selling consultancies whose prices they can't match and whose name is more well established. Please don't get hung up on the fact that I mentioned this point - its a reality.

6) Don't listen to others who tell you that you can't do it just because they can't.

7) See point 3. If you are not willing to do sales more than you do software than you should just stop right now. If you don't have enough money to pay for a sales then you have to do it yourself.

8) Don't think you have a software consultancy if you've just settled on being an independent contractor. You don't, and you are will likely just be a cog in the engine that I've described in points 1 - 7.

Hint: Nobody uses ML (I'm assuming you mean ML like in Standard ML or the like). Don't get hung up on a particular language or framework. You will just be limiting yourself to a very small segment of the market if you choose some niche language.