jobposter1234

The fear is that it happens at a subconscious level. Most people have subtle (latent) biases against disadvantaged groups.

A perfectly awesome to work at company might be doing this out of ignorance, not because they would be a bad place for OP to work.

I feel you are collapsing societal-scope with individual-scope.

Individuals choose whether or not to get pregnant when a man ejaculates inside a woman without protection. If you wish to do that, and bear the fetus to term, I do not wish to pay for your decision.

Individuals should bear the burden of their own decisions, not me.

Holy hyperbole, Batman! When did we go from my original statement, "I'm sure it's not shameful. It might bug you, but I don't see it as something worthy of shame" into the utter annihilation of humanity, and me as a bad person for wanting that?

It's kind of weird that humanity has managed to procreate without extended, government-funded maternity leave up to this point, isn't it?

(I'd also like to mention this discussion is scoped to US Governmental legislation, NOT the debate over humanity's continued existence.)

My original point was that it's not shameful to not provide this entitlement. Somehow we managed to go completely off the rails into zero-population Armageddon.

I would also ask that you tone down the rhetoric, personal attacks, and broad generalizations for the sake of civility.

Keep voting as a bloc and hope the music doesn't stop during their lifetime?

While I know you are being sarcastic, I have a serious question: do you believe that choice should enter the equation?

No choice in getting old, or ill, or injured. But people (Americans) sure have a choice in getting pregnant.

It's one thing for an insurance company to operate in that manner, it's another for the government to do so.

People have a choice whether to procreate. I should either be allowed to participate in that choice, or be removed from the financial consequences.

I'm sure it's not shameful. It might bug you, but I don't see it as something worthy of shame.

I do not have kids, do not plan to have kids, so I'm not sure why I should pay for someone else's decisions to create life. Whenever someone goes on family leave, other people who were not involved with that decision have to pick up the slack.

Now, maybe if I could take paid (or unpaid) leave-of-my-discretion as an alternative, I'd be okay with it. Otherwise, it feels like federal level discrimination against unmarried, child-less, individuals.

Lack of direct and corroborating evidence. Lack of specificity.

IE, a very common historical bias: if it's not written down, it didn't happen.

(FWIW this is a very difficult problem that I do not claim to be an expert in, but I think that's the answer to your question, unless I missed it...)

Just to make sure the HN record is balanced, I point out for future readers that Wikipedia currently records that some research suggests he is a critical ancestor to approximately 0.5% of the world's population. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_e...)

I do this not to participate in the argument but to point uninvolved readers to objective sources.

> We're just not wired for enough internal access to look at how our own minds work.

How can you justify saying this, given we (as a species) are less than 100 years into the exploration of our own minds? At best, you could argue that we do not yet have the vocabulary to argue how our minds work. It's a bit early to suggest we "are not wired" to understand our own cognition.

What is Servo?

The "academic internet" wasn't nearly as impressive as today's internet.

I am (un?)fortunate to have my first memories around the time of the first private networks being connected to the internet (late 80s).

Back then, the internet was run by academics.

It wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd round of commercialization efforts that it really became compelling.

So the structure of the internet is because of the academic beginnings, but the actual content (data, apps, etc.) are IMO b/c of desire to acquire wealth.

This is another example of the results discovered by the Resenhan experiment, where psych students committed themselves to asylums intentionally, but then could not prove their sanity and were locked against their will. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment)

We live in a very interesting world when trained professionals cannot distinguish between people who pose no danger to themselves or others from people who at one point pretended to be abnormal, but were not.

This is a power law distribution, and it's very common in human-created (artificial) measurements. It's difficult to avoid this situation without introducing unforeseen consequences.

Why is it garbage? It seems to me that most programmers who care about their craft would make a halfway decent UI by default.

I believe that interfaces end up the way they do for a reason. I'm curious what the reason is for healthcare -- is it a disconnect between stakeholders in the design stage? Lack of budget?

I'm hoping you can help me learn beyond the "design by committee" or other cliches. or at least understand those cliches in a medical setting.

It's the anti-spam zealots, and not the spammers themselves, that "ruined email for everyone"?

I see this as roughly analogous in any form of media. EG, the commercially successful artists in music are generally pop (Katie Perry, beiber, etc.)

They are the buzzfeed of another market. It seems pretty clear that if you want to go big, you need to compromise on the quality.

"Why" is left as an exercise to the readers.

What about your selected quote do you disagree with? Those seem like relevant facts to understand the context that led to specific records being created, propagated, and saved through history.

It sounds like a detailed version of "history is written by the winners".

Seeing as this thread is about software, I think the point might be that kids know they can't really break software, so they're more willing to experiment.

Informing my mom that she should just try stuff out on her Mac b/c she isn't going to break stuff was huge to help her get over her fear that she's going to click a wrong button and break something on a very expensive device.

[This doesn't address the issue of malware, of course, which is (in a sense) "breaking" your security by clicking a link]

Reasonable people can disagree on what constitutes good graphic design. Further, it has little to do with UI/UX. Even further, most UI/UX designers nowadays are focused on the result (the page), rather than doing a lot of the foundation work of creating the interaction model, etc.

I have little visibility into this field, but it strikes me as one with an awful lot of people stretching their self-description. Even amongst the hard core practitioners (UCD/HCI/human factors people), there are many charlatans who cargo cult.

I notice a non-standard behavior of inserting his homepage before redirecting, and was wondering what HN thought. Is that the behavior you mean? Because the back button works fine, it just has another stop along the way.

Part of me thinks this is genius. Sure, users have to click back twice to get back to HN, but from his perspective, it exposes a lot of people to other content of his in a relatively harmless way.

TBH, I assumed I had clicked through to the game from his home page until I took the time to investigate.

Interesting use of a 302!

I believe part of this is your own frustration, and I do not blame you for venting.

Another part is the inherent error is using education as a proxy for ability to contribute.

My biggest concern, however, is that we assume there is a hierarchy of programmers. That the person who surpasses John Carmack is automatically more valuable than someone else, because it's a vertical pecking order.

In reality, it's likely that given the constraints of a position, Carmack++ is not a good fit.

We see someone build a faster sqrt algorithm as ability. What about the programmer who does his best to navigate internal obstacles adroitly -- why is that not praised just as much? It's certainly a difficult accomplishment -- why praise people for ability entirely?

I'm confused on the point you are making.

Companies that hire programmers live everywhere. Given the disparate perception of a person working at Paypal, etc., compared to a Bay Area startup, even given the difference in purchasing power... Might'n't (?) we conclude that people choose the Bay Area for other reasons than salary and hiring?

Why is the default to believe people in the B.A. are irrational? I say this as someone with no dog in the fight, but have observed each side arguing to defend their bias.

Isn't your small laptop a more powerful system? You state what you do, not why you are doing it, which was the original question.

FTR I support your decision to include your own constraints. I believe better things are developed from constrained systems than from without.

Is sex somehow fundamentally different than every* other act that it should be treated so differently?

* Every. If I used my power at work to make you eat a literal lunch of feces, is that more or less egregious? I know what my gut would say, but why? Isn't the core bad behavior the concept of abrogating another human's free will? Why is sex in this other classification?

Edit: put another way, why is it that being coerced into sex is much worse than being coerced into e.g., murder. Is it simply the frequency? (It doesn't seem like the issue is that the act is against a specific or particular gender/race/hate crime victim group, unless we're differentiating between "straight rape" or "gay rape", which is a moral hazard worth avoiding...)

Very serious issue, but your first point is silly. While the absence of coercion does not clear the bar for "not rape", it does not follow that being unable to declare "not rape" equals "rape".

In your world view, it it inappropriate for any sexual intercourse to exist between a person of power and a subordinate who might gain from a relationship? Because the conclusion of #2 seems to be that sexual relationships can only exist between social / workplace equals, otherwise it will be M.A.D.

Rape is very serious. Sexual relationships are very complex. Every situation is different, and there is nobody (famous) on this forum that knows all the facts and should comment on this case, and should especially not try to draw conclusions from it.

This is more of a comment about the thread in general than your response, except where I specifically asked questions.

What is your definition of rape?

I'm assuming you meant the prices dropped to 1/4 of their previous level. Even then, pretty much any civic minded organization or "citizen scientist" is priced out of the market. In fact, the only people who can access it, in that range, are people who can turn a profit on it, i.e., likely not looking out for the public interest as a primary concern.

Those companies are just cargo-culting into the Big Data cult, like everyone else. It doesn't mean they aren't getting useful answers from their black box.

Heck, sometimes it's even useful to have a Magic 8 ball make a decision for me.

900 kg of CO2 per ton of cement. According to Wikipedia, it generates up to 5% of worldwide manmade CO2 emissions.

1.8 metric tons of CO2 per ton of steel.

200k metric tons of cement = 180k metric tons of CO2 200k metric tons of steel = 360k metric tons of CO2.