jodah

Agree that the challenge is in obtaining partnerships, but not every retailer needs full control of the shopping experience, especially on mobile. And that's the win - alleviating the need for every retailer to solve the same technical problem.

> async/await with async resource management (which C# doesn't have yet) gives it a real edge for server development

An edge over what? You're still limited to a single thread via the GIL. Until that problem is solved, Python is certainly not the best bet (all else aside) for server development.

It's been interesting to watch similar arguments being made of Golang, over and over. From a casual user's perspective, it seems to optimize for (what is to me) the wrong thing, which is readability over maintainability. Without the ability to create abstractions we run the risk of having to re-learn the lessons of the past, about DRY and SRP and all that jazz. While more language features give users more rope to hang themselves with, less language features constrict the ability of larger projects to manage complexity, such as is the case with dynamic languages. For Go, I sense that this will become more obvious over time.

TLDR; Readable code is nice, but maintainable code is better.

> The cynic in me wonders

If this were some no name scientist then you're point would be taken. But James Hansen - that's pretty authoritative. Regardless of where he publishes, people should pay attention.

A few things:

> somehow this became twisted by the furious mob

There's no mob here. If anything, most people seem unfamiliar with this episode.

> Legally in the US you are guaranteed three months of unpaid leave for getting sick

Except where one qualifies for protection under the ADA [1].

> That's not just not despicable, it's laudable

There are two things here. That Reddit maintained the employee for nearly two years, as you say, is clearly laudable, though this decision predated Pao. My overall view of the situation, and likely this goes for others, is in how it was ultimately handled, where Pao said one thing to the employee then did another, more than once. I can see a situation where this could have been handled openly and candidly, with humanity, but that's not what happened.

Maybe in the end he would have relapsed again, and maybe his doctor would have determined that he was too sick to perform his duties, and maybe firing him for that actually would have been legal (without knowing his ADA status we can't know), but that's quite a few 'ifs'. Not knowing what would have happened, Pao could have addressed the uncertainly in an honest way, but instead she chose to lie to and then fire the employee. I'm not a one man mob, and I respect your difference of opinion, but that to me is despicable.

[1] http://www.cancer.org/treatment/findingandpayingfortreatment...

I think he just deleted that one post. The rest were deleted by Reddit, as was the entire conversation for a while, before being restored.

Not sure what the downvoting is all about - let's hope you never get cancer. The source is the employee himself who did an AMA that was partially censored by Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3c0idl/i_am_dacvak_fo...

It was on HN a while back.

> the vitriol which I kept seeing peripherally... was absolutely appalling.

I'm not a Reddit user, but the vitriol seemed pretty commensurate with what motivated it, which among other things included the despicable (and possibly illegal) firing of an employee for having leukemia (more or less).

From my reading, this wasn't about harassment. It was about missteps, many of them. Needless to say, her various apologies were not spurred by harassment.

I'm the opposite. The idea that Clojure is just enough Lisp - that it strips down some of the syntax a bit - is one of the benefits, IMO.

> In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.

Sounds like an argument against their existence. They didn't have to take up the case...

After the housing bubble I kept a close eye on rent/buy metrics and spent several years renting while watching many friends crash and burn after having bought. But aside from the financial aspect, it's hard to overstate the extent to which renters get treated like second class citizens.

When a housing situation goes south and your only recourse is to uproot and move, you're not exactly in an advantageous situation. I had the misfortune of renting from someone who more or less turned out to be a slumlord and whom I had to take to court to get my deposit back from after deciding to leave. The tenant laws were luckily very clear. A landlord needed to prove the condition of the property is what they said it was before and after, which in my case they couldn't since the damages they claimed were fabricated. But to my surprise, the judge, when considering the he-said-she-said nature of the dispute, ruled in favor of the landlord "by default", as she said, even though the law is very clear on where the burden of proof lies. I could have appealed, but by that point I had moved out of state so it wasn't worth the hassle.

When I eventually did buy a home, the lender required a letter from all of my previous landlords stating that I was a tenant in good standing, even from the slumlord, who I can assure you was not interested in doing me any favors. No amount of discussion with the lender could move them on this point, and it looked as if I was not going to be able to get the house. The situation was saved when, at the 11th hour, I quietly received the needed letter from the slumlord's wife, who was apparently more sympathetic.

The idea that the absence of personal letter from an indifferent slumlord could prevent me from buying property was insane, and the entire ordeal, including the court judgement, highlights the extent to which property owners are held in higher regard than renters, as the judge said, "by default". You'll find this to be true in so many situations...

Perhaps it is questionably moral and risky, but why should it be any more so than a corporation filing for bankruptcy? The difference is that bankruptcies are, to some extent, priced into the system. If they weren't and if personal bankruptcies, for example, weren't allowed, we'd see problems with personal and housing loan underwriting standards dropping to the level of students loans. It's no coincidence that there has been a strong push towards making all personal loans exempt from bankruptcy. Being setup to fail is profitable.

So how do you change things? You can change the rules of the game, but the rulemakers are tight with the gamemakers. You can refuse to play, but playing the game is seen as the only way out for many. Or you can refuse to pay and break the game permanently. I don't advocate any particular approach, but I understand those who do.

A lot of commenters are zero'ing in on the author's experience, and I think they're missing the broader point. It isn't about what the author should have done, it's about a system of financial aid and rising educational costs that is broken, and that irreparably punishes people like the author for making mistakes while letting others off the hook. Depending on how you look at it, he was meant to fail all along (principal + ballooning interest = more profit, right?), and that is the point.

> There are people who are screwed by the system, and there are also people who just screw themselves.

And there are people who are neither, such as myself.

I don't think that the discussion about how crappy our system is and how to fix it should be owned by any one of these groups. Maybe the article's author is the not the poster child for financial responsibility, but that doesn't make his arguments about the broken state of our system any less valid.

Problems at the high school level are, not coincidentally, linked to what we're discussing at the college level (that is, they are the result of unusual structures imposed by moneyed interests). I think the best way to prevent financial train wrecks from misaligned incentives is to realign incentives. A post above about the Australian student loan system is a good example of what this could look like.

Something is wrong if we've reached a point where only the very rich (or the very poor) can go to a nice school. And something is wrong if only certain fields of education are valued enough to cover their costs. Economic theory says that the cost of education in the less valued fields should drop, but the easy access to loans for the study of anything, which can never reasonably be paid off, prevents that from happening. Depending on which side you're on, this is a feature, not a bug.

It's refreshing to see the occasional reminder, such as yours, that our situation in America is unusually bad.

> How is this system supposed to work well? It seems to be clearly designed to make money, not to educate people, which doesn't seem like a good way to enhance and maintain your society.

It does work well, for certain interests. But it's the same for almost any important financial concern in America. Taxes, utilities, medical care, retirement funding, most of our important systems are intentionally structured to fatten the wallets of powerful interests at the expense of maintaining society. And it's only getting worse, as the trade deals currently under negotiation clearly demonstrate.

> I'd say it's very clear that this is exactly one of the things the mechanism is intended for

Actually, no. The fundamental requirement of the H1B program is that workers be paid the prevailing wage. The only way that's possible is for replacement workers to be paid the same as those they replaced, which isn't what happens.

The H1B program is very clearly NOT meant to be a mechanism for importing workers to swap directly into existing jobs at lower pay. This is the crucial point of the article and of Disney's wrongdoing.

That's referencing the H1Bs that Disney employs directly. This article involves hiring a company to import replacement workers on Disney's behalf. They don't need to be prominent in Visa lobbying since they can just hire companies who are, and possibly skirt legal responsibility for their misuse of the H1B program in the process. It's a win for the corporation and a loss for their American workers.

Whether Disney's actions mirror those of other companies acting badly (they do), they clearly violated the purpose of the H1B program.

I'm not sure that outsourcing is the appropriate term, at least not in the usual sense, when your replacement is brought in to sit in your exact chair.

> I find mainstream hostility towards skilled workers really interesting because if you had replaced this group of people with any other group of people like women or other ethnic minorities, you can really start to see how outright hostile people are.

It's not just that, if the same practices were used in other industries that are traditionally protected (doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, accountants, etc) or unionized, all hell would break loose. But nobody seems too bothered that this happens to tech workers.

> To me, this doesn't look as horrible as the article makes it out to be. > Am I missing something in the numbers?

Whether it's horrible or not, the point of the article is that Disney (via it's subcontractor) is violating the H1B program by using it to directly replace workers at a lower wage.

They weren't fired for failure to carry out their duties, they were fired because they were more expensive than their H1B replacements, which clearly violates the purpose of the H1B program.

So, was it legal for Disney to fire them? Probably. Was it legal for Disney (or rather, its contractor) to replace them with H1Bs? Probably not.

The point of the article isn't that someone else got their job, it's that someone else was imported to take their job under the guise of a program that is intended to fill labor shortages at the prevailing wage, not as a means of achieving a cheaper workforce.

But that's different than having your replacement come here, to US soil, to sit in your exact chair as your replacement on an H1B. Whether you find this offensive or not, it's a clear violation of the intent of the H1B program as the sole purpose here is to drive down labor costs.

It's funny, the parallels between Putin and Blatter. They both have tried hard to hold onto power, knowing that when they lose it the skeletons will start flying out of the closet.

He has a shot, and it's great to see him taking this stand, but he's a flawed person/candidate in many other ways.