knowtheory

for what it's worth, that was neither flippant, nor snark. A lot of people listen to Dr. Oz and he has promoted the use of palm oil as healthy.

The FDA's ban on transfat is almost entirely after the fact. Transfats have been on the outs for a long time, and their use has declined in accordance.

The rise in the use of palm oil has more to do with people thinking that because it's natural, it's "healthy" for you (which is really only true if your baseline for comparison is eating tubs of margarine) thanks to folks like Dr. Oz.

So, since you can't see my eyeroll at the downvotes, here are citations:

NPR piece noting that transfat usage has dropped by 86% before the ban: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/16/414906829/fda...

And somewhat surprisingly the wikipedia article on the nutritional & health effects of palm oil is pretty well cited: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Palm_oil#Nutrition_and_healt...

tl:dr; Transfats are bad for you. That's why they don't sell them. Palm oil isn't vastly healthier than other oils. Eat less fat.

Hey Dan,

Paul Ford and his editor Josh Tyrangiel went on Charlie Rose's show last week to talk about the essay, and you can get some sense of Tyrangiel's acquisition of the topic:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-12/-what-is-cod...

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Zed's book is concretely about introducing programmers (particularly new ones or ones going from higher level managed languages down into C) to where and how C can be dangerous especially around string management.

And that's why this is a style issue. Even if he disagrees with Zed's approach (and in particular how undefined behavior is discussed) it's just mendacious to claim that Zed isn't introducing his readers to the idea that one needs to be careful with strings and understand what kind of inputs one will receive.

This is a critically different behavior when compared to Ruby or Python where string management is done for you, and coming from the POV of someone who's familiar with those languages... Zed's approach makes sense. Especially when the alternative being suggested is "you absolutely must go read the C spec and K&RC".

The full quote is "Let me start by saying that unlike Mr. Shaw, I am not a writer. I'm an engineer. Thus, this will be written from that perspective."

By implication, Zed's book is not written from the POV of an engineer (otherwise why would this be worth noting in any way shape or form? The topic under discussion is already software engineering).

At this point people just keep trying to pick fights with Zed. He's not out there picking fights with others (well any more than anyone else).

And all of the posts pointing this out all disclaim that "while they don't agree with Zed about some things..."

It's just kind of sad from a rhetorical perspective.

It's clear that the guy who wrote this post doesn't agree with Zed's pedagogical style, but that doesn't make Zed's book wrong in detail or approach. It just means this guy doesn't agree with the style. And he's not upfront about it either due to a lack of introspection or forthrightness.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case.

"Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Strong enough?

Github decided to do something. Nobody forced them to do it. They decided. We also don't know on what terms they decided to take that repository down.

Positioning feminism as an outside pressure group that is more powerful than the Chinese Government is pretty weaselly framing, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you tell me who's trying to chill whom.

> How many repos they took down that weren't malicious in any way, but simply didn't gel with the tech industry's current strongly pro-feminist attitude?

Through precisely which mechanisms do you believe that repositories are being removed due to anything resembling "pro-feminist" ideology?

Does github have a "report this repo for not being feminist enough" button that i've been missing all this time?

> Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

Yes. I know a number of people (some women, some not) who were excellent software engineers, sharp minds, good at teasing a part a puzzle who have left the field.

People balance quality of life together with compensation (and whether the opportunity is interesting), or everyone would be trying to become an investment banker.

It is certainly the case that if being a woman software engineer sucks more than being a man software engineer that calculus may result in clearly delineated differentials like the ones we see today.

Yeah, one of the huge problems our field has is that it doesn't give people a solid sense of how you upgrade your skills and what kind of waypoint you're at relative to others (and that that's okay!).

It is magnificent to encourage newcomers to the field. We should also have level playing fields for folks to participate with everyone (and not stratify further than we already do). But it sucks when these sorts of objectives collide and end up alienating people. (and heck sports have awards for rookies for example!)

The other thing that's really gear-grinding about OP is that... we're judging our worth based on what happens in hackathons? I hope to $deity most people aren't doing that, because hackathons are super slanted POVs on the world.

That's an interesting idea, but again, problem is that most journalism isn't done for video right now (not to say that there's none. There is a fair amount, just definitely not anywhere near the majority of either video produced, nor journalism written)

That's a hard thing to disentangle, because investigative reporting isn't just done by people with "investigative reporter" in their titles.

If you want a random waypoint Propublica's staff costs for 2011 were around 5mil$ for a small but very investigative focused news org: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/142... (granted they're also not a typical news org).

better e-ink devices won't fix the problem that the internet has completely changed the advertising market and how brands reach consumers.

It's hard to see what newspapers could do to get the same returns per unit sold or page viewed as they have historically. And that means a couple possible things: readers bear more of the cost, advertisements get more intrusive (or crazier), or newspapers find some other way to make money.

Shirky's post in 2009 was one of those great clarion calls. Failure is always an option (and not the kind you learn from and pivot off of).

Noting that newspapers aren't necessary (but journalism is) is great, but the problem is that a lot of (most?) journalism is still done in newspapers... and the way the media is currently breaking up, where companies like the Tribune Company and Gannett are splitting their television holdings from their newspapers means that journalism and newspapers may not be inherently tied together... but when it comes down to it, they are still for all practical intents and purposes tightly coupled.

Web based news orgs like Vox, Fusion, Gawker and Buzzfeed are making some moves towards funding journalism (Buzzfeed in particular has great investigative reporters), but they are way too few in number to replace newspapers as a home for investigative journalism even as the industry stands today in its depleted state.

Except this is a post about his book and his teaching? But here we are dedicating all this time to rehashing all this stuff that happened years ago with people who obviously weren't there at the time.

It does make a difference because Jenn's rise to general attention has been through her satirical and artistic work (as well as the fact that she's an awesome developer who worked at the NBA and now works for Bocoup).

The context in which everyone was relating to Zed was the dude who wrote mongrel who did an about face and not only left the ruby community but decried it all the way out.

Remember this was in the heyday of Ruby on Rails's rise, twitter was still using mongrel as their primary web serving mechanism.

re [1]: This is not an accurate reflection of the events and circumstances at the time.

The "Zed's so fucking awesome" follows the Rails is a Ghetto post, and the start of acrimony between Zed and other members of the Rails community, and so was more of a consequence of the aforementioned acrimony than it was the cause.

Keep on hatin'. Zed's just going to keep writing books that help people, and your impression of him will merely drown beneath the tides of people who benefit from all the work he's put into FOSS & teaching others.

I don't agree w/ Zed on everything, but i have benefitted from his work for literally a decade now: mongrel; his early writing on why programmers should learn statistics; his writings on the types of collaboration/projects programmers are involved in; Learn C The Hard Way; his various talks.

If discussing gender is a threatening proposition to you, your problem is likely not that gender exists.

Also, you've admitted that gender matters since by general population statistics 50+% of your users aren't men? So like... seems like it'd be a legit topic to discuss?

Yes there are many web developer who rely on rubygems, but it was written and continues to be maintained today by people who are (not perfect) but good developers who like Aaron, find shit like this and fix it.

If you actually cared, you'd be out there using your vaunted skills to improve the software other people use, instead of slagging off other developers on Hacker News.

Yep, and the location identification is pretty broken too.

I live in Columbia Missouri (MO) and the rankings for "Columbia" include folks from Columbia Maryland (MD) and Columbia South Carolina (SC).

So even if people want to use dashboard summary data like this, they should do some basic validation to figure out what the data means and how it was analyzed (and what flaws it might entail).

Surely we can agree that discrimination is not only about intent.

And, again, if you make someone else feel bad is it the right thing to do to go "oh, well i didn't mean to make you feel bad, so you shouldn't feel that way."

Okay, it's great that you've got concerns about how guys feel, but shouldn't we equally consider how women in the field feel too?

I had female friends with whom i took CS classes who all had stories about guys who would do super weird things like start talking badly about them to others or refusing to cooperate with them on class projects after it being made clear that there was no romantic interest.

Nit picking individual comments or trying to negate how people feel about the circumstances they find themselves in isn't really addressing their concerns is it?

Hopefully you can understand that intent isn't everything?

Being considerate of others isn't just saying "pshht i didn't mean anything by it!" it's actually thinking about how other people might react in the circumstances they've been put in.

You can call sexism a lens, but it might also help to understand the experiences others have lived (from their POV, not yours) to see why it's a lens that others are brought to employing.

Why would this necessarily be true?

Several authors have written about algorithmically generated & operated companies or entities (Charlie Stross, the Ghost in the Shell) either as litigation shields or entities which outlived their owners but continued to operate.

The idea is certainly odd, to essentially create autonomous and roughly speaking self-sufficient/directed artificial creatures, but it's consistent at least.

The thought that makes me saddest i think is just that the core quality we'd imbue humanity's first autonomous creations with would be capitalist wage-slavery (a literal non-hyperbolic one in this case).

On the flip side, anyone who's in the social sciences can tell you that self-reporting is a terrible gauge.

Re [1], you will want the current revision of the proposed decision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... (which is the same confusion i tripped across, because wikipedia's arbitration structure is as byzantine and confusing as the rest of their governance structure).

I read Bernstein's original post a couple days ago, and followed up by reading the wikipedia arbitration.

The real crux of the problem is that there's a mismatch between the broad scope of what Wikipedia's rules try to prevent against (biased editing) vs what gamergate is using Wikipedia for (a tool of harassment).

So the question is whether Wikipedia's rules are sufficient to prevent fiddling with the site and its purpose in order to harass people and are simply being misapplied, or whether Wikipedia is just structurally unable to prevent obvious coordinated campaigns of harassment.