lucasnemeth

Race is a social construct, there's no biological explanation for race. The set of characteristics that are identified with different races are social constructs, those clusters of features does not correlate to a significant difference in biological terms. Genetic methods do not support or explain the classification of humans into discrete races. Races are not genetically homogenous and lack clear-cut genetic boundaries.

Two people from different races can be way more similar genetically than two people from the same race. The concept of race was built over a long story of separating humanity in different ethnic groups, and then physical characteristics of some of those ethnic groups started slowing being adopted as a mean to show that those people are intrinsically different, but they are just an unimportant set of characteristics that does not convey important information from a genetic perspective, they gained social meaning through culture. The modern concept of race took form in the enlightenment, https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/757227361582608384, when the original western notion of which ethnic groups exists in the world was built into a racist anthropology.

That doesn't mean that "all lives matter" or we shouldn't talk about race. Race is a social construct, and as a social construct, it exists. Money is also a social construct. But, the concept of race makes no sense besides the social structure that was built on. That why different countries consider that the set of existing races is different, for instance, the only country that really considers "latino" a race is the US.

Going back to your question, the extinct humans actually had important biological differences, the different races have not.

Primary school teacher

Ugh. that's sad. I'll be sure to avoid old manufacturing companies when looking for jobs then.

For me the absurd part was this one:

"Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get ahead of the curve before the busy season. How can we do that?

Lee (Operations Manager): Company policy restricts us from building more than 3 months of backlog. If you just change that to 4 months, we'll have plenty of work."

You can't have one week of 10% less productivity if not you will immediately fire everyone? And you company policies only work if you change a line of code? And this line of code is from some old legacy code that no one touch and your whole process depends on it? No, 6 days of development is the least of the problems here. This company is absurd.

6 days for the line of code wasn't optimal, but wasn't that bad. What this story shows to me how bad management pretend things are IT fault.

I find surreal how much people underestimate how big is the population that deals with those unicodeerrors. It's SO MANY FUCKING LANGUAGES AND SO MANY PEOPLE. The majority of the world population writes using non-ASCII characters!

It's a HUGE problem in Python 2. Python 3 was needed. If you don't think the Unicode change was needed and you actually work with texts in any form, you should also stop developing "for web scale" before fixing this. Because you're actually focusing on a small percentage of the world population on your software.

For me Zed's argument sounds like "This is America, speak English". Specially with his quotes around "international".

I came here to say the same thing. People really should read more Feyerabend, it's fascinating.

Yes, but that's something a lot of people are arguing here and I agree. The "I could build in a week" is ridiculous, but "I could what this 1000 engineers company do that with a small team of 10, in a lean way in 18 months" is very frequent in the market.

Why the quotes? "The americas", it's not written like that in the original tittle.

You first need to understand that you're probably wrong on a bunch of concepts about code.

Programming follows some of the bad stereotypes of nerd culture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam4iiya1q0).

But no one really knows that much about all the technology world, and it is important to be humble about it. I used to be more arrogant when I've started programming, that was a self-defense mechanism against my insecurities, and by that I used to just reinforce the hype. A bunch of new hype technologies are not that interesting, they just repeat things that have been done before or they add layers that sometimes don't bring any benefit. So it is important to have a beginner's mind every time you read someone's else's project, because there's a thousand different ways of doing things.

Said that. It is fine to give constructive criticism, and to show other ways of doing things. One thing I believe is that all software is crap. And that we shouldn't treat code as if it was literature and an intrinsic part of our being. If you want to express your inner self, do art, not code. If you code for art, do the end project the art and not the lines of code that no one would understand anyway. It is important to detach the code from the person. And we need to assume that every line of code is a potential problem. We work to deliver features not code. Code is a necessary evil.

In summary: Think if you're not being aggressive due to your own insecurity. Of everything that there is to know in the code world, and how that can be scary. And try to give constructive criticism, give criticism to help people get better at their projects and deliver it, not to make them feel less valued.

There's a paper from the University of Toronto called "Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal": http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/papers/2016/icer_2016_bimodal...

That's part of Danto's Theory of "The end of art". http://hyperallergic.com/191329/an-illustrated-guide-to-arth...

" Art history is generally thought of as a linear progression of one movement or style after another (Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, etc.), punctuated by the influence of individual geniuses (Delacroix, Courbet, Monet, Cézanne … ).

(...) The story Danto tells in “The End of Art” follows on from this model. According to Danto, the commitment to mimesis began to falter during the nineteenth century due to the rise of photography and film. These new perceptual technologies led artists to abandon the imitation of nature, and as a result, 20th-century artists began to explore the question of art’s own identity. What was art? What should it do? How should art be defined? In asking such questions, art had become self-conscious. Movements such as Cubism questioned the process of visual representation, and Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as an artwork. The twentieth century oversaw a rapid succession of different movements and ‘isms,’ all with their own notions of what art could be. “All there is at the end,” Danto wrote, “is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.” Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Duchamp’s readymades demonstrated to Danto that art had no discernible direction in which to progress. The grand narrative of progression — of one movement reacting to another — had ended. Art had reached a post-historical state. All that remains is pure theory:

Of course, there will go on being art-making. But art-makers, living in what I like to call the post-historical period of art, will bring into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a long time come to expect […] The story comes to an end, but not the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance […] The age of pluralism is upon us…when one direction is as good as as another."

You should be proud of your creative projects and funny names!

I didn't knew about "Feynman Lectures On Computation" and was reading the reviews. There's only one 2 star reviews, I clicked to see what it was about. And surprise, it is by Guido Van Rossum! (And he's not that impressed by the book)

https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-...

Sometimes only. big O cuts all the constants and they are really important in actual software development. A lot of actual work involve improving the speed from a 10N to a 2N, it is a big difference for the costumer, but they are all O(N).

The music they play at the gym. I also don't like putting headphones over it and destroying my hearing...

I like exercising but I hate the appearance obsessed, shitty EDM culture of gyms.

I..actually don't want goals. I want a place I could go to quietly and mindfully exercise just to keep myself fit during the years.

But that is the extreme opposite of what they offer. I probably ain't their focus audience.

Yes, I have no idea why...

Shelta, is a language spoke by the Irish travellers, came from Irish and English. It is pretty interesting : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta

OMG that is AMAZING. What. You worked on both 3 feet high and rising and All Hail the Queen. WOW. Sorry about the not very informational post, don't fully follow the HN recommendations. BUT I AM LOOSING IT. WOW.

They seem to be building a web version, they are hiring for this:

http://www.hello.com/en/jobs/index.html#frontend_swe

I think they just thought mobile was priority and are launching a MVP before having the web version...

But if we see this in a more broad perspective, there is electronic music (not necessarily techno) that is as complex as Beethoven 9th. Specially if more avant-guarde electronic music is included, not just EDM.

I have privacy badger from eff on, I don't even care about ads, as long as they don't track me. But that still shows up the subscription nagger.

They should update: We get it: Tracking you through multiple pages without your permission is not why you’re here for. But Tracking you through multiple pages without your permission help us keep the lights on.

Really. Find a better way to "keep the lights on". I wouldn't block ads if they would respect my privacy.

Turned off JS to read the article.

Biggest charismatic personality still wins. You're optimizing too much for extroverts.

I believe another reason to not pointing out the flaws come from mob thinking. It becomes very hard to criticize "the collective".

And yes, I think you have a great point on Biggest personality wins, that is already a problem on meetings. Lot's of amazing developers I've worked with had a hard time speaking in meetings...

spaces, tabs are nonsense

Unfortunately, needs to remind people about the social distribution of OSS work in the community:

http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an...

Of course OSS work is good, and we're happy you found time in 2006 to learn ajax or whatever, but considering open source as a measure for good developers is unfair. Even John Resig (quoted in this article) already made a post explaining his views abt this, (that differs from the OP) http://ejohn.org/blog/project-based-interviews/

I think it's pretty clear that the quoted person means "skilled" when he says "very good". Good not only mean "what is morally right" but also "having a high standard". He didn't said a "good person", he said a "good programmer", it usully implies a "skilled programmer", not an "morally sound programmer". The same way a "good restaurant" don't usually imply that all their food is fair trade organic ethically sourced, but that the food is prepared with high quality.

Interesting article.

Just a note on the biblical reference: The moral angle that thinks it is important to love your work comes from a more protestant view of the Bible. Martin Luther defined that wordly work is a duty that benefits the individual and society, it is an extension of the concept of good works in catholicism. From a protestant perspective, work ethic is very important, because the "good works" are not only charity work, our wordly daily work is a work of mercy as well. It must be done in benefit of society. Even though it is a more lutheran concept, it is very influential in the states, the "self-made man" myth, the importance of the person that goes up the social ladder on perseverance, is very influenced by this protestant ethic. So, the view of love thy colleague, but not your work, is more akin to a catholic thinking. Countries that have a very strong catholic tradition such as spain or ireland, tend to have different work ethics than germany or the netherlands.

A good programmer produces good code. The motivation or their personal feelings is absolutely irrelevant. Your comparison does not makes sense. There's no reason on his text to assume he's not a good programmer. We can say, that at least to his eyes, he's a very good programer, and that's all we know. The rest your saying comes from personal bias and generalizations.

Lastly, the programmer can make his decisions on financial grounds instead of "difficult problems". The most difficult problems are on academia, but not everybody goes to academia because the pay is low and the job opportunities are few.

It says you will be able to add a few collaborators. So I think it will be very similar in the end.

I hope they create a stakeholder account for that. But it is wrong to put all your eggs in one basket. Github is nice to show to non technical people but it is definitely an over kill.