mrrrgn

We already suffer from declining birthrates in the west. Your solution would make not having a child the best choice for "go-getters."

While you can put processes in place to improve code quality (version control, reviews, style guides/linters), there's no simple way to help a person who doesn't understand the underlying structure of software. APIs are great tools, but don't let them lull you into becoming a cargo-cult coder.

Globalism is a political philosophy, not a moral imperative. Here in our country we [citizens] get first dibs on jobs. Our land, our laws. We have every right to enforce that. If the market punishes us for it perhaps we'll change.

Hmmm, no. I come from a small town in the Southeastern US. People are incredibly religious, you can't even sell alcohol there thanks to the laws they've passed. A part of the local culture is consulting preachers for counseling instead of psychologists/therapists. It causes enormous amounts of damage. We should never encourage people to visit witch doctors over trained medical professionals, culture be damned.

GitLab is pretty nice and auto-imports from GitHub!

Massive wealth accumulation isn't just about having money to buy things, it's about influence, and entities with the ability to marshal more than x million dollars per year (Apple, GOOG, Unicorn LLC) would still need to exist. If your policy became law what would stop people from simply dumping huge sums into businesses/non-profits that they control? I believe capping yearly income would introduce a lot of weird bugs into our system without fixing (m)any real problems.

> It makes writing software more expensive, and decreases the supply of people who can do it.

That sucks for business types, but this has a real upside for professional programmers. Despite propaganda, salaries are based on supply/demand, not impact.

"Inasmuch as it is believable, this is a story about how all our lofty notions of justice, honor, purpose etc. are just bullshit, and it's really all about fucking, consuming and keeping those genes alive."

When we're sad, we often get caught in a sort of mental loop. Sometimes getting attention from a pretty girl steals our attention and helps bump us out of it. It's something about the human condition. It's relatable, and that's probably why people tend to find the story beautiful.

There's nothing inherently good or bad about that. Your disgust is fueled by the same physical processes that underly the warm fuzzies felt by others.

Pitting the global working class against one another in this fashion will simply drive down wages across the board. Taken to the extreme, eventually the American, European, and SE Asian will be equally poor while c-level executives and investors continue increasing their wealth.

Your idea makes a certain kind of sense, but it's not going to lead to anything except even more inequality than we started with.

I noticed that when I hit my tethering cap, and start seeing an upsell page, my Linux vms can still access content like normal. Seems that they do all of their fancy tracking via user agent strings and consider Linux browsers as being smart phones.

If true, it means that Linux users might end up getting accused of being ToS breaking "hackers." Beware.

I'm a child free person as well. I would really love to see tech companies offer short sabbatical periods. Knowing the people in the tech community, that time would almost certainly be put to good use: learning new skills, and finishing up backlogged personal projects.

Sabbatical could be a benefit that kicks in after several years, and any parental leave before that time would just be subtracted.

This is an interesting thought; but your assumption that the brain would just "create its own little world" is unfounded. Like other animals, we are born with certain instincts. It's not been definitively proven that the brain is some sort of perfect blank slate.

While I'm not denying that human brains have been shown to hallucinate under sensory deprivation, there's no way to say whether or not a lab grown brain would experience discomfort because of its lack of input, or whether it would even dream up a coherent reality for itself at all. There's simply no way to test this.

That's a valid point! It could be. I wasn't offended, but it's an anecdote that supports the idea that women aren't seen as being programmers. Other examples: going to conferences and being asked if I was covering it for a blog. Also not a big deal, but it illustrates the stereotype.

Likewise, if a man goes to a nursing conference, or a conference for elementary school teachers, he will likely face the same sorts of misunderstandings.

It's pretty mild; but someone sent me a twitter message after finding my GitHub account (hey nice projects, etc....) The left was my profile pic at the time, and the right is their final message. The fellow with a beard is my little brother. :) http://i.imgur.com/UuQMpi2.png

It's a great way to keep our community unique and worth visiting. The world is full of vapid joke comments (anyone can make them).

Once again, the words you choose betray antipathy towards women. Each phrase is packed with loaded words; it makes it impossible to have a legitimate discussion.

Sorry for whatever experiences you've had that led to this.

"procreate and provide the best environment for their children to grow in, all the while keeping a high social status and level of respectability"

This is the bargain they've made. It's a rather simple exchange. "Parasitic" is a loaded term here, by applying it you're displaying that you have some sort of political axe to grind.

This was also the sentiment being expressed above, when someone said that what you said sounded "judgmental" -- an accusation that you dismissed by being, or pretending to be, oblivious to it's true intent: "you're attaching pejorative terms to these women, without enough information to make a fair case for it."

"The conservative way has proved to be a very stable path towards improvement. Slow, but stable. Stability and balance, are in my opinion, the most important characteristics of meaningful improvement."

Can you give some evidence supporting the idea that this has been proved?

My thinking is that technologies are improving at a non-linear pace, and technological change leads directly to social change. Given that, a conservative approach often leads to policies which are out of touch with reality (as political/social trends diverge).

The fact is, transgender people have extremely high rates of suicide before and after any surgeries. Life on the margins of society is not easy, and surgery does nothing to address that problem. Here is a study, using the data from above, which explicitly mentions this:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... "It is therefore important to note that the current study is only informative with respect to transsexuals persons health after sex reassignment; no inferences can be drawn as to the effectiveness of sex reassignment as a treatment for transsexualism. In other words, the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality."

Further, numerous studies exist which disagree with the claims posted above:

http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/handle/1871/23255/189321.pd... "The results substantiate previous conclusions that sex reassignment is effective."

http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567%2809%2962807-0/abst...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2008....

What is known, is that "conversion therapies" are not useful. It's not possible to modify a person's sense of self, just like it's not possible to modify a person's sexual orientation.

Lastly, let's remember that slapping the word "science" on something does not make it correct. Everyone has a political agenda of some sort, and plenty of science has been used to justify homophobia and racism.

This is the sort of bigoted non-sense that people once said -- and sometimes still do say -- about gay folks. Luckily, society is continuing to progress socially. I imagine in another few decades (if you're still alive) your views will be seen as a novelty; a sad reminder of a bygone era -- like Archie Bunker's overt racism.

On the other hand, I moved to the Bay Area in 2013 to work for a big famous tech company and I was utterly disappointed. Earning a high income was no fun because I was trapped in a city full of type-a, over-achievers, who only wanted to talk about work. The people who I most enjoyed hanging out with were financially struggling and on their way out.

Cheaper places allow for more diversity, which creates a healthy and vibrant culture. The Bay Area feels sick to me; like something from a William Gibson novel. I left after a year and will _never_ live there again if I can help it.

This is why I work from cafes whenever possible. If I actually work from a quiet room by myself I start to slip into sadness. My brain craves the presence of other humans.

That said, I prefer cafes to offices. It's nice to be around people with no real ties to your source of income. It eliminates the stress of needing to manage all of your actions more carefully.

Also, I find that over time I make actual friends coffee shops. Co-workers rarely make good long-term friends.

It's the same for me in French. I can understand Americans (who have a thick accent) much more easily than natives. I think it's because my brain can tune into the palette of sounds produced by Americans more readily. Some sounds that are very distinct to natives sound the same to me; it artificially inflates the number of homophones I have to deal with.

"Web development is like an entry point for programming these days"

Web development is just a _type_ of development. You're creating a hierarchy where none aught to exist.

I've known many system programmers who said the same thing about data engineering: "what kind of a lame made up job is that? They write Python and SQL queries, wow, that's barely programming."

It's all non-sense. You can employ techniques which vary over a wide range of sophistication to create web pages, embedded systems, or ETL pipelines. There is no clear cut hierarchy.

source: Have worked as a web dev, data warehouse engineer, and release engineer.

I think the point you're attempting to make, is that the people who let out their apartments via AirBnB and drive for Uber are entrepreneurs. This is a valid perspective, and can be argued well. My view is a little different however.

It seems to me, that the people who drive for Uber or let out their homes/apartments on AirBnB have no control over their destinies. If they are banned from the platform, their "business" is over.

What Uber and AirBnB have really achieved, is to replace management with an API: allocating work, evaluating performance, and firing people in automated fashion.

Those who utilize these platforms are something like contractors (though with less legal footing); not small business owners.

If this trend continues to the extreme, perhaps by 2050 most of the workforce will be managed by software. Imagine it, a nation of mechanical turks and task rabbits.

It may sound horribly depressing, but it rings true to my own experiences. That said, I think it also depends on what you consider to be "learning."

Most engineering jobs require a lot of horizontal learning: develop enough knowledge of a topic to do something useful for the company then move on. While academic learning revolves around developing depth in a particular subject.

If you'd like to learn enough about a topic to contribute something truly new to the field, 99.9% of engineering jobs will not satisfy you.

Something like that exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar#Grammatical_s...

In most languages, word for word translation produces rubbish. In Esperanto it doesn't.

Esperanto has no particular word order, instead, suffixes denotes parts of speech. This alone makes it much more simple to translate literally between languages. It also has no gender, and is perfectly regular.

The language was designed so that one could send a letter to a friend who with did not speak it, and they could translate the entire document quickly using only a dictionary and a basic understanding of the grammar.

I think your criteria sound very fair. I would be curious to know how many generalists - which is what you seem to be describing - are able to produce the kind of 1000x returns that PG was describing though. Perhaps your definition of a great programmer is simply more reasonable and accessible?

>I am pretty sure that most people would not have been able to contribute meaningfully to that type of revolutionary project.

I agree with you totally. Didn't a lifetime of learning lead to that achievement though? The concept of cross compilation between languages had been around for some time prior to HipHop.

They developed their knowledge and executed on it; but other people could, and would, have made the same connection under similar circumstances. They were experts with a specific set of skills. Not just born to be "great programmers."

This concept of a "great programmer" is something I find very suspicious.

A competently trained engineer who works with distributed systems may implement a trivial fix and save her company tens of thousands of dollars in AWS bills.

Someone with a strong background in programming languages might implement a PHP -> C++ cross-compiler and double the throughput of her company's web servers.

The capability to recognize these improvements does not require some inborn spark of genius. Rather, it requires the prerequisite experience in some programming sub-field. Experience which can be learned.

Moments of rare insight do happen - "hey what if we cross-compile all this crappy PHP to C++?" - but these are a matter of random chance: get enough folks with programming language expertise working on a strictly PHP codebase and eventually someone will have the idea.

The "born programmer" is a myth. A great programmer is often a person with a high level of training in some particular sub-fields, and/or, a person who is very savvy regarding the craft of building software (i.e. "The Pragmatic Programmer").