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I'm quite sure that Musk is the one responsible for the increase in value of his companies, not someone who's been uninvolved in running them.

He's going through a massive divorce that could cost him billions.

I agree. I'm a white guy who's gone through some very difficult stuff. When SJWs talk to me about my privilege, it just enrages me. Academic left discourse turned me from a middle-of-the-road guy to someone adamantly against the entire program of social justice.

Guilting people into reducing emissions has been ineffective. Better would be to embrace geoengineering.

Clearly, it'll be the world's first domed city

Honestly, why? Most of the time, you want to write C++, with exceptions, and the STL. You can make this kind of programming as robust as you want against memory allocation failure.

If you don't want to use this style of programming, for whatever reason, check out sys/queue.h. It's already on your system, if you're using some kind of Unix.

Thank you. There is somebody else on this fucking planet who understands that memory is not limitless manna from heaven.

Indeed. It's incredibly disingenuous, not to mention a risk to the public health, to scream "STD!" equal loud for HPV and HIV.

So what? That's up to them. People who buy organs are paying a fair price. Why do you want to infantalize poor people by denying them the opportunity to participate in the market?

How about just paying people for their organs? Let the market work. Is that really such a bad idea?

Good. I'm sick of people walking over copyleft licenses generally. It's only because of copyleft that there exists a pro-sharing social norm in the software development community. If you kick down the GPL, the norm will shift back toward proprietary software everywhere. You, young developer, have no idea just how shitty a world that is.

I wonder whether there's a connection between cowardice in the face of SJWs and cowardice in the face of everything else.

In most other jobs, candidates don't vary in skill by a factor of 10x or more

> the data solution proposed in the article is "interviewers rate interviewees in a few different dimensions," which is not any less arbitrary.

This article's headline reveals the spin the HN community is trying to put on it. Many people in SF like to attack the very idea of meritocracy, because if you admit that meritocracy is a good idea, you're implicitly endorsing the idea that people have different levels of merit, and thus that between-group differences in representation might be due to something other than discrimination.

That's disappointing; the article mentions that Mozilla is happy with Debian's patch set, but I don't think they'd be happy with a patch that disabled mandatory extension signing. I was looking forward to Iceweasel sparing us from that anti-user nonsense.

> Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actually research).

I have to wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to genuine advances just being harder to come by. When others have already filled in the color between the lines in your field except for tiny bits in the corners here and there, what's left to do but fudge experimental results, salami-slice what genuinely novel results you do see, and take advantage of publication bias?

Maybe researchers wouldn't need to resort to these shenanigans if we weren't running out of things to discover.

There is an infinite universe of actions we can take. We can sleep all day. We can wave our arms for hours. We can all decide to dress up as Ross Perot. We need some way to determine which actions are worth doing and which are not. You appear to reject the use of return on investment as this filter. With what do you propose to replace it?

> The fact that those things don't have a return of 15% shouldn't be a justification for, we, as a society, not doing them.

Isn't it, though? Doesn't ROI define what it means for something to be "worth doing"? If you think we should be doing X and X is not currently profitable, what's effective isn't expressing disappointment that X isn't being done. What's effective is changing the incentive structure so that X is profitable.

By the way, it's not a 15% return that's necessary. Right now, the current reserve on US federal bonds is 2.56% over 30 years. Investors are buying these things like crazy. It's really fucking sad that our society is so hard-pressed for things to do that 2.56% over 30 years looks like a great opportunity.

Malthus. Malthus, or more specifically, declining returns on investment in science and technology, is holding back the economy. It's not debt levels or bad interest rate policy or currency manipulation; these effects are all second-order. The primary cause of the slowdown is that there's just not much more to _do_.

This lack of opportunity is reflected in the very low interest rates available today combined with low growth. This technological stagnation is reflected in the massive funding of SV-area tech companies, which are shitty opportunities for a return on investment in a world full of even shittier opportunities.

Investors are desperate for a return anywhere. That it's so hard to find a good ROI is against indicative of technological development petering out. After 300 years, we've reached the end of super-Malthusian growth, and we're going to return, hopefully peacefully, to the normal steady-state conditions of human existence, albeit at a higher baseline technology level.

There are no major advances left. Physics can predict everything except the most extreme conditions at the largest and smallest scales, and there are no more bugs in the universe to exploit. Computing will see incremental improvements, but all the really hard problems have already been solved or proved impossible. Quantum computing will make some problems a square-root function easier, but won't change anything. Biotechnology may help us live longer, but research that might change the human condition --- germ-line genomic editing --- has _already_ been banned.

Sure, you might argue, we're still going through the technology revolution. But that's petering out. Cell phone sales growth slipped into the single digits last year. Tablets are dead. Desktop sales have been declining forever. The commercialization of technology we've already developed --- e.g., self-driving cars, automated personal assistants, and high-efficiency power generation --- will decrease costs by some constant factor, but also put a lot of people out of work.

It's remarkably, really, that the laws of the universe are such that humanity was able to elevate itself from ape to thinking ape, and then from thinking ape to calculating machine. It's remarkable that we can compute. Why should we expect the universe to be further more compliant?

Isn't this business model plain extortion? If you want to create an open-source adblocker, fine. That's your rights to publish that software, and it's within the rights of users to run that software.

But requesting money for making modifications against the interest of users to the default settings of that software is just sleazy; I can't think of anything that would make this sleaze illegal, but it's still no good.

Cyclists like you make people like me vote against pro-cyclist laws. You have no moral right to slow down all traffic on a road to the speed of your calves because you feel unsafe in your designated lane, and I hope you soon have no legal right to do that.

> the trick of using an image recognition neural net to generate canonical images of what it recognizes

That sounds interesting. Where can I read more about it?

> I have a non-scientific suspicion that performance reviews are going to become the next industry "thing" that prospective candidates evaluate before joining a company.

It's not already? The performance review system is something I evaluate very critically before deciding whether to join a company. Use Microsoft-style stack ranking? I'll pass.

His post cited well-known differences in achievement between genders. You, on the other hand, speculated on the OP's personal characteristics. Maybe you see your argument as more rational than the OP's because you profoundly disagree with him, but the fact remains that the OP is making statements about the real world (statements that happen to be true), while you are merely making statements about the OP.

I wish more project maintainers would emulate the good example Duncan set here. Identity grievance is a terrible disease for an organization to contract, but the prognosis is good with early and aggressive treatment.

Your comment calls "code review", the practice, "toxic". You go on to suggest that project maintainers "merge [the pull request] already and be done with it", suggesting that the normal review process not apply to this particular diff. You suggest that there should be a high bar for commenting on other people's code.

Your comment sounds to me like it advocates lowering the bar for merging of external patches. That's a sure way to technical inferiority.

Virtue signaling persists only because too few of us are willing to speak out against it. The good news is that I've noticed an increasing amount of opposition to political correctness culture in the FOSS world. We're fighting back, and we're winning, albeit slowly.

> essentially kicked out of a core position [snip] > That's not just 'unnecessarily rude' – it's a stupid and broken way to run a community.

The project owner was harsh, but I respect his pragmatism. The perpetually aggrieved are never satisfied. Anyone who complains about something as trivial as the variable name in question is someone who lives for attention-seeking and virtue signaling. It's better to immediately and fully separate yourself from that kind of person, even if it involves a short-term reputation hit, than allow that person to gain influence and endanger your project's existence.

Are you proposing that the ability to comment on proposed changes is toxic? How exactly is a group of people supposed to come to a consensus on technical matters without the ability to communicate? Are you really suggesting that certain changes proposed by certain people get special treatment, immunity from discussion, and expedited merging to mainline?

Technical excellence in such an environment is impossible. Nobody's stopping you running a project that way, but if you tried to introduce this kind of discrimination, prejudice, and, well, privileged treatment into a project to which I contribute, I'd fork, and everyone who actually wanted to write code would follow me.