rza

Voting is not working. As far as the media is concerned, there are always going to be only two candidates, both of which are in bed with corporate lobbyists. Without every voter doing significant research on their own to make meaningful third-party voting blocs, that will not change. Money determines the primary candidates, and that money comes from the same places year after year.

I won't go into what's right and what's wrong or what the solution should be. I myself am often skeptical about the purpose of a lot of racial discussion, but I don't see anything terrible about black girls trying to come together and code. I won't ignore the basic human psychology that you will gravitate toward people you feel you have more in common with.

> Is that something to be encouraged or discouraged?

I think you're reading way too much into what I'm saying. I'm just stating how I think it is. Whether you like it or not, when a homogeneous group gains power anywhere, people will be suspicious, just like if a company was run solely by Republicans, the Smith family, or black people.

> People of the same race have the same upbringing? What am I even reading?

Fine, I'll be more specific, under-privileged African-Americans, 2nd generation Latinos, Southern rural white people tend to have have similar upbringings with regard to family, income, culture, and education.

> Are we as a society supposed to indulge that feeling? > Pampering that feeling creates more racial fracturing than it fixes.

I'm not offering any solutions. But for the topic at hand, when black girls come together to code, that's not saying they shouldn't hangout with white people. You're implying a false conflict. That wouldn't be the case with something like affirmative action or racial quotas which does cause conflicts.

You may not be thinking about race, but an outsider looking at the tech industry probably is. Ideally, yes whether everyone is black or white shouldn't really matter, but I'm sure you feel the same way as well when you are in an 'ethnic' neighborhood or gathering. You don't feel the sense of belonging or at the very least, the racial apathy that everyone else feels. By gathering people with the same upbringing together to work toward a common goal, it builds camaraderie and morale, not so different from why companies care about 'culture-fit'.

If the metric is merit point per attendance point, than University of Rochester destroyed everyone, and UMD is pretty average.

Just tried it. It uses https as soon as you login for me.

If by rap you mean commercial rap, then I don't blame you. But keep in mind rap is a very diverse genre with many hard-working artists, and a large, passionate subculture. You will not hear that on the radio because it doesn't sell, in the same way you don't hear metal, classical, or experimental music on the radio. I hate to say it, but your school bus driver exposed you to very little "rap".

Source: I was in the breakdance community for several years, where you'll meet all sorts of wonderful hip-hop heads. And yes, such a thing still exists and it is not the tacky stuff you see in commercials and in movies.

Have you ever considered that maybe the product you're making is just not that world-changing for any sane developer to work consecutive overtime for? If you asked me to work 80+ hours to cure cancer sure, but to sacrifice my life to build cute iPhone apps? Nope.

If the military can use this technology cost-effectively, they will use it. While the "Campaign to Stop Killer Robots" is amusing, I doubt it will have any effect whatsoever. It's reminiscent of Pope Innocent II trying to ban the use of crossbows against fellow medieval Christians, yet here we are, two World Wars later.

People leave big companies for smaller companies for a variety of reasons that don't have to do with money: product, culture, team, technology, or just for the sake of working at a smaller company. And for the record, Google is not a perfect Utopia that has a monopoly on all the good developers with a flawless interviewing system.

Well, for the second bullet it is.

He most definitely does not have depression. Saying that depression is simply apathy and 'feeling dumb' spits in the face of those who have to deal with actual depression everyday.

I kept reading expecting a complaint other than the spacing and camel-case, but couldn't find any. I think you many be underestimating the non-programmer's ability to parse English, as I can't imagine it would be too difficult to realize 'ds' means Data Source when it's in the Data Source category. Those words seem to be labeling variables? Which if it's the case, having no spaces in variable names is indeed a good practice.

Non-programmers can still use technical software.

That's what I meant. Having Google on your resume opens up doors many doors when you leave - it would be hard NOT to find offers or connections once people know you're an ex-Googler. I don't imagine this to be the case if you leave a lesser known or respected company.

edit: oh, you were replying to a deleted comment

Would she have the same success if she didn't have Google on her resume? I frequently think about jumping ship, but sometimes I wonder if it won't turn out as well as these kind of stories suggest.

It's fine if you don't want to create a startup, I'm pretty sure this is article is directed toward people who have a startup idea, but are too afraid to commit to it. As for what arguments against 'You should be more productive' or 'You have to contribute something to be a worthwhile human being', that is pretty much trying to answer the meaning of life, and is sure beyond the scope of this article.

Just because things are worse in India, that shouldn't mean we should ignore everything else until it's fixed there first. Because for one, it's much easier for US citizens to fix problems in the US, for both legal and practical reasons. Hopefully something like this right in America's fabled land of idea-makers and disruptors will compel some real action to resolve it.

I use caps lock quite often, e.g. for constant variables or acronyms. Then again, I have to remember to turn it off or else my next few key strokes will make vim go crazy.

In a modern society, you will have complex systems where the individual worker is so abstracted away from the concrete value that they will not be able to see the immediate effect of their actions, but this does not make them pointless. To an investment banker, all they see are numbers growing larger, but that does take away from the fact that they're moving millions of dollars, which invariably comes from somewhere.

This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then by definition, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.

Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn't understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better 'PR researcher' to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives will revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.

I would love to believe in this product, but there are just so many sketchy statements on the homepage alone that I doubt the ability of the team. People are literally going to entrust their lives to this product and the best third-party assurances they have are completely un-cited quotes such as:

"The taste is awesome."

"As a Biologist/Chemist I approve of Soylent and really want to start using it."

"My mood experience! It has improved a lot lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT."

Paul Graham wrote on this same subject (http://paulgraham.com/cities.html). A bit more anecdotal, but convincing nonetheless.

"Dogshit developers get paid 50k to start. Good ones are over 100k. You just have to have actual skills."

Because how much someone makes determines if they're dogshit or not.

Heh, Because having a six-figure salary (at a top software company!) automatically proves your superiority in all subjects.

This may have been true in the Cold War, but that war has long been over. To say that US defense spending now is benefiting anyone in any way now is laughable, except for maybe South Korea and Taiwan. If anything, our meddling has raised security concerns for all our European allies due to the displacement and disruption of life by our actions in the Middle East.

As a recent college-grad who'd moved to suburbia, I think the automobile-centric culture in America is what is killing intimacy. If you were not able to make close friends in college/early-life, than once you live on your own in the suburbs, it often feels impossible to get any sense of intimacy. Intimacy is built up with small moments, and when every interaction has to be a commute-laden ordeal, you lose the opportunity for spontaneous and random social interactions, making the process of building of relationships orders of magnitude slower.

In the same line as when people over-use the phrase "get shit done"; it just seems like a bunch of try-hard developers trying to appear super edgy. We get it, you're not a "corporate drone" and you can curse, but you're a developer, not a rockstar. Phone-apps aren't that serious.

I wouldn't call it a total fail. Tab moves focus to the next input element on almost all web forms, in this case the send button. It allows you to send the message without moving your mouse in a fashion consistent with how we use web forms, much like how I can submit this comment with tab+enter.

College is a good environment to learn theoretical computer science and to be in a research environment. If you intend to go into research either at university or in a big company, college is a must. To be around other bright CS students, professors, on a campus where there are is always some exciting project going on, it is an excellent place to be, especially if you come from a background which didn't give you such exposure in high school. At a job, you will not have the opportunity to invest all your time on arcane algorithms or data structures, or in any subject for that matter which doesn't directly involve your job. This is a pro or a con depending on where you want to go with your life/career.

If you want to work at a social media start-up working with hot web technologies, or already have a foot in the door in the tech industry, then college probably isn't very useful for you.

Because anything you post that might remotely be labeled as politically incorrect, you know, might get you fired.

I thought the exact opposite while reading this. If Bezos is constantly thinking about ambitious projects such as this, it's easy to see why "he really does not give a shit about your day."

Yes, the issue of drones is extraneous. A drone is no different than a gun, the former just has a longer range. It's just fluff around the question of whether the government can kill unarmed and non-threatening citizens.