Hacker News Reader

samdon I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one

This post got flagged off the homepage almost as soon as it made it there.

samdon Poverty in America: Greater Than Statistics Indicate

How much do you have to save on your phone bill before you can buy a house?

The difference between a cheap Android and an old iPhone isn't going to be enough to buy a home, or provide food for the family every day, or pay for (or off) an education, or pay for medical expenses, or buy a reliable car, or any of the other truly expensive things that those with wealth take for granted.

Judging the spending habits of the poor on small luxuries is a common way we shift the blame of poverty onto the poor. It allows the rich to feel better about themselves and about the society they've built.

samdon Conservation of Intent: why A/B tests aren’t as effective as they look

So damn true, it's so difficult to get statistically significant A/B test results, and the popular tools actively lead you astray. It's rare enough for a startup to have the traffic to meaningfully get results on their homepage before the heat death of the universe, let alone random landing or in-app pages. I'd recommend anyone reading this who does or wants to do A/B tests read: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html It was one of the trickiest lessons I had to learn. Once you realize you need to set your sample size in advance, you actually have to do the math to figure out the traffic you'll need. That's when reality hits you.

samdon The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem

Four hours without comment, not many upvotes, and clearly a flag or two. Hacker News doesn't want to face the demons in its own industry.

Seems that nobody wants to know that the darling Tesla is rotten at the core. Culture comes from the top. It's ok to love the technology, to the love the cars, but hate the culture, hate the sexism. You don't have to be complicit in their discrimination just because you see electric vehicles as the future. Hold your heroes to higher standards.

samdon Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

Are you being coy? I assume you know about the disparity in engineering jobs between men and women, particularly in management and executive roles, but are blaming this on something else. Say what you mean.

samdon Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

That's good news if true, the women who make it and get promoted earn the same as their counterparts. Still lots of work to be done removing the barriers that keep them from getting these jobs and promotions in the first place.

samdon Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die

Absolutely. How is it just to punish one person with financial catastrophe while another with mild inconvenience for the same crime?

samdon Why there is something rather than nothing – The finite, infinite and eternal [pdf]

No, he just asserts it. And it's probably impossible to prove.

samdon Why there is something rather than nothing – The finite, infinite and eternal [pdf]

To summarize his arguments:

The universe is eternal, which means it has always and will always exist. If there is something that always exists, then it is impossible for there to be nothing. It is impossible for there to be nothing.

Not a very satisfactory answer. The interesting question just becomes: Why is the universe eternal? or Why does there exist an eternal universe at all?

samdon No, I Am Not Lost – A Black Woman's Experience in the Stanford CS Major

First two comments come right out the gate and cast doubt on the authors experiences. One goes on and says women and minorities, particularly blacks, are not smart enough to make it through difficult CS classes.

This is pathetic Hacker News, pathetic.

samdon Tinder sued for sexual harassment by former co-founder

Implicit in your comments is the idea that you can't work with women without the risk of lawsuits. This is classic victim-blaming.

The problem is not the lawsuits. The problem is harassment, and further, the men who are so incapable of not harassing women that they segregate their workplaces.

We should recognize that the number of lawsuits pales in comparison to the incidence of actual harassment. We should be blaming the perpetrators of this harassment, and the men who would avoid working with women rather than change their behavior. We should not be blaming the women who raise these suits, or decrying their nature, as there is a very real and serious problem of sexual harassment in our industry.

samdon Poll HN: What is your personality type?

N's tend to be big-picture, conceptual thinkers, whereas S's are detail-oriented and concrete.

J's are to-do list sorts of people, they enjoy finishing tasks, tend to "get a lot of stuff done", but can be stressed if there isn't a plan. P's prefer starting projects to finishing them, they tend to work off-the-cuff, probably appear to get less done, but are more capable of dealing with changing circumstances and priorities.

samdon Rent Affordability Gap in San Francisco

I'd say the premise is that people who work in SF should have a right to live in SF.

samdon Anatomy of a hack: even your 'complicated' password is easy to crack

In case anyone hasn't already seen it: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

tl;dr

Use bcrypt.

samdon Stay in the Building

"This weekend I was in front of a TV and people were watching Randy To The Rescue."

Funny use of language there, especially given he goes on to explain the episode and quote from it. I think that means you were watching television. Which is ok! Don't worry! You're allowed to watch television, even shows like Randy to the Rescue. I won't think less of you for it.

samdon NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program

Yes, the more you know about your target the more confident you become about their nationality. Though I don't think the target needs to be a specific person, it could just be an email address couldn't it? Given just an email address you could be more than 51% certain it belonged to a foreign national and start collecting their data.

Sure, you might have to tortuously stretch the legal wording here to justify collection of any particular target, but if there's one thing this Administration has proven adept at it's tortuous stretching of the law.

samdon NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program

The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection.

US citizens make up less than 50% of the world population. So given any target I can be more than 51% confident that they are not a US citizen, knowing nothing about the particular target whatsoever.

samdon What Programming Taught Me About Sales: Throwing in the Towel on Google’s Go

This is the introduction and conclusion to what could be an interesting blog post on how to present and "sell" new technology to people using Go and Ruby as examples. Unfortunately, the entire body of that blog post is missing. Kudos for getting me interested in the topic, but go back and finish the post, even just talking about what you didn't like about Go and what they could've done better to sell you would be interesting.

samdon NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama

Every American has to ask themselves, "Is this worth it?" Are the plots stopped and the lives saved worth the loss of privacy, the loss of trust and good will internationally, and most frightening of all, the unprecedented power this gives the government?

I don't think anyone can reasonably say that it is.

samdon How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

What's really important is this line:

"For that reason, we wanted to let you guys, loyal Cutting Edge readers and Knife Depot fans, know that you might not being seeing Knife Depot ads peppered across the Internet."

If you don't get to advertise with Google you basically don't get to advertise on the Internet. That's a powerful monopoly, one they've had for years, and that's the real story here. You have to deal with Google and all their idiosyncratic/evil/whatever behavior because there's no alternative.

samdon Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps

Alright, read the manifesto first, understand it, then go read about Scrum.

samdon Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."

That's what I mean by retro. Two parts: self-reflection, and change of behavior.

Sounds like your problem with retro is that behavior isn't changing. Maybe it's management stopping things from changing, or teammates who refuse to go along with what the team wants. A team that won't change won't get better.

samdon Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps

Don't read this article either. Instead read the actual Agile manifesto. It's really short, but very insightful. After you've read it stop and think (we're programmers, we're supposed to be good at that) about how your current process, or a potential process matches the principles laid out.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

samdon Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps

That's a great analogy. I think you need a high-functioning team that really understands the Agile manifesto and its principles to roll-your-own solution.

If you are going to roll-your-own solution, start with retro and build from there. Retro is the most important part of the process. There's a reason it's the only explicit activity mentioned in the manifesto. As long as you keep reflecting on past performance and continually try to improve you'll probably end up with a good process.

samdon Apple announces iPad Mini with a 7.9-inch, 1,024 x 768 display - $329

What I like most about the Nexus 7 is the soft rubberized backing. I'm not constantly worried about scratching it, I can toss it around more, but it doesn't require a bulky, obnoxious case. Have you seen those sci-fi movies where people just have tablets laying around everywhere, like people have documents and books laying around now. That's what the Nexus 7 feels like.

Most every other computer, tablet, smartphone has to be managed. I have to worry about where I set it, where the case is, where it's plugged in, whether I'll drop it, etc. I don't feel that way about the Nexus 7.

I'd rather have iOS and the iPad's battery life, but I don't want my tablet to feel precious.

samdon StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

It's interesting to contrast that with the way Valve was run, given Half-Life was a contemporary of Daikatana, but obviously did much better.

samdon Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities and Stack Them Sideways

Istanbul's layout is downright Byzantine.

samdon Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby's bright multicore future)

"Modern HTML5/JS apps depend on beautiful, consistent RESTful JSON APIs."

"Rails is great for JSON APIs."

"Many of these companies have client-heavy HTML5/JS applications which consume a JSON API coming out of Rails. Many of them have APIs that are routinely cited as archetypical RESTful JSON APIs."

Rails is great for JSON RPC over HTTP. It's not great for beautiful, consistent RESTful APIs. It still lacks basic support for hypermedia. Without hypermedia you aren't being RESTful and you aren't reaping the benefits of being RESTful. All you have is a weak convention for doing RPC with HTTP methods.

None of those companies are examples of REST either, they're all doing JSON RPC, and propping them up as RESTful does a disservice to REST and a disservice to Rails. How can Rails make progress towards hypermedia APIs if people won't even acknowledge that it's lacking?

I know people like Steve Klabnik are valiantly trying to get Rails to adopt hypermedia, but it isn't there yet, and there are significant technical and political barriers to overcome.

Node.js frameworks, being in their relative infancy, aren't burdened with the same barriers as Rails and have the opportunity to move faster than Rails could. No framework has dominated the Node.js community like Rails dominates the Ruby community; there's still the opportunity for a Node.js framework for building hypermedia APIs to take center stage.

samdon Valve Software recruits hardware experts

In Valve's New Employee Handbook released a few months ago there was a quip about how Valve struggled to hire disciplines well outside of its typical expertise. They specifically mentioned industrial designers as one of those disciplines. I guess people didn't pick up on it at the time.

Link: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

*Economist was the other job they mentioned, which they filled with the famous Yanis Varoufakis.

samdon Rails Testing with Factory Girl

Integration tests just mean you are testing the integration of multiple components, say view and controller, model and database, controller and model. Acceptance tests are tests from the end-user's perspective and touch the entire stack like a real user would. Acceptance tests are integration tests. It's alright for these tests to hit the database because part of what you are testing is the integration with the database.