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scottmwinters

43 karma · joined July 16, 2014

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scottmwinters··on How Poverty Changes Kids’ Brains
I'm rather tired of hearing that people are a product of their environment. "Its not your fault you dont do anything with your life, its what you were born into" is dumb as hell.

Also, this study doesn't look remotely thorough. Correlation does not imply causation. Explain the test parameters better, etc, etc.

People are responsible for their own actions and own lives, not their environments. Lets move on

scottmwinters··on Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg's 99% pledge is born with strings attached
How dare Zuckerberg pledge to give away all of his money to make the world a better place! Lets criticize him for that!

This kind of journalism is garbage.

scottmwinters··on Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
While I agree with most of this article, its a bit extreme. I've never liked spam, but is it really that hard to ignore them? I've had a recruiting firm call me 4-5 times and send emails and I started getting a bit upset...but far from that extreme
scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
Please back up ANY of those points. From personal experience, I saw girls encouraged to get into STEM...my high school had a STEM program that only took up to 50% males.

Not caring about whether they hire males or females is exactly how is should be. It would be awesome if gender wasn't a factor at all..but I dont believe thats what you want.

What are these terrible problems in the workplace that only women are facing? At my first job out of school (tech job at a tech company), I sat to eat lunch with 2 females and 1 other male, all fresh out of school. We talked about salaries. Both men had negotiated for a high salary and used competing offers as leverage. Both females said they had other offers but didn't negotiate any of them. Sounds to me like a common case where the women SHOULD be paid less...simply because they didn't try

scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
Without looking at sources, I assumed that the percentages were accurate..and there are quite a few of those. I dont think they come close to making the point that the author is making, but they seemed factual.
scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
how is everything stacked against them? None of those 3 things are true. Early education is identical. Most tech companies try very hard to hire women to help their statistics and diversity work environment? Modern HR is pretty damn strict on things like sexual harassment so please, back up that point...I dont even know what you could be arguing
scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
so many tech companies desperately try to hire women...those percentages of women at tech companies are higher than the percentage of women earning/pursuing technical degrees. They want that percentage to be higher. Subjectively saying that the industry is biased and tries to keep out females is very deliberately ignoring facts.
scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
nope. I completely agree
scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
but the number of women in tech is growing slower than the number of men in tech.

To be fair, its not that "its cool now, so they want in the party", its actually that so many women just dont want in. I dont understand acting like the whole world needs to change because their are trends in peoples personal choices.

scottmwinters··on Why aren't there more women in tech?
I can honestly say I have never heard the word "brogrammer"

Anyway, I like how this article has a lot of facts. I dislike many other things.

Diversity is great, it is an awesome thing to have, promote and embrace. But you can only do so much to force it. At some point, if females choose to stay out of tech, thats their choice. If they choose to get into tech thats great too. The fundamental idea of forcing society to change to have a higher proportion of women employed in "STEM" jobs is absurd.

Personally, I know quite a few women (a much higher proportion than men) who went through STEM programs in highschool only to go into bio or environmental Engineering. Guess what? There aren't all that many jobs in those fields compared to more traditional tech/generic engineering roles. Some of them left their respective fields within a year for that reason alone

scottmwinters··on Show HN: CPU simulator in 60 lines of code
neat project. I like it.
scottmwinters··on Create Your Own CPU on an FPGA
Every Computer Engineering undergrad is rejoicing somebody just did their project for them.
scottmwinters··on Data from hack of Ashley Madison cheater site purportedly dumped online
False. they just released the data a couple of hours ago. They've had it since your link
scottmwinters··on Show HN: Simpler alternative to WebEx and GoToWebinar, built with WebRTC
".mp4 is fine - was just concerned it might be some proprietary format like Webex uses."

Exactly what I was going to say. I've never understood what webex was thinking there

scottmwinters··on Google Cloud Storage Nearline graduates to general availability
It would be insanely easy to copy data over and over until you hit 100PB. This number still seems crazy
scottmwinters··on Apple Watch sales down 90% since the opening week
To clarify, I'm not remotely an apple fanboy..but I dont think anybody excepted to continue 20k watches/week. They have sold a lot. The initial sales are done and thats fine.

Apple has a way with new versions of selling a lot all over again.

scottmwinters··on How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting
They pretty much said it was catastrophically broken...so maybe it IS making a big difference?
scottmwinters··on A Serious Conversation about the Future in Space
Was I the only one extremely disappointed that wasn't actually much related to Musk, nor a serious conversation about the future? It was an interview of a fiction novelist, nothing more.
scottmwinters··on Ask HN: How can I hack for community service?
I like this idea a lot more than just "make a website." While that is clearly a valid application of programming, it's not my strong suit and most places already have websites up anyway. I'd imagine most any of them could use some good scripting and such though! Thanks!
scottmwinters··on June Intelligent Oven
This thing is cool, really cool. So the novelty factor easily makes it worth more than another toaster oven. But I can go get another toaster oven on Amazon for 5% of that, so..yea, staying clear
scottmwinters··on The Fuck – Correct your previous console command
yea, lots of us use shells with suggestive text...that doesn't make this less amusing. Now if only someone would make rules for my osx terminal, thatd be great
scottmwinters··on I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
How much do you think moving to the valley improves the odds of a startups success as opposed to another city, say Atlanta or Raleigh on the east coast?
scottmwinters··on What happened to all the non-programmers?
I think you're kind of missing the point. There are not nearly as many MBA, liberal art, lawyer, etc people on here as techies and programmers.
scottmwinters··on What happened to all the non-programmers?
It seems obvious to me to bring up "correlation does not imply causation". Just because a lot of programmers like X, doesn't mean that they like X because of programming.

With that said, I dont really understand confusion with social groups forming of similar people. I understand a desire...even a need...for diversity, but people who like X are naturally going to want to be with other people who like X. Seems pretty natural.

scottmwinters··on Hello, World
"burning out" only happens when you dont add fuel to the flame. If someone is passionate about what they are working on, they wont get burnt out. I can easily see getting burnt out on one technology or another, but the more code, the more I want to code and learn more.

If someone programs at the same company doing the same tasks for years until they hate programming, then I really feel no sympathy. Get a different job...its easy. Do side projects...even easier. Adding fuel is easy. Letting it die takes effort.

scottmwinters··on A Teenager’s View on Social Media
Really interesting views on people disliking but still using Facebook. I was walking around my college's campus a few years ago and overheard a girl saying "well, he doesn't have a facebook, so thats kind of a huge red flag to me. I dont think I'm going to keep talking to him" Funny what an animal social media has become...
scottmwinters··on Strategies to quickly become productive in an unfamiliar codebase
I recently started a new job with a new language and did a few of these steps. The only one that has really helped me learn this codebase is "make something".

Making unit tests can be great if you already understand the language (and the IDE), but when you're new to xcode, dont expect a unit test to make any more sense than the code.

Pairing can be a great tool, if you are pairing with the right person. You can't always find the right programmer (with the time or care) to sit down and work with you like that.

I was certainly humbled by this process, whether by choice or not, and asked my share of dumb questions, but I don't think you can really understand a codebase until you work on it

scottmwinters··on Sense – Wake up when it's right for you
Integrating this with Nest would make it one of the coolest and most useful embedded electronics on the market. What if it adjusted the temperature immediately and automatically when it determined that you were cold or hot? A sensor is great. Its really cool. But a control system that reacts based on the sensor data...thats a great device with a large market
scottmwinters··on One More Case Against Tipping
Regardless of the validity of the whole argument, the numbers and that graph are ridiculous. People working a job that requires no skill and no education are more likely to live in poverty than other workers?!?!? Thats just crazy...
scottmwinters··on IBM and Apple just not that big a deal
Its easy to say that its not that big of a deal from a perspective outside of MDM. I recently graduated college and started working as a developer for an MDM provider. Its very hard to say that this news is not that big of a deal. Most likely, this is completely right and it is not a big deal. Apple will use it to 'partner' with IBM and sell some more product.

If they do a serious partnership, maas360 could quickly become the leading MDM provider. This would change the face of a developing industry. This influences several of the big players in tech. VMWare, Samsung and even google will have to see where this goes and decide how to react.