spiffyman

Not really tech related, but the most memorable for me is "Tense Present"[1] by David Foster Wallace in the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine. It's a beautiful exploration of language and dialect. It taught me at a young age to appreciate the way others speak and the socioeconomic implications of the way we listen to others. I'm still a SNOOT at heart, but I learned to temper it thanks to this piece and years of study in linguistics.

[1]: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

> when you struggle on a freaking leetcode problem

I'm all for the message of "get help if you need it," and it sounds like OP needs the help of a professional, so I upvoted your comment. But minimizing the triggering event is not helpful; the things you see as trivial or unimportant might be insurmountable or critical to someone else.

Some friendly feedback: I clicked through to your article about the two pointer technique and, AFAICT, there's nothing for me to do or read here. It says "In this guide, we'll cover..." but it's not clear how to actually view the guide. I'm guessing - without having clicked around at all - that my next step would be to create an account and visit the page again, but that's not at all clear to me as an unauthenticated user.

I do see a small "Login" on the bottom right of the page, as well as "Sign in" and a highlighted "Upgrade" at the top. But there is no CTA telling me what my next step should be. Maybe users of your site who land on this page will know what that step should be, but you might want to add some direction for people who randomly land on it via SEO/SEM or links on forums.

Cheers!

ETA: in a search for some action, I clicked all over the graphic and on a couple phrases in the intro to see if they would take me somewhere. If you're tracking clicks, it might be worth looking at whether other users are doing similar things.

Very nice! Is there a way to provide feedback on a given item? For example, this[1] seems to have a typo in the title (and thus the URL).

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but it's pretty easy to see how to monetize this by affiliate-linking out to a print/frame provider.

[1]: https://artvee.com/dl/valles-mariners/

There is also https://expediadotcom.github.io/haystack/, an Open Tracing-compliant distributed tracing system.

Actually, even God couldn't beat dollar-cost averaging[1].

[1]: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

I'm friends with several philosophers since I took it fairly seriously in undergrad and befriended several grad students. From my perspective, the "trolling" is generally just pointing out interesting entailments of another philosopher's arguments. For example, in a recent thread philosopher X outlined philosopher Y's argument just to point out that he hopes it shows the "weird consequences" of the basis of Y's argument. Y showed up to point out that X had missed a key wrinkle. A bunch of others showed up to wrangle about the meaning of certain words.

... So basically the same thing philosophers do in their papers, just with fewer citations.

(That's not me throwing shade -- just pointing out how the field seems to work. I loved and still love philosophy.)

Really good point. By the same token, someone should let Dan Patrick know that it's already illegal to surveil and harass people in bathrooms.

First, this is a good thing for the community. The ecosystem has been pretty well prepared for 3.x adoption for a while, but we just haven't done it. Still, when Django switched its default docs to use 3.x instead of 2.x, it noticeably increased adoption of 3.x. (Source: Kenneth Reitz on "Talk Python to Me" episode #6.) By pushing on with 3.x, Django is doing its part to drag the rest of us forward with it.

Second, this is necessary. Support for Python 2.x is supposed to end in 2020, per Guido's keynote at PyCon 2016, so Django is going to have to get in line in ~3 years one way or the other. A major version increment is a great time to introduce such a breaking change.

So ... "what this means" is that Django is doing what it has to do, which happens to coincide with the interests of the community at large. shrug I'm glad it's happening, but there shouldn't be a whole lot of drama or hand-wringing here.

Seriously? Was this a professional program or something? Maybe I was a particularly poor undergrad, but I can't imagine being able to afford a separate computer, even a shitty one, with a month's morning. Nor could I justify the expense -- "oh that's just my test-taking computer."

I'm uncomfortable with how willing I am (and others are) to just make/accept claims about how terrible the JS community is without evidence. In this thread there are tons of people saying JS devs don't understand CS fundamentals, write low quality code, and take their bearings from hype; that the "vast majority" of inexperienced people choose JS; etc. And I haven't seen any statistics on this or even a single example of such things.

I'm a Python guy who's working in Java at the moment. I don't particularly care for JS or frontend work, and I make no bones about it. But if someone were saying all this about the Python or Java communities, I'd be asking for evidence. And, frankly, I'd be pissed. So I think we should hold ourselves to similar standards -- don't just shit on a community because that's how you feel. Provide cases. And possibly even advice on how to improve!

I have a question. Our first child is due this week, and we also got a box from babyboxco. What did/do you use as sheets for the box's pad? We noticed this week that the sheet that came with it is just a non-fitted one that fits a regular-sized crib.

It's important to note that you can often "go prove it to yourself and get a developer to believe in your potential company" without coding a thing. For example, a non-technical friend that I'd worked with a few times came to me last year with an idea. I wasn't looking to jump ship from my current gig, but I was happy to advise him as he ramped up. We took his idea and boiled it down to some minimal questions that needed to be answered.

From there, he manually simulated the product: he manually gathered data from publicly available sources, manually dumped them into the tech he intended to use for some analysis, manually evaluated the results, etc. The result? In less than two weeks' time, we figured out that he actually had a decent idea going. Over beers, I sketched for him a general outline of how I'd automate the process -- nothing too detailed, nothing getting into the weeds, but I was able to give him an outline and say "here is where you've got some risk" or "this part's easy."

He shopped that around to a few folks, some of whom I was able to recommend to him, and ended up finding a technical cofounder. That guy threw everything I'd suggested away and went with another stack, but that's not the important part. What matters is that my buddy a) had proof that the thing could work, and b) had clearly done some due diligence in figuring out the initial development needs. That made him more attractive to technical people and led to his landing that technical cofounder.

So I'd advise you to:

1. Think hard about how much what you're doing needs any code at all.

2. Anything you can do manually, you should go ahead and do just to prove things out to yourself and, later, to potential cofounders.

3. Find a friend or a friendly face at a local meetup who'd be willing to advise -- don't ask for anything more.

4. Use the outputs of these processes to either a) decide not to go forward with it, because that's what you may learn, or b) pitch technical people.

Good luck!

Or create your own junior devs and turn them into mid-levels in a couple years. Take a look at the University of Texas's Software Developer Training Program[1]. They have similar problems with respect to hiring, with the additional problem that there is a lot of legacy code in proprietary technologies to maintain. So as a solution they began hiring for aptitude, not knowledge, and putting their trainees through this ~6-month program. The net result is specially tailored devs who know their systems pretty well. They have a strong community of developers who all have a certain background in common. There's a tacit understanding that trainees will stay on long enough to make the University's investment "worth it," but I don't think that's much of a problem. I think most trainees are "grateful," so even though they don't necessarily make what they would in the private sector, they stick around.

I went through this program and ended up working there for three years. Have recommended others go through it as well when they began pursuing careers in tech. Can't speak of it highly enough.

[1]: https://www.utexas.edu/its/analyst-training/

I think you're using the wrong standard here.

From Wikipedia:

> Hate speech - outside the law, is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.

"Marginalized political views" isn't in that list, but then again it doesn't purport to be a comprehensive list.

However, it seems like you're relying on a particularly legalistic view of what "hate speech" is. Is hateful speech toward a group truly not "hate speech" until a legislative act deems the group protected? On face, that doesn't seem right.

You're right about "hate speech" as a legal term, but I don't think the CEO of a non-profit speaking to his employees requires that level of scrutiny.

> all of its rounds after seed funding were debt rounds, including one at the end of July

This surprised me. They burned through a round in just a few weeks? And looking at their funding history[1], they closed $2.6M back in June. So that's $3.25M in less than 60 days.

It looks like the July round was targeting $3M and they only got $650k[2]. Maybe an expected deal didn't go through and it was just as much a shock to the management as the employees. This could just be a case of unrealistically high fundraising expectations, with unfortunate consequences for everyone. OTOH, assuming they hit the end of their runway, they had a burn rate of at least $1.6M/month, so I don't know how that last round was supposed to help for long.

Anyway, this is all armchair speculation. I hope their CEO can take some time and then share her experiences. It would probably serve as a good lesson for others.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zirtual/funding-roun... [2]: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1566557/0000897069150...

This is critical. IME, you're probably not going to get very good at programming while in school. That only comes with doing it several hours a day for a long time. So, certainly work on being efficient so that you can finish up the degree, but don't think about it much beyond that. You'll get there, and realistic people don't expect brilliant programmers right out of undergrad.

On the other hand, I haven't yet had a job where written communication wasn't important from virtually day one. You may start out thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to code," but in reality you have to talk to clients (even if they're your coworkers), your bosses, prospective hires, etc., and this often takes the form of written communication. If you write unintelligibly to a customer or your CEO about why a feature is taking a while to implement, you're going to have a bad time. If you issue a poorly-worded question to a prospective hire, you'll muddy the waters in an already difficult decision. And there's no substitute for dodging the heat with a well-worded CYA email.

Learn to write precisely and concisely. Rhetoric classes, if your uni offers them, are a great investment.

This is a great story. Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind my asking, what materials did you use to develop your curriculum, and have you shared the curriculum anywhere? (Apologies if this is on the site. Didn't see it but might have missed.)

That article was published today. I'm guessing this is just a cheeky swat back at the SEC. Especially since the original article prefaces the link with "Your tax dollars at work."

Looks great. One thing I loved about HackerNode was the fact that I could send an article to Chrome. (Maybe I'm blind, but I can't figure out how to add Chrome to the iOS 8 activities sheet.) The in-app browser is nice, but this is an important feature for history-diving purposes. I'm sure lots of your target market don't use Safari on the desktop. Any plans to support it?

FWIW (and I know I'm beating a dead horse), I did an informal survey on Facebook about this. The question was, simply, "Are dresses formal attire?" The universal consensus is "no." Dresses can be easier than pants, comfortable like pajamas, etc. So I think there's a good chance that many men simply have the wrong idea about dresses and they're the equivalent of jeans & hoodies.

Anyway. Maybe it's worth asking the women you know.

Eh. "Accepted" is probably a relative term here. As in, she was probably not "accepted" the way a man would be in casual attire. She just had slightly fewer hurdles to jump.

In any case, the point here is that men's reactions to women in dresses often cause distress and make women feel uncomfortable in technical settings. That's frankly ridiculous, since (as far as I understand) many women like to wear dresses and don't feel that they're formal. Maybe it's due to a misunderstanding? Men labor under the misapprehension that dresses are formal attire when they're not, and that causes the disconnect, etc. etc. Doesn't mean we should just accept it -- let's correct the misunderstanding. :)

I don't think this is about whether it's natural to have assumptions. It's that the "tiny minority" (although I think your numbers are wrong) are consistently saying that those assumptions are offensive, exclusionary, off-putting, etc. So, natural or not, it behooves us to try to set them aside.

You're making the mistake of thinking that dresses are formal attire. I'm not a woman, but I don't think that's a valid assumption.

I don't think that's true. You might get disregarded as a "business guy" if you show up to a meetup in a suit. But it's just as likely that people will just assume you're in financials. One of the better Python speakers I know of shows up everywhere in a suit. But women consistently report not being taken seriously when wearing dresses.

I posted this on FB last night and had quite a discussion ensue. I really like what the author has to say about assumptions. As a user group and conference organizer, time and time again I have seen men approach feminine people in the crowd with these just terribly naïve prejudices. "Oh, you must be a junior dev." Or "Who are you here with?" We men should absolutely try to set these poor assumptions aside -- if not for better equality (although why not?), then because of the awkwardness that ensues when someone says "No, actually I'm giving the keynote" or "Yeah, I co-wrote that book." If you don't want to look like an idiot on the regular, don't go around the world thinking every competent person looks/acts/dresses/talks the way you do.

GitHub has this issue, too. Try doing a PR on GH when the diff is reasonably large. We get 500s from them when trying to review anything worth doing. That and the inability to set permissions on branches have prevented us from moving from self-hosted Gitolite to GH full time.

Not sure about what you're saying here. In no way did Martha bring vision, set direction (see note below), or provide motivation. She sat and read the code for a while until she found the problem. Without any more detail, it seems likely enough that Arnie was setting the vision/direction and providing motivation. They just didn't reach their goal before (relatively uninvolved) Martha figured things out.

Not trying to devalue Martha's contribution. I love the Marthas in my workplace. But, very often, they're not leaders. They're the people leaders know to turn to in times of crisis. They're extraordinarily valuable, and should be compensated/lauded accordingly, but that doesn't mean they're the leaders. Nor, in my experience, do they always wish to be.

Note: Martha did, of course, "set the direction" at the end of the meeting, when she'd found the bug. But I take direction-setting to generally be an event prior to the activity (in this case, debugging). Martha did not do that.

Maybe I'm being selective about my memory, but I don't remember the awful linkbait titles being nearly so popular in 2007 when this was written. I don't think there's even the hint of imitation of Buzzfeed-style titling here. Also, I've taken a class from one of the authors, and I'd be surprised if he'd ever even seen those kinds of pages. :)

> Here is what we need you to do?

I'm Ron Burgundy?

(But seriously, good redesign. Cheers.)