spyhi

> it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures.

This, to me, looks like the PS2 vs Dreamcast move, where Sony blocked Dreamcast sales with PS2 hype. We've been waiting for 10nm for a while now, and now Intel is essentially confirming "yes, it's really coming this time" where they might not have otherwise--it's hard to not see that as a reaction to Threadripper. At least on the surface, increased competition has led to increased transparency, which is good for consumers...or at least I'm happy knowing I have the option to avoid a big, hot, power-hungry chip if I want to.

Does the irc bot you imported use websockets? I've been researching how to do a Twitch-plays game in Unity/C# and am thinking websockets to avoid rate limiting, but was wondering how much that'd do for latency, given it's push-based instead of polling.

Especially now that (more often than not) you can attach Audible books to your Kindle books for a fairly trivial price, and whispersync for voice means you can hop back and forth between reading and listening. Now, any time I'm using my eyes and hands, but not my ears and mind, I'm listening to books--increased my reading rate by a lot.

> But if I just give her some JS and ask her to run it she'll stare blankly right back at me.

Exactly. I know how to program, if programming means designing an algorithm to achieve a task and returning the result...but even though I'm most of the way through my CS program, I don't know how to do a lot of the stuff necessary to make that program useful in the real world. I know I'm missing that and I'm learning on my own, but I'm really bothered there hasn't been much emphasis so far on how to deploy the program in a real-world environment and integrate it with an ecosystem of programs, such that laypeople can use it. Algorithms and programming are only a small piece of the puzzle, and a lot of people won't have senior developers to guide them.

Yep, it really explains the strangeness of men's interactions very cogently. It's nearly a year old, but it's stuck with me because it was so good. Also shows how repressed most of us are, that our way of figuring out how our friends are feeling is to attack them--in game design terms, our "verb" for loving is the same as the "verb" for hurting, which might explain why so many women in a male-dominated workplace feel attacked.

This reminds me of an extremely eloquent comment I saw over on Reddit a while ago about how men being assholes to each other is actually a form of male bonding, and there is a delicate nuance to our rough-edged camaraderie. [1] I was raised in a gentle household by a nerd and a feminist, so when I joined the Army as an infantryman, I absolutely had to learn how this worked and can absolutely attest that it's a real thing. Given the later apologies, it sounds like it's possible the office was bro-ing it up with her and may have even thought they were welcoming her into the tribe, so to speak. (Of course, they could have all just been misogynist assholes, too...sad how there can be little difference)

Thing is, most women absolutely DO NOT respond well to that kind of male bonding. And, honestly, they probably shouldn't--I think this "emotional sonar" is a maladjusted response to men being told they can't express their feelings. Given this, we probably shouldn't be exposing women to that kind of environment either.

I guess this kind of underscores why you need women in the workplace. It's too easy for an all-male space to fall into this kind of emotional language and interaction framework, which is "hostile but comprehensible" to those in the culture, but completely alien to those who aren't--women and foreigners alike. At the very least, we (meaning everyone, not just men) should try to be aware that not everyone bonds the same, and bonding activities for some people and genders may be anti-bonding and hostile to others.

I want to make clear, I'm not trying to justify what happened, but I feel like often these articles are kind of one-sided, which can make it difficult to diagnose what's going on. The problem with saying "don't be misogynist" is I suspect few people identify as one but, on the other hand, we can identify our baggage and try to examine critically how it affects others.

Either way, sorry OP had to experience that, whether mismatched bonding attempts or actual hostility and misogyny.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/comments/5dpezd/girls_what...

As soon as I saw the headline, I thought to myself "well yeah, Americans have also never been fatter," so the conclusion wasn't much of a surprise. Interesting that it's affecting men so much more.

This isn't the only study that indicates fatness is impacting aggregate performance, either. The US DoD has actually identified American obesity as a potential threat to national security and readiness. [1][2]

[1] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/policy-dose/articles/20... [2] (PDF) http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a547350.pdf

I doubt it's much different. Sure, the content itself is more invisible, but social dynamics are probably a more important factor to spread. I know if I notice my wife engrossed in something on her phone or computer, I'm gonna ask her what she's found just out of sheer curiosity, and that's if she doesn't bring it up first. Conversely, if I'm fascinated by something, I'm gonna tell my wife (even if she doesn't care, much to her chagrin), and I'm gonna tell 'errbody who I think might have even a passing interest. Maybe we are unique in this regard, but I suspect not, given the success of everything from StumbleUpon to Delicious to Facebook...humans are just wired to share with each other.

> The third piece — and it’s missing for a lot of teams, she said — is someone who can communicate the exact value proposition for the customer and speak their language.

So, basically, someone doing sales and marketing. I'd think that'd be a CEO/non-technical cofounder job in a very early stage startup, but maybe the capital-intensive nature of scaling up a robotics/hardware startup means the CEO should be entirely focused on raising money and securing partnerships while someone else is entirely focused on product leadership. I wonder why the investor settled on that division of labor.

The lack of emphasis on software engineering/programming/implementation at my program has been an ongoing complaint of mine. I went to school as an adult, so I know what the workplace needs and I know a lot of universities are missing a critical component of that.

Do you have any preferred resources for getting up to speed on the software engineering side of things? I'm picking up stuff here and there, but always looking for more or for convergence.

That's a really fascinating documentary. Interesting to see a woman analyzing male issues from a first-hand perspective, haha! I did think it was a little funny at the end, the guy saying "this will be revolutionary" but today it's mostly the same, though I do believe things are slowly getting better for both sides.

You're pretty alright :) Have a good evening!

"In Millennial Guy, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bicentennial Man, a blogger living in a world where robots seek humanity seeks to become a robot, but spends his time arguing about it on the internet instead, ultimately never achieving his goal. Instead, he waits for his break as an internet "thought leader" while living with his disappointed parents, then he dies."

Thanks for saying this--too often people hand-wave away others' problems though, ironically, they may end up inheriting them. Your comment reminded me about an article on how Millennial women are conflicted about being breadwinners. [1] Between chuckling about how I (a Millennial guy) have said many of the quotes nearly verbatim, it dawned on me that as we approach equality in the workplace these women are being now being exposed to what were classically "man problems." I think guys are mostly familiar with those, but I think we also mostly conditioned or compelled endure it in silence, which may lend to the idea that there are "no extra obstacles" for us.

So yes, let's be sympathetic to each others' problems and avoid demonizing each other...you never know, it could end up being your problem.

[1] http://www.refinery29.com/2017/04/148488/millennial-women-ar...

> I mean, we wouldn't be having the same discussion here if the company had instead hired someone (perhaps even the OP) on contract specifically to automate the job, and that was it.

A small fallacy to this idea: An automation contractor would have been paid differently (i.e. more, maybe even dramatically more) for the job, so it's not directly equivalent. The rates for semi-skilled data input labor vs creating a tool that will yield ongoing, long-term value are completely different, which is the real source of conflict here.

Well, now you've gone and killed him.

I'm currently working through this struggle in Hawaii. I'm currently an adult student pursuing concurrent degrees in CS and Entrepreneurship at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and trying to find ways to bring the two programs closer in ways that reflect my self-study on SV-style tech entrepreneurship and my experience in the professional workforce...and it's not easy.

Not mentioned in the video are a couple factors that probably influence the process in invisible and important ways:

1) At UH (and other universities I've checked on), the different departments are run as different business units, so trying to run mixed classes runs into the typical corporate politics of how funds are allocated, who gets credit, etc. We do have a video game design class that combines CS and creative media majors into one crossover class at the undergrad level, so I'm trying to gain insight on how that works at a pedagogical and administrative level.

2) Talking to the curriculum manager of our MBA program, he expressed that he didn't have any professors who would want to teach a multidisciplinary class, and he didn't have anyone he felt comfortable assigning to it anyway. When I asked him why, he said that business academia heavily discouraged multidisciplinary research, and publish-or-die culture has resulted in extremely "pointy" professors who are stellar single business discipline, but essentially worthless outside their skill silo. Because of this, he felt that a silo-breaker class would be either resource-intensive or ineffective.

We do have a couple "entrepreneurship" centers on campus, one oriented around tech (with a former technical SV-type manager), and one oriented around business. Sadly, they seem to be mutually exclusive for the most part, but I've been working on trying to build the connective tissue.

I do completely agree that business and engineering need each other, because I always see product without strategy or strategy that completely misunderstands the magical business properties of pure tech--and that's if the business kids are pitching tech at all. These two disciplines, at least at my school, are utterly ignorant of each other and it shows in the ideas they have. When it comes to preparing students for any kind of entrepreneurship, you need to have practitioners and managers mingling for it to work, and I doubt I'd ever go to a business masters that wasn't multidisciplinary. To this end, very happy I'm seeing things like Harvard's MBA/CS and the Stanford interdisciplinary programs pop up.

I doubt I'll get UH to see the light, but wish me luck. Hopefully the insights I got from administrators help someone look at the problem differently.

> Taken to the extreme this is an ugly future of wasted time and resources to bend to facebook's constant tweaks which are not in favor of the content creators, but ~~the advertisers~~ facebook.

Small correction: Content creators are the advertisers. If you want the audience you've built to see the content you've made, you pretty much have to buy ads in the form of "boosts" and other ad units. At this point, everything is looping around to benefit Facebook. I see more sponsored posts for content than for products these days, honestly.

Yeah, I was gonna say, it's extremely difficult to efficiently get the content you're looking for on Facebook. These days, even if I go to someone's page, the most recent videos or photos might be hidden behind some UI element or another. In many ways, Facebook controls what you're going to see in ways cable companies didn't or couldn't. If you're in the feed, there is no way whatsoever to choose how its sorted. I have a lot of pro photographer friends and I want to see their photos, but Facebook's algorithm wants very badly for me to see the latest stolen viral video, so it hides everything else. Very powerful position.

Picked up a copy, thank you! And thanks for the suggestion on proving things in area I already have an intuition for, maybe I'll do that in conjunction with reading the book.

Speaking of the lack of education in proofs and popularizing math, do you (or anyone else here) know of good resources to practice and learn more about proofs? I've asked several professors and TAs in my CS program and they say "practice," but they couldn't point to any good tools for self-teaching and I don't really feel confident evaluating the material I've found on my own.

My takeaway is that "fake it 'till you make it" applies to both dogs and journals.

Really, though, the problem here is that the "publish or perish" metric for careers has created demand for willing outlets. It's interesting that this can create circular authenticity, as was the case here. This seems like it also might be a driving factor behind the issues reproducing experiments--things can get published without proper peer review if the journals aren't really in it for the science.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a magic bullet here, since it's a product of a lot of disconnected incentive systems coming together to accidentally create a monster.

Yep, because otherwise the site would have seemed like a ghost town despite growing because of the 1-9-90 rule. They had to keep submissions going until they attracted the 10% of users that makes a community truly come alive.

> Facebook shows me updates about friends that I wouldn't otherwise know about.

Adding to this, text messaging and emailing and deliberate and specific, which means someone has to think to include you. It takes work to figure all that out--it is an active decision to communicate instead of a passive broadcast about something general that invites people to participate. It's very easy, and a good way to keep relationships warm and to make room for serendipity.

I don't know about you, but I really dislike things like personal newsletters and text messages/emails just to strike up any conversation, probably because at any given time I'm probably pretty busy, and being present requires both thought and time. On the other hand, when I share something on social media, it means I'm pretty much willing to engage with all comers, or if I see you've updated on social media, I'll assume the same.

Secondly, if you're that random friend that insists on only communicating via text message or email or some weird idiosyncratic way that applies only to you, I'm probably going to leave you out of a lot of stuff, even if I like you, because I have limited brainpower and I'm going to forget when I'm managing 15-20 people on a social channel and trying to update you out in the wilderness.

Lastly, email and text really, really suck for discussing topics in large groups, so if I send a link I want to talk about to a bunch of friends, I have the choice of managing 15 individual conversations (with lots of repetition), or managing an incredible amount of chaos.

So yeah, IMHO social media has definitely solidified a place in the communication stack.

Yeah, I made an account a while ago with the intent to participate and realized I wasn't nearly technical enough to add any value yet, but back now that I'm farther along with my CS degree. For once I had some relevant info! Shitload of Reddit, though, and easy to spot certain patterns from a mile away, just funny to see it here.

Hour-old account, archive.is domain. I feel like that's a hint...

> I hope it sticks to user engagement/meta-type posts (IAMAs) rather than being an account that acts as an auto-submitter of WaPo headlines to r/news/politics/worldnews.

A friend of mine is the lead mod for the /u/washingtonpost account, and his primary goal for that account is engagement. Even as far as submissions go, they are trying to create content crafted for reddit, such as those news rollups they're experimenting with. His personal goal is for the account to become like the Wendy's Twitter of Reddit--a bit more irreverent and conversational, and willing to joke around with users. So far he's gotten a generally warm reception, especially when he pops up in unexpected places like TIL.

Part of the opportunity for them with reddit is that it's a bit less ephimeral than Twitter or Facebook, which creates new opportunities. As long as a piece of content is relevant, it stays on top of people's front pages, and WaPo can jump into the thread to answer popular questions, which then everyone can see. In a way, this actually gives them an incentive to not auto-post and let stuff rise organically, so they can engage in the right places.

As an avid redditor, I really feel like they have the right idea (it helps he's into the same things as reddit in general) and I feel like good things are gonna come of this over the next few months.

You covered product decisions pretty well, but I was curious about organizational decisions. Based on your talk, it seems like you existed mostly outside the SV bubble and seemed to maybe even avoid it. Nonetheless, many of your employees came from the network you developed in SV and it seems you were based in SV at the time.

Do you feel that it helped to have started there? Do you feel at this point that you can build a successful company "where you are," given modern tools (AWS, etc.), or does it still help to do your time in SV first?

Good idea, thank you!

Agreed, though I draw the parallel elsewhere. The industrial revolution was about automating labor, though really it just scaled up repeatable processes. Likewise, computer programs don't really automate mental labor, they just scale up repeatable processes once the mental labor of figuring out the specification is done. Deep learning, on the other hand, promises the automation of actual mental labor--creating new information from other, unrelated information. If you look at it that way, its role and future seems pretty obvious.

I'd be interested in reading about this as well. I've been keeping an eye on Buffer for a while now because I'm fascinated by their culture and business philosophy, and I've been watching the development of B Corps to see if eventually they'll prove viable. However idealistic, OP's headline caught my attention for the same reasons. I think the bottom line (P&L) is important, but I also feel that current corporate structures can elevate its importance to an unhealthy degree, leading to negative externalities and short-term-ism. If and when I start a company, I'd like to follow a holistic approach to value creation that takes these things into account, but there is precious little out there about how to do it successfully. It'd be great to have more info out there about these approaches!