themarkn

I was laid off as part of the last financial crash in Ireland. I’d been working as an administrator at a well known mortgage broker business at the time. We were told the housing bubble wasn’t going to affect our jobs because we did so much other business. In retrospect most of that other business was mortgage-adjacent. Insurance etc. Anyway the boss calls us all in one by one and explains things. I see other people coming out looking shook but it’s my first job out of college so I’m still totally surprised to be told I won’t have a job next week.

I had some help from other people who worked there offering to get me started at another mortgage company, but also had a friend who worked a 20-hour week assisting somebody with a disability, and was looking for his own replacement. At the time this work paid well in Ireland, it was 20 euro an hour, easily the equivalent of a full time entry level job in some other industry. I took that job, lived with one of my college roommates nearby, worked my 20 hour weeks, wrote plays and poems, and played shows with my band, it was great.

I was lucky to be laid off and have that amazing experience. It turned out to influence everything else I did in life, including working for 7 years with folks with disabilities in one way or another, and when switching to full time web development, having a good eye for accessibility.

I was on my way to getting some qualifications and become a financial advisor back in 2009 at that company that laid me off. It’s just what they expected of junior employees. After a certain point I might have fallen into just doing that as my career after sinking some time into learning non-transferable financial skills.

Meetup works really well in my city. Recently a few friends started a meetup group for a taco night with other folks in the tech scene- no speakers, no frameworks, just some people getting together after work. Some of the group that set up the event came, but because it was on meetup, several total strangers joined us and we all got to hang out and shoot the breeze. Several of the people who showed up were people working remote jobs who don’t have an after work socializing option when they want one.

Thanks one example, but shows the overall idea: anybody going to a meetup event has already accepted that this a publicly known event where there will probably be some new people, and wants to socialize with new people too.

Not a JS solution but if memory serves, setting the font size of in an input to 16px or greater prevents the mobile auto-zoom. At least on iOS.

Luckily the young dude has no need to prove himself to you, and hopefully he never reads this comment.

Being engaged enough as a teenager to win stuff, have a job, become actually fluent at languages (Irish high school does not make you fluent), do your grades in music, and choose then qualify for a university outside Ireland - none of this is easy or the "default" that is expected of children growing up there.

The default is you either stay in the town you grew up in or attend one of several major Irish universities free of charge with a bunch of your friends. After which you get a job in one of the bigger cities, maybe emigrate for employment reasons, or indeed head on back to your home town anyway and look for work there. That's normal.

You're doubtful of this kid's accomplishments but you have no context for the surrounding culture or how hard these things might have been for him individually.

I grew up there. It's not easy to stick your neck out and try to achieve things or be interested in success as a teenager in a rural school in Ireland.

> Happy people don't make great art.

This is kinda just a myth as far as I can tell. There is a often romanticized relationship between art and suffering, because sure, some art is created as a way to relieve suffering. But it's by no means mandatory, and at one point I've even been in the spot (like many many others) of being afraid to get help for mental health issues because of what it might do to the work I was creating. This is how the myth does harm. The longer people "trade" health for art, the more they put themselves at risk in service of this misguided idea. It's no exaggeration to say that people have died as a result of believing that treating their depression would diminish their art. A person in that situation has to win every day of their lives, while depression only has to win once.

The basics are not what make them hard. But they are vast in how they can be used and combined to achieve various results. Writing semantically correct, accessible, maintainable markup and CSS is websites that often have thousands of elements on a page (a separate problem, but true), made up of components authored in a CMS with who-knows-what nesting ... etc etc it’s hard. CSS favors conciseness over explicitness, so there are many properties that look like they do one thing but actually do another. That’s hard too, you have to learn not to assume the obvious interpretation of a property name is the correct one.

What often happens is developers duct tape complicated user interfaces together using the basics (because CSS and HTML are considered “easy”) and end up painting themselves into a corner where it’s increasing difficult to manage the code and assistive technology has no idea what’s going on.

For me, letting new developers know that good HTML and CSS is hard helps them to respect the huge surface area involved and be patient with themselves when they struggle. Telling people those things are “easy” makes them feel stupid when they can’t get something working right away.

I guess you cover this by saying advanced features require some learning - but I feel like people hit the hard part of CSS very early on when trying to implement basic patterns that are on most websites.

We aren’t being rewarded for how hard we work, we’re being rewarding for having skills that are in high demand while supply has not caught up yet. Salaries may well go down in future when the need for developers is less or the pool of talent is bigger. We also aren’t trapped by the examples set by previous developers - our productivity varies depending on what we are doing, the tools we are using, what our team is like, etc - not just the raw number of hours we put in.

Sure, I just used medical as the example because that’s what the parent comment talked about. There are many other industries with problems maintaining a good work/life balance for people who work there. Often those gigs are lower paid than tech work. I worked many more hours and had a more stressful, less predictable life when I worked at a nonprofit, before I became a developer. Now I mostly work 9-5, sometimes an extra hour or two here and there but no expectation that I’m doing stuff outside of work. I have some side projects, meetups etc that I spend time on, but can also spend time at work learning new things or trying stuff out.

I’m not sure that the lesson to be learned from the medical profession’s overburdening of its professionals is that other well paid industries should follow suit and overburden their own professionals.

The meaning of 10x has blurred considerably - when coined, as far as I can tell, it seemed to mean that sometimes the most productive developer on a team is 10x more product than the least productive developer, not the “average hire“ - which is a very different claim.

It’s safer to assume that any code you write will at one point be maintained by somebody with a visual impairment even if there’s not currently a team member with an impairment.

Definitely not wading into specific methodological arguments. All studies require interpretation is context of their methodological strengths and weaknesses in terms of what was actually measured, and how much weight to give the study's results in context of other studies of related topics.

I feel the same way about the the studies that form the basis of the article you linked. You don't seem sceptical about those results.

I'm not going hunting for a meta-analysis that addresses this, which is really what would be ideal.

I think you are off by orders of magnitude in terms of how much influence a person's physical body has over their interests, choices, and likelihood of success. I can't relate to that, I can't argue with it, you might as well be telling me that that the sky is made of cheese.

This is why I don't see the point continuing the conversation. We'd first have to agree on what the sky is made of.

Three were linked in the same Washington Post article you referenced.

> This inequality of result, and the inability to attribute such to intrinsic factors, is the great "gender bias."

Ok I don't have the energy to keep this conversation going, the distance between us is too great.

It's based on things I've listened to women say about working in male-dominated fields, and on the many other studies that contradict the one in that article. Even the author of that study doesn't go as far as you, she admits the results do not mean there is no discrimination. "Radically overcorrecting" seems a couple of steps beyond that.

I guess we'll just both be astonished. Sometimes two people look at the exact same world and see different things.

Not arguing that you didn't admit the assumption was incorrect ... Just that in saying it was based on the editorial bias in the articles you're ignoring your own participation in making the assumption.

You admit you were too quick to jump to conclusions: but I'd argue you were quick because those conclusions "seemed right" based on your own biases. I dunno. Maybe your statement "Although, I don't think she has enough experience to realize that it's a good thing to do." didn't have anything to do with her being a woman and it's just a coincidence that women struggle with being seen as less experienced than their male peers. It just came across to me as a really patronising and insulting thing to say, and hard thing to blame on the reporting of others.

Social, historical, and cultural factors undoubtedly make the level of effort required to be successful as a woman in tech or science spaces higher than the level of effort a man has to make for the same level of success (if you could control everything else). This can be true without any derogatory implication about the inherent capabilities of women generally. That you can't tell the difference astonishes me.

No need to avoid your own responsibility and bias in making that assumption. It's not accurate to blame it on the media coverage alone. Strikes me as more like confirmation bias around what your expectations are for academics, women, or both.

Money is still the biggest problem if you are poor. It blocks out all the others. You spend all your time thinking about staying ahead of financial ruin. Calling time and discipline the largest factors, to me, misses the point entirely. You can’t have time if you juggle multiple employers and have kids and are still scraping by. You can’t have “discipline” or willpower or whatever about this stuff if there are 20 more important things you don’t even get done thinking about before you fall asleep from exhaustion at the end of the day. Who’s doing organized meal prep when they have to decide whether to pay the water or the gas bill this month or take out a payday loan or what to do?

Sorry for the rant, if that tone is coming through. But no, the problem is not that poor people aren’t trying hard enough, which is what these kinds of responses seem to boil down too. The problem is people without wealth are exposed to way too much risk and hardship to ever have a chance (or even enough resources and time) to act strategically the way people. Everything is tactical, everything is about just staying upright.

Hey friend. Sorry to hear about this. It's a real predicament and in your shoes I'd probably do what you are doing. Hope you can find that time.

Flu and complications related to flu kill thousands of people each year. How is it not serious?

Just jumping in here, but if detecting accidental triggering of irreversible actions is a challenge, maybe the overall approach is problematic. You could, though, temporarily introduce a confirmation step and see what % of users choose to cancel rather than confirm their invitations or something like that. The chance of a random tap on a face that Facebook (not the user) chose to put on a screen seems to guarantee there will be some accidental invitations no matter what, since accidental taps happen.

> arguments like men being physically stronger and faster solely due to upbringing and not biology.

Is that a real example? It seems obviously untrue and I’d be surprised if people really think this. Especially the word solely.

... no it isn’t. It’s saying the differences that do exist are related to sex, not gender - any statistical relationship to gender is mediated through the relationship to sex because gender is often correlated to sex ... but there are many people for whom this is not the case. So gender can’t be responsible for physical differences. Only sex, which is physical, could be correlated with physical/neurological differences.

Well, they wouldn’t be gender related because gender and biological sex are different ideas. To many people, anyway.

Yeah this is a fair point, didn't mean to suggest that easy security wins that dont't inconvenience the user or add cost in some other way aren't worth making.

I guess I'm projecting that then. The opening "Have you ever noticed that nobody is allowed to be successful on the internet?" struck me as very silly and I must have gone on from there and filled in my own thoughts about why anybody would write this way. "Allowed" to be successful makes it seem like you have a huge chip on your shoulder with somebody - who does the disallowing? How do they actually prevent you from being successful? It sets the tone of the post as a story of persecution which I'm guessing you did not intend.

Not sure what you mean. Nothing is secure, ever, in a binary sense of being just one thing or the other. It's all a balance between level of security and level of practical usability. Often we've made things easy to use but hard to secure. Like SSNs. But regardless of the source of an attack, the reward for breaking 1 billion targets on the same system vs 1.3 million on a different system is probably much higher. So the inconveniences of more secure systems must be weighed in context of the desirability of the information within them. More attractive targets need more secure, less easy to use, systems.

It's ok for it not to pass the smell test, because what you have stated is not actually the argument being made. The number of languages and dialects was (presumably) brought up to emphasize the many differences in scale and culture (especially government corruption) between India's population and Estonia's that might introduce complexities, incentives, and opportunities for bad actions in one situation that are not applicable in the other.

Hmm. I disagree with this overall assessment that that's what's going on. I think people some people (especially hn people) are rightly suspicious of advice that is related to that one specific time success happens. Though of course some individuals apply this in a kneejerk way which must be infuriating if you're trying to make a more subtle point.

But I think in general it's a trend against the idea that successful people or projects are successful because of a particular sequence of steps that could, if replicated, make an observer successful also. Whereas, as you point out, it's more about this meta thing of how we do our best to recognize good conditions for success, and then keep showing up. If the chances of success (especially really big success) are small- trying more times increases your odds.

I think people, broadly speaking, understand this idea, and all the yelling about confirmation bias has roots in real instances of people bragging/advising/publishing books/whatever based on anecdotes about things that happened during their specific successful project, with less recognition of how much coincidence matters.

And yes, you can't benefit from coincidence if you don't show up. If you aren't trying in the first place. If that is your actual premise, it's not very obvious to me from your post. Honestly the tone of your post felt more like complaining/whining that people won't listen to your advice when you want to give it and how frustrated that makes you, than a sincere attempt to talk about the pros and cons of repeatedly taking risks on new projects when you could be doing other things.