throwaway9475

Lotta male tears here, but then again, it's Hacker News...

So clearly we should all look at language through the lens of your childhood experiences. Got it.

> It's not as if you can simply work around and pick similar words for that individual's particular noun

We're working with an arbitrary constraint here (and I, for one, am enjoying it, actually); we kind of /have/ to do that. ;)

> you miss almost all of a thought by dancing around it vs. using a fast shortcut that quickly aligns thoughts with low odds of ambiguity.

You seem to forget that we're trying to find clever ways to refer to people and things without using the most common letter in the English language.

"Missing third individual that both must grasp to carry on."

"I'm saddened by some of the comments here. It's true that COBOL is not safe. It's true you shouldn't be using it for large portions of your professional setting. It's true that these sort of libraries appear to be slapping a bandaid on a broken bone... All of those things are true, but you should learn COBOL. And you should learn it well.

I wonder where we will be in as little as 10, 20 years. When the COBOL dinosaurs die and universities stop teaching the basics of computers. Young programmers are being pushed away from the harsh realities of COBOL (not to mention anything below COBOL), who's going to be building the building blocks in the future? Who's is going to keep optimising modern languages like Smalltalk and Simula? That minority is only going to get smaller..."

It would sound ridiculous then and it sounds ridiculous now.

Individual who is not I and whom I do not know. :)

It also pays to realize that when people say something makes them feel "deathly ill", they're probably using it as an expression to signify how shaken they are by something.

I guess it's a kind of armchair environmentalism: it's easy to "go green" by switching to canvas bags (which _does_ help, a little), but then not make large, more sacrificial changes that would _actually_ benefit the environment. I don't know. It's tough, though, because to a large extent we're forced into lifestyles that are bad for the environment. You can't just decide to stop using the electricity produced by the coal power plant in your city, for example.

I don't understand the mentality expressed in the article, where environmentalism is only observed for tiny pieces of waste that don't matter. These same people (like you mentioned) fly dozens of people on airplanes, which is so much worse. Or they have kids or don't update their home's insulation or drive a gas-guzzler. At the end of the day, there's only so much you as an individual can do (and certainly the CEO of ExxonMobil is way more complicit in climate change than Jane Doe walking down the street), but as far as carbon footprint is concerned, paper invites (which are biodegradable) are barely a blip on the radar.

Well-played! I was testing you! Not really; I made a mistake. Still, though, I'm not doubting that packaging in aggregate isn't a problem, but as far as anyone individually is concerned, a few bits of plastic are the least of the planet's concerns.

Third choice: Slack exists, but doesn't hold your data hostage until you pay. I mean, on my list of things I care about ideologically, this is lower than my concern for warm gin and my dislike of sweatpants. It's legal and totally within their right, but it's a crappy way to behave.

It's true. Most of our climate issues don't come from teeny tiny packets of soy sauce. Consumer recycling might make people feel warm and fuzzy, but remember that a few years ago BP spilled 780,000 cubic meters (780 cubic kilometers) into the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm confused. How is this different from just following a recipe and going to the grocery store?

And for that, the top 1% of earners are truly thankful.

No, a test will tell you whether or not that test passes; it says nothing about the correctness of anything else. But at this point, you're doing the job of a typesystem.

I think it's also hard because it's not as if crappy hours, tight deadlines, and low pay are directly killing people. Sure, stress is bad for you and you deserve to make enough money to provide for yourself and have healthcare, but I imagine conditions are overall still better than at the beginning of the labor movement, which involved rather dangerous factory work. It's easier for people to tolerate 60+ hour weeks and the like if they're paid well enough or if they hold hostile views towards unions, which I don't think is uncommon in the software field as a whole.

It's different if you get paid for overtime, though (usually time and a half). Companies threaten action against people working overtime because then the company has to pay more and that's a Bad Thing (TM), (even though the employees are providing way more value to the company than the company is providing to them), not because people want a staffing problem to make the company "wake up" or something. My mother doesn't work overtime out of the goodness of her heart, she just scrapes by and wants to be able to retire at a reasonable age.

No, they hold your data hostage because they can. Welcome to capitalism.

I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.

How is it down there in Galt's Gulch?

You should publish because I know I and a lot of other people would be incredibly interested in divining this information during a job interview.

Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

Religion is the result of changing the world to fit your beliefs. Lack of religion is the result of changing your beliefs to fit the world. Cognitive dissonance can be resolved in one of two ways.

100% this. It's all a game, except prospective employees are guilted into thinking they're the only ones lying (or that doing it is wrong). It works the other way too:

Candidate: "What do you dislike the most about working here?" Interviewer: (My asshole boss...) "The office is a little noisy sometimes."

Companies are under no obligation to be truthful.

A) A recruiter isn't necessarily going to know that. B) Even if they did, companies do illegal things all the time and get away with it. Maybe it's technically illegal, but also maybe your company would come after you for something trivial and just ruin your life with litigation. I totally understand actually wanting to abide by an NDA even if it's unenforceable.

Does that include inappropriately frisking children because what if they're secretly lightning rods and they're going to kill us all? No. Because that's ridiculous. Just like it's ridiculous in airports.

What's more likely: that everyone needs to know intimate details about basic data structures or that the world is held together with duct tape and Perl and 95% of code is written by people not in Silicon Valley who need it to just work?

According to the Cato Institute [1], the probability of being involved in a terrorist attack by a foreign-born terrorist from 1975 to 2015 was 0.00003%, or 1/3,609,709. The probability of you being struck by lightning this year is 1/960,000.

Terrorism ISN'T a serious problem, compared to homelessness, obesity and other health issues, lack of access to healthcare (see: obesity and other health issues), minority rights (especially for Muslims and Mexican immigrants), labor rights, poor public transportation, etc. It just isn't. God, if people cared 1/10th as much about some of these issues as they did about "being hard on terrorism", imagine how much we could get done. Instead we're groping ten-year-old boys at airports in the name of "safety".

Edit: add source.

[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa798_...

Moreover, it's not actually about fighting terrorism. I'm sure some individual TSA agents (the ones who don't get their jollies from groping ten-year-old boys [1] believe they're doing the Lord's work, but most of this policy is just about keeping people's necks under a boot and harassing minorities. People fleeing war-torn countries with suitcases are not going to fly planes into the World Trade Center, as certain media outlets or politicians would have you believe, but we keep enacting policy like that. Not because those in power actually believe it, but because they simply hate Muslims. They hate people whose religion is different, whose skin color is different, whose gender is different, whose sexuality is different.

[1] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/29/tsa-punishes-boy-who-left-...

> I am not sure how you would twist personal development and remaining up to date with "do more of their job outside of work for free".

Well, unless you're doing personal development at work during the 40 hours (or so) that you're required to be there, then you're probably not getting paid for it. I mean, I'm willing to tinker on my own, but you can be a good developer without doing it (you can also be a bad developer in spite of doing that).

> Would you rather go to a doctor who is passionate about their work and constantly devoting personal time to remain up to date on the latest research, drugs, studies, techniques and technology?

I want to go to a reasonably friendly, competent doctor. I really don't care how passionate they are about being a doctor, because I don't view passion as a proxy for quality (because it isn't).

> I'd pick option #1 every time. Same with engineers.

So my friend is a brilliant chemical engineer, and yet she doesn't sit around designing plants at home on the weekends. No, she hangs out with friends, sings in a choir, watches TV shows, travels, etc. I don't particularly understand the tech industry's fetish with eating, sleeping, and breathing code, and it's a damn shame that we're pushing away really fantastic nine-to-five developers.

> Look, if you are not interested in remaining current, that's OK. Just don't expect to have access to the same opportunities. It's as simple as that.

So it turns out that most software isn't created in Silicon Valley, and more money is made by crufty old Java and Perl enterprise systems than the next sexy JavaScript framework (which is probably just a poor rehash of a computer science concept Alan Kay developed in the '60s).

> Wow. Not sure how you made the jump to harassment there. Gender has nothing to do with it.

Gender has nothing to do with it if you don't experience the kind of issues that women in the workplace face, sure. If you're a man, you're not particularly affected by issues that affect women.