workthrowaway27

I have evaluated it to the best of my ability and don't believe it's a majority by any stretch. Why would I reject the null hypothesis when there is no evidence for another one?

The woman who took issue with the framing thought the Kotaku article was too hard on Atari's culture, so that only supports my argument.

The people involved don't think the behavior was shitty. It's only now, 40+ years after the fact, that people on twitter are complaining about it.

Yes it is a straw man. In Atari's case the people working there enjoyed the culture and didn't have an issue with it. You can't say the same thing about slaves.

I don't understand why the standards[0] of 2018 are relevant to the culture of a startup in the 1970s.

[0]: And these standards aren't broadly shared. Rather there's a vocal minority who wants to classify much of what was previously common behavior as harassment.

I doubt these ethics courses do anything to change people's behavior.

That's a poor approach to life. I've tried it.

I think you underestimate your capacity to commit a bad deed if you're in a situation to do so.

The only thing I use it for is messaging people whose phone number I don't have and a couple of groups that have events near me.

There is (or at least used to be) a menu next to people's posts that lets you stop following similar posts (or unfollow the person completely while remaining friends).

> Any way you look at doing software development as a career you come to see that it stinks. I'm not going to recommend it to my kids.

What are the alternatives though? Lawyers work much longer hours and only the ones who went to top schools and get into top firms make more. Doctors make more but have 6+ more years of education and training. Finance is competitive and also has long hours. Programmers have it pretty good.

Yep, I switched from fintech to another industry (still software development) and took roughly a 50% paycut to do so. It let me live in a much nicer part of the country (given my non-work interests), but I might go back since the pay is so much more.

This is the most perceptive comment in the thread. Based on moving from NYC to a much smaller metro area without any major tech companies I think you're right. Compensation here is roughly half of NYC compensation. The big tech firms are driving the high salaries.

I'm sure you'd see the same pattern if you looked at finance grads. The top ones who went to work for investment banks, hedge funds, etc. are pulling down large salaries, the rest are making much less working for small to medium size companies.

Is there any evidence that people would be more productive without Facebook? I bet they'd just watch more Netflix.

Edit: Plus, it's really not that hard to not use social media once you finish school if you don't feel it's beneficial.

NYC metro area population is ~21M. It's way more dense than Colorado, so it's not surprising that a large company moving into NYC doesn't change it much.

I meant that having a publisher or distributor provides a lower bound for quality, not that it indicates high quality. There's plenty of crap published by legitimate publishers and plenty of movies not worth watching. But the quality is even worse among the people who self-publish (talking about averages obviously, not outliers).

And for books critics typically only review books from established publishers. Films might be a bit better in terms of allowing unknown directors to be discovered because of independent film festivals, but the barrier to entry is obviously higher.

I agree about Facebook though.

I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but a lot of these "gate keepers" are performing useful functions. Particularly for things like books and movies a major publisher or distributor gives some level of quality assurance. They also handle a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect an author or independent filmmaker to be good at.

No, I meant interest rates. There's an inverse correlation between interest rates and asset prices. Most governments have been keeping interest rates low since the financial crisis to spur investment, which causes asset rates to rise. So while asset prices are high on an absolute level interest rates are also much lower than the historical average. My guess is that if you account for interest rates being so low assets aren't priced all that highly.

There are lots of problems with today's democracies, but the problems of the 20th century are on a completely different scale than the ones we're dealing with now.

I'd be interested to see the value of the stock market compared to interest rates. My bet is the market is only a little bit high if you account for how low interest rates have been for the past ~10 years.

I didn't say anyone should be deported. I said immigration has downsides and you can't talk about it openly in the US.

This is absolutely true, and obvious to anyone open-minded who has spent time in those countries, but good luck trying to have any discussion about the downsides of immigration in the US without getting shouted down as a racist.

You can't not play. Not playing just means losing faster because you don't know/don't care about the rules.

It's odd how little skepticism any of Musk's claims are met with. I can't imagine the situation would be the same for anyone else. (Not to say he hasn't had many impressive accomplishments, but people seem to want to believe anything Musk says so much that they stop thinking critically).

I agree, and it also helps that most clinical psychologists try to get you to examine your own life and see what is going wrong in it to cause you to feel depressed or show you how to face the things that make you anxious more appropriately.

That's not to say anxiety and depression are always lifestyle issues, for many people there is physiological cause that can be treated with medication, but a lot of psychological problems are really life problems.

This is a non sequitur. They were able to grow so fast because they're in non capital intensive industries with limited constraints on their ability to scale up rapidly and were able to leverage the birth of a new marketplace and an existing telecommunications infrastructure largely financed by the government and by other corporations. The impact of their internal culture with regard to politics is tangential at best and probably non-existent given that these issues have only come to a head in the last few years.

China has similarly dominant tech companies and I'm sure they do not share SV's political opinions.

Lots of large, multinational, Google size companies have a culture of not discussing politics at work. Or if you do, it's with your friends at work, not random coworkers.

I don't think diversity includes firing people with different beliefs than you.

I've done this before. It's a pain in the ass. You have to run several different programs each with hundreds of configuration options, make sure the different programs can communicate with each other properly, make sure your email doesn't get flagged as spam, and be your own sysadmin. All for marginal benefit.

It would be great if someone wrote a program handling all of this that could be deployed as a single binary with secure defaults and limited configurability, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Email providers are good enough for almost everyone and the people who are good enough programmers to make sense of all the different protocols they'll have to deal with and get everything to interoperate nicely probably have other things to work on that people will actually pay for.

Edit: That said, this guide does look like a great resource for someone who is interested in doing this. It's interesting to learn how email works and if I had this guide when I started out I'd have saved a ton of time.

I mostly agree with you. Although, social media has some benefits. I used to not use it very frequently and had thought about deactivating FB for a while, but then I moved to a new city and found it useful for both showing my old friends what I was doing on the weekends and for finding fun things to do like mountain biking and rock climbing through various groups.

But I see your point in that FB's management isn't really pushing to make those sort of interactions happen more frequently, they're just trying to get people to spend as much time on it as possible to extract ad money from them.

I never made any of those claims, nor do I endorse any of them. I will say that the concept of "same work" is very hard to define, and I don't think you can do so outside of very specific industries that are mostly low skill.

I agree partly. Some inequality is certainly immoral, particularly when it's based on a person's race or gender. (And that definitely occurs in the US). But sometimes it comes down to other factors, like intelligence, work ethic, assertiveness, etc. if that's the cause of the inequality and I don't think it's desirable to eliminate it.