ffn

Yeah, the phrase "cause harm" carries a lot of affect (e.g. urgency, impatience, panic, outrage, etc.). If we were to have a graph of common word usage and association, the words "cause harm" would be strongly linked with other phrases like

- morally repulsive

- life or death

- fix immediately

All of which is just one step away from the affect-saturated words like "hitler / mao / stalin", "genocide", etc.,

As such "cause harm" is one of those magical phrases in our common lexicon that has gained the power to turn an "is" to an "ought", and the author uses it as the logical glue to connect the relatively descriptive phrase of "This is not good UX design" to the proscription of "revert the changes"

But by using such an affect-laden phrase, the author is implicitly asking the reader to assign more weight to feelings (e.g. impatience, outrage, disgust, etc.,) and less weight to calculated executive thought.

This attempt through language to subvert the executive portion of our brain in favor of more primal processes makes me feel the whole article is suspect. After all, if the author's argument can be one that stands up to executive scrutiny, than what is the intention when the author attempts to by-pass executive scrutiny?

Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.

That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).

When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.

In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing

BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?

Well the strategy was first to get the Chinese people addicted to wealth before moving on to discuss the issues of human rights (imaging trying to sanction a poor communist country - e.g. north korea - it will have no effect because the citizens there won't rise up in discontent to protect what they have if they have nothing). But given that China is currently the largest economy in the world right now, now is probably a good of a time as any to show that China needs to play fair internationally and locally in order to acquire the consent of other trade members

I'm all for openness and transparency, but wouldn't an increase in US refusal to play with China just lead to more censorship and oppression by the communist Chinese government?

Consider the following:

1. The Chinese communist government derives its legitimacy to rule almost exclusively from its massive economic growth (i.e. Chinese citizens and corporations are effectively saying to themselves "I'm ok to trade some of my human rights for lots of money")

2. The Chinese communist government wishes to remain in power

So if the US decides to target Chinese economic growth - i.e. lower the amount of money that an unit of human rights could buy - this should cause the Chinese citizens and corporations to respond by exercising the human right that the Chinese government is no longer able to buy with growth. In turn, this would cause the Chinese government to use alternative methods (i.e. straight-up oppression by force) to prevent the Chinese people from becoming unruly.

This sort of pressure on the Chinese government may lead to reform (which is indeed a good thing), but it may also lead to civil / politic unrest and a massive economic slow-down that will have aftershocks around the world (which is certainly less than ideal) - and all of this pretty much will depend on how Xi decides to handle this pressure.

Here in the US, We should at least recognize that this is a risky move and take measures to protect ourselves against this (somehow)

What if the problem with open-source not making money isn't the open-source part, but the money part?

Our current economic system focuses on money as a medium of "equivalent exchange", as in there's no free lunch and a dollar you spend on buying a piece of butter necessarily means you can't spend that same dollar on a gun (same thing for the butter merchant). This exchange is based on a contractual agreement that binds for a finite time, and stuff that happens outside that window is necessarily considered an "externality". In other words, money facilitates a social interaction that prioritizes focus on the costs/benefits of individual(s) involved while de-prioritizing the costs/benefits of the collective at large.

But contributing to open-source is not that sort of social interaction, instead, it's one that prioritizes contributing to the collective over individual gain - i.e. a social interaction that focuses on externalities instead of on contractual time-based exchange. Money, with its focus on being loosely "conserved" (e.g. you can't double-spend the same dollar), is simply not a good medium for encouraging cooperation and discouraging free-riding to open-source (and other public-goods)

In traditional villages, public-goods contributions were facilitated with some combination of reputation and gossip. Later, cities and states managed to come up with taxation, courts, and prison when reputation and gossip failed to scale. But the super-connected capitalist "globopolis" of today demands a new form of organizing cooperation and eliminating free-riding when it comes to public goods.

To properly solve the problem of the economics of open-source, we need to solve this more general organization problem.

Free speech v. public safety is a touchy subject that pits the moral pillars of liberty/oppression against care/harm. However, before we lose ourselves to moral outrage for one side or the other, consider that, with Judea Pearl's (somewhat) recently work on causality, there might actually be a "correct" solution to when the government (or government-like entity) should intervene to "protect the public interest" or do nothing and "encourage free speech"

Namely, we can use the idea of calculating the "probably of necessity" v. "probably of sufficiency" from Pearl's section on counterfactuals to calculate causation.

Taking your arsenic merchant example, for instance, if you publicly release information that "arsenic in large doses is good for you" to the public, we would consider the counterfactual statements

- "would large portions of public have taken arsenic had you NOT released such a statement"

- "would large portions of the public refrained from taking arsenic had you released such a statement"

Notice that, in both statements, we require a model of public behavior that is contextually dependent on things like "how educated the general public is", "how common is it to take arsenic", "how much harm does arsenic actually do" etc., most of which can be determined and agreed to beforehand. Given that we, as a society, can come to agree on a model of ourselves (lol probably not easy), we can directly calculate the necessity and sufficiency values, which would allow authority to make "just" feeling decisions

The Book of Why DOES have a section on climate change toward the end - he actually uses climate change to illustrate the idea of counterfactuals and even provides an example about how to calculate how much man-made carbon emissions X can be a "sufficient" / "necessary" cause of storm Y... GIVEN we can agree on a model.

Among other (likely more polarizing) reasons for why folks remain so obstinate regarding climate change, it certainly is possible that not every involved party may agree to the same model of how climate affects weather

The real problem here is that there the asymmetry in machine learning capabilities between big companies and everyday consumers. I think what we all will need in the nearby future is personalized AIs (that we all individually can "build" and "own" in the same way we currently do our personalized computers) which will negotiate the currently web against big companies on our behalf.

It's an user-experience problem: for an audiobook, Book of Why is quite dense in formula that are hard to visualize when spoke as words.

For example, consider what happens if we try to describe a causal diagram in words

"A points to B, A points to X, B points to Y, and X points to Y. Now, if we apply do(X) to the diagram, we see that we can Y is now no longer a child of..."

or even simple formulas in words:

"P of A given B times P of B is equal to P of B given A times P of A"

For most of us, this sort of deal is hard to "get" and would be much better served if we just looked at a visual diagram or saw the equation.

I personally had to repeat many sections over and over again with a notebook and pencil in hand to truly understand what was being read to me... but if I'm taking notes and creating visuals for myself, then I might as well have just gotten the paper variant of this book lol.

Yes, the article even has a section where they straight up say "Einstein was right".

The title of the article "Colliding neutron stars falsify some theories of gravity" is accurate, but the theories of gravity that it falsifies isn't the popular mainstream one (Einstein's) that, let's face it, we've all been secretly hoping to take down. Instead, it falsifies some of the new challenger (MOND) theories.

I, for one, welcome our continuing Einsteinian Relativistic overlord theories of gravity (at least when it comes to dark matter)

Hmmm... storyboarding in software design, this is definitely a new idea for me. Going to try it out in my hobby projects and see where it takes me.

Honestly, the best route IMO is to actually maintain an open-source portfolio of work. This obviously isn't feasible or possible for everybody, but if you can contribute to OSS, doing so is easily the best way continuously test your mettle and prove to your future employers, partners, and the general community that you're someone they want to (or don't want to) work with.

The true value of the face-to-face interview really should be getting a feel for the person - is this person someone I want to work with? Or will this person make me want to kill myself whenever I step into the office? - not to gauge technical prowess or whiteboard prove-you-are-smart-and-took-an-algo-class-in-college challenges

The article actually does actually mention something along the lines of "Lovecraft's literary legacy is threatened in the 50s by his rumored homosexuality and today by his latent racist attitudes". But yes, you're absolutely right, an article about a man's tragic life really has no place in loudly screaming that one of his early influences was racist.

Honestly, having experimented extensively with VR, I highly doubt its best applications will be in gaming. At its core, gaming draws people for at least one of the following reasons:

1. engaging story-line

2. flow-inducing gameplay

3. social involvement

4. sheer boredom while on public transit

Because VR is so new, no artist has yet created the "epic" story or "flow" game-play that requires VR. Social with VR is potentially revolutionary, but currently, the multi-camera setup required to full mo-cap yourself properly and the lack of tactile output means social interaction in VR is not quite there yet. And because of the setup required, one can't exactly play VR while in public transit.

On the other hand, I do see VR having a lot of work-related applications like 3D modeling and architecture... it's just that no one has written those programs yet.

Honestly, though, Tomster v. electrons-circling-nucleus branding aside, both ember and react are currently experiencing a lot of community-driven convergence in core philosophy.

For example, ember-redux exists to take the functional centralized state-management of redux that makes react great and ports it to ember. Similarly, react-scripts takes the developer-ease of ember-cli and gives it to react. Everybody uses the DDAU for handling DOM interaction, shadow-dom-tree-diffing (or whatever it's called) for rendering, some sort of declarative remote data-layer in both ember-data and redux-orm (and there's even ember-redux-orm), and junk like animation-handling and whatnot all expose the same change-attribute-yield-block API to the programmer.

If you look beyond the stylistic difference of things like writing jsx v. hbs, there's actually very little philosophical difference between modern 2.x ember and modern react

Joining LinkedIn

Great, I'm glad Ember is gaining more traction in enterprise... but what does this mean for things like Fastboot, Ember 3.0, glimmer 2.0, ember-cli 3.0, and the whole cast of in-room-elephants such as ember-redux, flexi, ember-data, vr, etc.?

Thanks for all the work you and the good folks at Dockyard put into Elixir Phoenix and Ember.js, my entire stack nowadays is run with Ember in the front and Phoenix in the back, so I very much appreciate all the great addons, packages, talks, etc., you guys have given.

Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong.

Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).

Honestly I don't have an opinion on the creepiness / necessity of riot doing this... but anyone else notice how common the dichotomy between "forced politeness" and "free toxicity" occurs in naturally occurring human interactions?

In MOBA games, we have DotA versus LoL

In internet forums, we have 4chan versus Reddit

In nations, we have USA versus China

And even in traditional families, we have dad versus mom

For some reason, even though freedom and structure are polar opposites, as humans we apparently demand access to both.

He doesn't even have to hang out with peers, one simple search across some popular job site nowadays (e.g. glassdoor) will immediately land you with a decent salary amount for your desired position. We've already entered the brave new world where the concept "salary is private information" is dead, and, if one is a developer active on Github (or other OSS platform), then the concept "my work portfolio is private" is also dead.

So you're absolutely right, the worst thing for a hiring manager and a potential employee to do is set themselves up into adversarial positions of who can best manipulate and "break" the other person first. Because a company built with employees and management who can't trust each other, and are in constant underground wars to gouge the most out of each other, is bound to get trounced by competitor companies in the open market

evaluate the candidate

But candidate evaluation is not an objective business, one company's perfect candidate might be complete trash at another firm. A company's interview process then is necessarily a reflection that company's character, culture, and attitude just as much as it is a process to find potential employees.

For example, your suggested hiring process of doing essentially an extended homework assignment might be great for a firm who doesn't care about "hiring the best", "building the elite team" or whatever, and instead wants to just assemble a ragtag team of misfits who trust and work well with each other to get things done.

Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley standard Googlesque hiring practice of using timed tree-inverting-list-o(log n)-optimized-talk-through-what-you-are-doing-(oh-90%-of-our-devs-use-your-oss-but-you-dont-remember-red-black-trees-so-fuck-off) algorithm questions to pinpoint the most academically smart candidate is perfect for companies who want to hire the "smartest programmer" to create a culture of intelligence oneupmanship to drive "innovation".

And unless one happens to be in a situation where one absolute needs a job right away, a candidate could really glean a lot about a potential company's direction and culture through just how they conduct their interview, and decide if this is, indeed, a place where one could do one's best for the company and continue with the application or apply elsewhere.

Actually, if you look at their numbers (or the summary numbers provided by the top-voted comment), the statement "women on github are more competent than men" seems to be a result of selection bias rather than "one sex is better than the other".

It appears there are more than 150k men on github but less than 10k women. But if you look at real life, men don't out-number women 15-to-1, which seems to suggest programming on github draws in more men than women. I suggest that, whereas in addition to professional men, tons of boys will make a hobbyist account on github to leave inane comments on open-source projects, there are very few hobbyist girls that fall into this category; that is, a woman only makes an account on github if she is a professional in the industry.

Naturally, if you compare a group of professionals against a group of professionals + college-rockstar-ninja-guru-hackathon-"yeah, but is it optimized?" amateurs, the group of professionals without the baggage would be "better".

Anyway, that's my take on what the numbers say; maybe I'm wrong, in which case, I for one welcome our new female overlords; if they must put us all to death, may they do so with snu-snu

Same here, my best projects are the ones that were banged out over at most a week or so (then possibly supported with minor fixes over time). Still though, every shitty cancerous hell project before that plays its part in training your mind and preparing you for the moment when you can finally produce your opus.

Because creating a self-driving car is an extremely creativity-intensive exercise that demands "smartness"... but smartness doesn't add linearly (or, I could posit even monotonically). If 1 smart guy can produce 1 self-driving car in say 6 months, it doesn't mean 2 smart guys can produce a self-driving in 3 months. Once you have a bunch of people, 2nd order and third order interactions between us get complicated and managing that becomes its own time/money-sink.

As for money, yes, it can accelerate growth in its first-order effect; but it also induces stress and so threatens early exhaustion of your other precious resource: personal motivation.

So, as a crack-shot programmer, if you know with 90% certainty you can crank out a self-driving car in 6 months by yourself or fail, but only 20% certainty you can arrange a cohesive team with someone else's money to crank out a car in 1 month or fail (and alienate your team, and ruin your credit)... I would advise taking the 6 months route. Patience is a virtue and sometimes it's better not buying into every pot of snake-oil the SV hype machine wants to sell us.

Well according to that Vox article about that liberal prof who got censored (and links therein) linked by the parent comment, the following things:

1. works of Edward Said

2. works of Mark Twain

3. works of Upton Sinclar

4. works of Maureen Tkacik

5. Ovid's Metamorphoses

6. The movie Avengers

7. Debates about abortion

8. Some "Afrobeat" band that had too many white people in it

9. Some male professor who was "creepy" at a conference

10. Asking harassment victims for proof

And if I recall correctly from pop culture several months back:

11. The comedic act of Jerry Seinfeld

12. The comedic act of Chris Rock

If by small business you mean get-rich-quick schemes to con greedy / desperate investors, then tremendous damage has been done. If by small business, you mean a small group of individuals (or just one person) who have an idea and several free weekends / week-nights to implement that idea into a product then put it in front of potential users via sites like HN (if some sort of developer-centric product) or on a market-place like amazon or Taobao (if some sort of real product), then none at all.

The monetary cost of delivering most new products to users is pretty much at most $100 (the time cost hasn't changed though; it still takes forever to get really good at doing something). Which means, for the majority of small businesses, millions of investors dollars is next to useless to the expert owner when he or she can bootstrap him/herself to profitability without them. Sure, it might take 2 or 3 years longer, but the small business owner is also under no sleep-depriving pressure to go fast, and when one's runway is effectively infinite, one doesn't run out of it.

So to the DIY owner with plenty of professional skill, discipline, and patience, investor money (and the associated risk and burnout) just isn't attractive. Which leaves the venture investment field largely populated by impatient hot-shots peddling get-rich-quick schemes. And, having been burned time and time again, perhaps these investors would have learned by now.

Agreed, and this goes waaaaaay beyond just mere online review journalism too. Even textbooks for game engines are now cluttered to the brim with self-important lessons on "objective morality" and even "serving social justice" (e.g. Gibbon's Intro to Game Design for Unity). It's just amazing how, despite all the improvement in the medium, game-writing has actually become worse than it was in the days of just forum posters writing guides, faqs, and reviews on GameFAQs.

In my opinion, the "news" / "blog" agencies have already innovated on this by just blending content with advertising with notoriously click-baity articles like "top 12 ways your cat wants you dead" where every single bullet point is a cleverly worded advertising for cat neutering, cat food, or whatever.

I suspect Facebook already does something similar via automating the hundreds of millions of dead accounts in their system. My suspicions were triggered because a decade ago when FB was still fresh, I created a page for my dog (now passed away), and very recently, it shared a "funny" video. So either my dog is using facebook from beyond the grave, or fb has automated his account.

Okay, say you're a US citizen building some digi service like JS Bin, and VATMOSS starts fling threats at you, for how long can you go about ignoring them? I mean 3.5k GBP and however many weekdays it took isn't exactly affordable for every small business, and if you don't even have many Euro pro-users, I don't see the cost-benefit justification of giving VATMOSS priority unless they can reach across the Atlantic.

lol the null / undefined issue in javascript is further exacerbated by the fact there is no int type and everything is just a "number".... yet the number 0 is still treated the same as null/undefined by js special forms like "if" and "==". This is particularly hilarious because it leads to some null-check bugs like:

if ( user.getScrollPosition() ) { whatever(); } else { die(); }

99% of the time, the code would be fine, but if the user scrolls just right, the whole thing would die. Stuff like this is literally death to debug because this bug is effectively indeterministic and can't be reproduced.