npc

I've been wearing a watch every day for years and I have no interest in this stuff either. Honestly, I like the idea that my watch is just a stupid thing that tells me the time, having it beep at me every time I get an email would just feel like I'm being tethered to a computer even more than I am already.

willing

There was an important word there that you seemed to miss. I didn't say that he who sacrifices more will always win, but they do have more options available to them, so to speak. Please don't think I'm advocating sacrificing health and family in the name of success, far from it. I just don't like this post facto moralizing that glosses over the difficulty of choosing between working late on something that might be critical to the success of your enterprise and going home to see your wife and kids.

No matter what, you're always going to be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to sacrifice more than you, whether that be health or family or anything else. I liked the article but it completely danced around the obvious conclusion which is, "maintaining a healthy relationship with your family is going to cost you time and energy which is going to at least somewhat lessen your chances of success and you have to be okay with that."

Edit: I've realized that my last sentence was somewhat ambiguous, I want to make it clear that I in no way support neglecting your family for a chance at economic success. When I said you have to be okay with it, I meant being okay with the risk of failing.

Aww isn't that cute! A musician/artist having an intellectual idea that isn't completely terrible

I think it's less to do with him being a musician/artist than with him being will.i.am, notorious "My Humps" backup singer. If it had been Thom Yorke or Getty Lee or someone then I think they'd probably have been (reasonably or not) treated with a little more respect.

You so desperately want this to be a nefarious PR job. And you seem to desperately want me to be some bitter chick-fil-a hater. IF chick-fil-a was involved in the writing of this piece then it's nothing more than what hundreds of other companies do everyday, PR involvement is an integral part of the modern press. I may not like it but I would not call it "nefarious". I'm not commenting because I have a hate-on for chick-fil-a but because there seems to be a lot of wilful ignorance here on just how much the media we consume is manipulated by PR.

On to your points:

1. I don't really see why chick-fil-a would get more pageviews than another restaurant so I'll skip this.

2. Of course the writer wants an effective opening, but the "you're part of a pay-it-forward line" fantasy could have easily been written at a generic restaurant.

3. Other people have said it but chick-fil-a is closed on sundays. Also I don't really get what this has to do with how and why the author wrote the story.

4. I'm pretty sure a fluff piece on people paying for each other's fast food didn't take a month to write. And I think the author probably did discover the phenomenon after a chick-fil-a related conversation, one with a chick-fil-a sponsored PR representative.

5. It's impossible to say assuredly whether any article was PR influenced but that quote seemed awfully convenient.

6. You seem to be very concerned with christianity when no-one else has mentioned it, least of all the article. I would not personally assume that chick-fil-a patrons are particularly christian, it seems strange to me that this is immediately the thing you jump to. Same thing goes with the source's political leanings, I don't consider fast food to be a political matter and I don't think NYT or chick-fil-a do either.

7. Sure, but if that's the case it's interesting that most of the other restaurants mentioned are coffee shops and a bagel cafe (which aren't really chick-fil-a competitiors) rather than popeyes or mary brown's.

so in conclusion:

1. I'm right

2. You seem to weirdly have tied up a fast-food restaurant into some christian right wing identity you hold and it's preventing you from acknowledging the very really possibility of PR manipulation in an NYT fluff piece.

You can't believe it would happen for money, but you'd believe it'd happen for free? Anyway, PR is far more complex and subtle than "I give money, you write article". Someone posted a pg essay below that might be instructive.

As to why I think this might (I make no claims to certainty) be a PR-influenced article:

1. Chick-fil-a is mentioned in the first paragraph, no other restaraunt is mentioned until the fourth.

2. The first 3 paragraphs are a visceral imagining of what it would be like to be part of a "pay-it-forward" chain at a chick-fil-a specifically, complete with giggling cashier. Other restaurants are mentioned only in an detached and objective manner.

3. There's a direct quote in paragraph 5 from the chick-fil-a "director of hospitality", the only other quote from a restaurant owner is from a smaller local shop 3 or 4 paragraphs down. The chick-fil-a representative’s quote is a comment on the value and reasoning behind pay-it-forward, the other's is simply a factual one about a lady at his store that does it.

4. Getting a bit more abstract here, but this is exactly the kind of ideal that chick-fil-a probably wants to be associated with, "good-old down home people helping each other out small town america &c.". Note the jab at starbucks at the end?

5. Like op said, chick-fil-a took a bit of a beating in the press awhile ago. People might not remember what happened exactly, but they probably came away with a slightly worse impression of chick-fil-a. If PR was involved in this article then it's probably to try and repair that damage.

It's not that he doesn't believe this happens, but rather that the presence of a story about it in NYT where chick-fil-a is mentioned directly in the first paragraph is not an accidental matter. Chick-fil-a being the main restaurant talked about in a feel good article like this is great PR for them, discounting the possibility of it having been arranged deliberately just because the op was overly cynical is a bit petulant. PR is almost never about making things up, but rather the timing and the tone and the things mentioned in the periphery of the story. PR firms know that a straight-up story on how chick-fil-a is great is not likely to do much for them with world-weary americans, but a feel good story about people helping each other (which may very well have happened) with chick-fil-a strategically placed just in the background is great.

I think the whole point is that "should" and "shouldn't" simply aren't very useful concepts when dealing with corporations, like talking about what a slime mold should or shouldn't do. Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to. Individuals will respond to moral accusations, but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation.

That's dumb, just because someone isn't willing to go to an extreme measure to prevent something doesn't mean that more moderate measures are unreasonable. Banning all electronic devices on airplanes would be a major headache for everyone involved and would probably be overkill, but the risk is still non-zero and asking passengers to turn devices off for a few minutes during the two most dangerous times in a flight is perfectly reasonable.

I don't know, did he? Here's some more if that didn't convince you (courtesy of Tim Wise: http://www.timwise.org/2010/07/black-powers-gonna-git-you-su...)

http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/race_at_work.pdf

http://www.eeo1.com/1999_NR/Title.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01race.html?_r=2

No, just the people who decide who gets them: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

> Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate)...

1. No one ever said that only women are faced with high performance demands, you're very obviously making a strawman and you should feel bad for it.

2. Arguments like "This is a very common argument and it is false" and "it is simply not true that..." are merely bald assertions of fact and would not be convincing even if you were arguing against an opinion that someone actually held

3. "Many or even all men can feel this same expectation in performance-based professions, but they will not blame their sex" is dog whistling for the idea that women are somehow conspiring to use anti-sexism to apologize for poor performance. Also, how you can claim to know the feelings of "many or even all men", and compare them to the feelings of women is beyond me.

4. I have never seen a man complain about sexism in tech, but many women have. There are only three explanations: a) women in tech are somehow unreasonably seeing sexism where there is none, which given that it happens to numerous women but no men requires an explanation that isn't cheap handwaving b) women in tech are trying to use complaints of sexism to get ahead unfairly, which I will happily dismiss as being needlessly cynical and misogynist c) there is sexism in tech, which given that sexism exists to some degree in most every place is not an unreasonable thing to think

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat might be a good read

>I think programming is bound to drop more specific syntax and become increasingly like natural language

Why do you think that? Programming has never been like writing in a natural language, nor would it be useful for it to be. Natural language is inherently filled with subtleties and imprecision, both of which are anathema to the typical process of programming. When I write something for the computer to consume then I want to be able to know with 100% certainty what it is going to do, the probablistic parsers typically used for NLP couldn't guarantee that.

I'm going to try to be nice and give you some advice: don't write like that. Constructing these overwrought sentences with the dashes and the semicolons and the vocabulary and whatnot just makes you look like an insecure sophomore trying to cover up inexperience with excessive verbiage. Which is probably accurate, but oh well. The purpose of writing isn't to make you look smart, it's to communicate your thoughts clearly and convincingly, and writing to show off all your fancy college-boy book lernin' is just going to antagonize your audience. You're still in school, my advice is to take a writing course and listen to what they say.

People have at least tried, however: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Rat...

85% dollar-wise, or 85% of items purchased? Because I would argue that men tend to make fewer, but more expensive purchases, eg big tv, high end stereo, etc. I would still believe that things are skewed a bit since married women tend to make more of the purchasing decisions than their husbands (from what i understand), but 85% seems awfully high to me.

What, you've never gone and hacked an interpreter because you were mildly annoyed by something? I don't think he actually means for it to be used in production.

I started using repustate's sentiment analysis for a project recently and it was impressively easy to get started with, although the sentiment scores can seem a little arbitrary at times.

I don't think anyone thinks that it's wrong to try and give your children a better position in life than they would be able to achieve through their ability alone, just that it's beneficial to society as a whole to minimize this effect. Prisoner's dilemma and all that.

This is sort of an odd statement since the way a piece of code is run is directly related to how it is parsed. If an alternative implementation like Topaz parses something differently than MRI then you'll have code that does two different things on two different interpreters. Having a complicated and informally specified grammar makes this a lot harder to avoid.

how is it necessary to make racist comments in order to "get shit done"? will your production systems all crash if you don't make a minimum of 5 jokes about nappy hair and malt liquor a day? have you encountered a nasty bug in rails that can only be fixed by exposing it to clips of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's?

IANAL either, but I assume that they would have to somehow prove that you read it, perhaps by showing that you posted in the comments section.

nonfiction books rarely become "classics", that doesn't mean they're not important or worth reading.

No it's not.

(See what I did there? I responded to an unsupported statement of fact with another unsupported statement of fact. Both our arguments are equally valid, i.e. not at all. Perhaps next time you post on HN you could add some arguments to support your position, if only out of courtesy to those of us who cannot read your mind to see the no doubt infallible logic behind your opinion.)

firstly, there's legal issues with IQ tests in job interviews in the US at least

secondly, IQ testing covers a number of areas, many of which are not necessarily related to the kind of thinking needed for programming. i think most of the verbal stuff in IQ tests wouldn't relate that much

thirdly, even if someone aces the IQ test, there's still no indication that they would actually enjoy programming if they've never done it before. It's kind of pointless to train someone to code if they're just going to get sick of it and quit in 6 months.

and fourth, an IQ test doesn't say anything about a person's ability to work with other people or prioritize things properly. an IQ test provides no protection against ending up with a prima donna who obsesses over brace style at the expense of getting useful things done.

really, i think the best way to find out if someone can code is to look at something they've coded

> After this can we please not post anymore racist/sexist/*ist stuff?

How about we stop talking about racism and sexism when there's no more racism and sexism? And how is talking about a problem that effects people negatively a "waste of brain power"?

So if I say something shockingly racist, but the only people around to hear it are my shockingly racist buddies, then it's totally OK because no-one is offended?

I can't say I've read the entire series, but you're definitely not the only one who here who disliked Ender's Game. I keep this around in my bookmarks since it pretty clearly expresses what I think is wrong with the book: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

There's more to it than just sizeof, for example an array of arrays is structured completely differently than an array of pointers to other arrays, even if you can still access items via a[i][j].