thehardsphere

Okay, so, maybe he's a nut or a troll, but nothing really about gaming?

I'm not so sure. The problem when the only "wall between genders" that's "erected" is consent, you often find out too late that it's not strong enough of a wall. It seems like at Atari in the 1970's it was fine, but there are easily identifiable places it was not, like most of Hollywood in the current decade.

I'm guessing something else about Atari's culture prevented the kind of problems that can crop up when you have a relaxed sexual attitude, but it isn't as easy to identify.

Right, but the women at Atari weren't disenfranchised. Even in the 1970s, their alternatives to working at Atari were numerous. The secretary there who was "stacked" wasn't facing an alternative of no employment or living in Bangladesh if she didn’t like hot tub meetings; she could go work at any company in America that didn't have hot tub meetings, which was all of them.

I've never heard of Notch having strong biases regarding social issues and the game industry. I quickly googled but all I could find were references to some tweets he deleted about some "heterosexual pride" or something that he later apologized for.

Do you have a link or can you sumarize what those biases are?

I'm guessing that Filipinos aren't obviously "white" or "black", and thus get to dodge all of the baggage that Americans have about the topic of race.

Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.

See, "we're not Google" should actually mean that you care about performance more. Google can throw millions of dollars worth of infrastructure into making an app go marginally faster. Whereas, all you have is brainpower before you deploy or ship. And it doesn't take that much more brainpower to get big increases in client performance when you're starting from not-optimized-at-all. The marginal payoff is larger and the marginal costs are much smaller.

Just a guess: You were alive when progress marched on before your eyes. Animations are "new" to you, and like many people you have some sort of implicit association somewhere in the back of your mind that "new == better"

Do you ever find some animations to be lower quality than others? E.g. a pop up with a progress bar being lower quality than a spinning wheel? That might be another sign.

TBH most of the cons stated in this article are just because of bad programming, not because it's a SPA

The worst programming is the result of choosing the wrong tools for the job. There is a class of jobs for which an SPA is entirely unnecessary.

That's a good starting point. I'd drill down even further and ask "what does the user do with the application?"

If the user needs to look at multiple screens at a time (e.g. like a mail client or something of similar complexity), then they're a candidate for an SPA. If the user does not need to do that, the app is probably simple enough to not be an SPA.

The problem with SPAs in the sort of cases that the author is talking about is that people don't think clearly about what requirements they are satisfying when writing a new one. If your app actually needs to switch between various screens without a refresh so your users can most efficiently get their work done, then yes, by all means, make an SPA. That requires knowing clearly who your users are, what they want to do, and what constraints they are under (e.g. if they all work on desktops with good internet access, maybe it doesn't matter that your app is bloated and slow on mobile). I think most people don't do that thinking step first. They want to play with the new shiny, either as a sort of fun or so they can add it to their resume.

This I think is made worse by the unparalleled decadence in which the modern, first-world developer now lives. It is absolutely excessive to have to download 2.6 MB just to show a blog or some simple textual information, but thanks to broadband everywhere and terabyte hard drives, nobody under the age of 30 who isn't working in embedded systems thinks about this anymore.

People always say things like this about despotic regimes while they're in power. Yet, every time they fall, we almost invariably learn that things were actually much worse.

Well, sure. I get that sort of argument for something like tax policy.

But is this actually an experiment that should be run at the state level? I mean, having 50 different net neutrality laws that all actually mean and require different things doesn't strike me as being efficient.

Serious question: Is having state-level net neutrality laws actually good policy?

The current administration says they want less immigration occurring, but also seems confusingly willing to cut deals that completely flying in the face of the President's public statements. There's presumably room for a deal if partisanship doesn't get in the way, because it seems as if there's no will to revoke DACA for real on anybody's (even Trump's) part.

But, it's an election year, so...

This plan would fail, because someone sophisticated enough to find the naming and shaming list of awfulness would probably already be sophisticated enough to realize that old, bad advice is bad and why it is, and where to find new, good information. The problem is not merely that bad old content exists, but there is a class of PHP developer who is insufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between good and bad information independently.

Whether that's a feature or a bug of PHP is an exercise I leave for the reader.

I think you and other commentors are being generous in assuming there was a spec to review and that the work was done by a contractor.

I've seen lots of organizations try to save a buck by extending a previously existing system with in-house labor after the original contractor asked for more money to do the change. I would bet that the original contractor (if they're still involved with the project) hasn’t seen that screen because it's some homebrew patch put in by whichever administrator babysits the machines for the state government.

The problem with organizations maintaining their own rogue patches is that, if those organizations had people compentent enough to make changes well, they wouldn't have hired a contractor or bought off the shelf in the first place.

I didn't say there was a lack of debate, and never mentioned Twitter. I said, if they didn't respond in court, they would lose in court.

Well, the law is that it's illegal to not hire someone based on their race. The lawsuit contains screenshots of people saying they don't want to hire people who are white.

So, if there's no rebuttal (e.g. Google's lawyer doesn't come back and say "this is a fake screenshot" or "it's taken out of context" or "the hiring practice is not illegal for this reason" or "this person has no say over what the hiring practice is" or whatever), those screenshots would be the only evidence at trial. Uncontested, they depict a company that doesn’t want to hire white people because they are white. Google has to provide evidence to the contrary in their response.

That's how any court proceeding works. All I'm saying about the lawsuit is that it's not on-its-face without merit. That doesn't mean Damore is right, it just means Google has to offer a defense since the plantiff has at least shown that there is a reason to believe the claims might be true and demonstrate illegal behavior on Google's part.

Well, I have two thoughts about that.

1. Is Damore against "anti-discrimination provisions in law"? I haven't seen anything to suggest he is. He is against specific anti-discrimination policies at Google, certainly, but his objection to them seemed to be on the basis that they wouldn't be effective and would have other negative effects, not that anti-discrimination is undesirable.

2. If we assume Damore is a "classical liberal" (I think he called himself that in the memo), then he could have an entirely non-ironic desire to see the law enforced that is separate from whether or not he thinks any specific law is wise. This may seem silly (and I personally think it is in cases where a law is obviously stupid and unenforceable), but it's not on-its-face ridiculous, unless there's a quote somewhere that shows he really has contempt for the particular laws he's claiming protection from.

I'd bet right now you're not going to find such a quote, since it seems like he's been planning this lawsuit for months before he got fired, just based on what screenshots were in the lawsuit.

Because many companies try to weaken the boundaries between "work" and "not-work", so that their employees will spend more time at work.

I was giving GP the benefit of the doubt in assuming they were referring to some other incidents outside the lawsuit that showed Damore is a fraud or his lawyer is unethical.

I mean, I've heard Damore be accused of all kinds of things, but I haven't heard anyone say he's a fraud before. I just assumed it's a detail that got lost in the discussion about whether or not he's a terrible sexist and/or racist. I haven't heard of his lawyer before so I wouldn't know anything about that.

Most significantly, it is partially protected in California.

Could you please cite sources that prove that Mr. Damore is a fraud and that his lawyer has done unethical things? This is the first I've ever heard of either claim.

The lawsuit contains screenshots and other evidence that serves as an effective prima facie case for workplace discrimination. It's not really correct to say it's "speculation", which kind of implies someone just made a bunch of stuff up or is guessing as to what behavior takes place inside Google. On it's own, if not rebutted, it would be enough to win at trial.

That said, Google should have an opportunity to counter the claims if they have a defense and evidence to support it.

Please state the fact: programmers are not trained, nor have the time to go far enough asking the questions.

Speak for yourself, bub. I ask questions all the time when I write software.

Usually, when I write software for someone other than myself, I have these things called "functional specifications", which is how I know if the thing I wrote does what the person I wrote it for expects. Sometimes those are in a big, boring document that some corporate department insisted we write in advance, other times they're in the form of "user stories", depending on how the people I write software for like to do their planning. But either way, I ask questions and try to figure out what they want, and I do it because I'm the skilled person who has to try to do that. And asking those kinds of questions is part of the job, unless you're making something for yourself or if you have no customers.

And if you want to talk, maybe you shouldn't insult all programmers everywhere by suggesting they share your lack of skill when it comes to talking to people.

And, 17 hours later, we now know that there were three distinct vulnerabilities, of which one applies to AMD.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...

We know that "AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against." E.g. that AMD does not need the patch that Intel does. That is not the same as saying AMD is not affected at all.

We do not know what the actual bug that prompted this activity is. Nobody has revealed that information. It is possible that the bug affects AMD also but does not require this patch.

Actual information about the bug itself is still embargoed. Most people are assuming it's the attack you suggest based on recent commits, but it's a guess.

We won't know until we know what the actual bug is. All we know is that people are writing patches for Intel chips, and what those patches do.

It's very possible that other processors are affected by the same issue in some different way that doesn't require this set of patches to mitigate.

This is like saying that Netscape can re-write Navigator because they can copy Internet Explorer. It ignores that Netscape and Microsoft had totally different reasons for the choices they made, and that changing those choices in a re-write was very non-trivial for Netscape, to the point where it ceased to be a company.

You will likely find similar problems with this in attempting to replicate other health care systems. Indeed, you could complain that the mess we are in now is the result of doing a poor job replicating Switzerland's health insurance laws.