I have to agree with everyone here that this doesn't make sense. I'm currently working on integrating Stripe into my application to create a subscription system. By far the easiest part has been payment form. In their tutorial they have a basic form that you can plug into a .html file and create test customers within minutes. It's laid out in 3 well documented steps in that link he calls "daunting".
The angst in this post is really off putting. It reads like a series of observations by someone having a bad day after reading a book about existentialism (Mark Cuban is more likely to answer my emails than my friends?). He hints that caring can make you more successful as a business. But ultimately decides that we should care more simply to seperate ourselves from an uncaring world... because nobody cares. I don't find this particularly relevant.
I agree. If nothing else its always refreshing to read a piece on HN written by someone with a command of language and writing. Sometimes it gets tiring reading bullet pointed articles about how to design an engaging landing page, or poorly written and thinly veiled link-bait blog posts meant to get free marketing ("Dear Mark Zuckerberg", or "If You're Doing X, You're Doing it Wrong").
I think there were two big points made by the author, and he argued them fairly well: be aware of how powerful language is, and if you're a "hacker" - which by definition is someone who thinks out if the box - look around once in a while and realize if you've become a member of just another Herd. Sure he made his points through pointed satire and ridicule, but i think we all benefit from laughing at ourselves once in a while.
I don't have a blog and I don't know the proper convention for those "Show/Ask HN" posts so I suppose a comment here is the next best thing because my question is related.
After reading the "Yes, I was Hacked. Hard." post I updated several of my passwords and found that Netflix enforces a 10 character limit on their passwords. Does anyone have an idea why or how this could be the case? I would find it very ironic if they did this to save a few bits per user in their database considering they're a media streaming company.
Very likely its just some sort of limit imposed by a security API or library call. Definitely not a way to save space. Its really idiotic - they should be extending it out to longer than that, but there are still some banks around that impose shorter limits than this (8 chars) so they are in good company.
This reminds of a news story I distinctly remember about Circuit City from a few years back. They fired their senior sales associates and hired cheaper presumably less knowledgeable workers to cut costs. They were already on the way out at the time but I have no doubt this sped up the process as it signaled to their customers that experience and knowledge aren't a priority so much as the bottom line.
I'm not at all convinced that popular sentiment in the world we currently live is that "programming is shit".
There was no About page on this blog so I couldn't tell if the author is just very young or if this is dated. Either way the post was half baked, with the author ultimately coming to the thoughtless conclusion:
"That’s a crock of shit! ... It’s not programmers that are wasting life , it’s the non-programers!"
This article is about a call to action to end sexual assault and harassment against women. It's really disappointing that the majority of comments that have followed are about how things really aren't THAT bad (as a man), or that women should expect this from a bunch of lonely guys, or that hey it happens to men too. I know some of these commenters are are well meaning, but this article isn't about you. The comments miss the point and completely undermine the author with their male centered narrative.
So next time you read about a minority group creating something exclusive to their gender, race (like Black Girls Code), or religion, remember this thread of comments. Because I bet you're first instinct will be to say "the solution is not to divide us into separate groups!". But until you start listening, internalizing, and cultivating those minority voices rather than dismissing them or displacing them with your own, those people are going to keep dropping out, showing up small numbers, or start making their own exclusive conferences/coding groups/fill-in-the-blank.
Articles like this are declaring issues in existing communities. This make it natural for members in those communities to create opinions and question when listening, internalizing, and cultivating the issues brought forth. Some of those opinions will be of the type "Is this issue, compared to all other form of issues already identified in the community, significant different that it need a imminent and unique reaction?".
Hackers/programers/scientists/problem solvers is also extremely, to the point of obsession, interested in identify root issues when talking about problems. To find root issues, one need to ask questions, like are there similar issues like this one? Are they caused by the same problem? What suggested fixes are there? are those proven to work? whats does the number says, do they show a trend? are there sources that back up what people experience? How can we eliminate research and political biases? are there additional factors involved like relative risk, risk assessment and risk aversion?
Denying those questions and asking the community to accept the issues as facts, immune against research and question, and just shut-up and follow any suggested fixes it gets, is wrong. Just simply wrong. Maybe that will result in people dropping out, showing up in small numbers, or who starts making their own exclusive conferences/coding groups/fill-in-the-blank. Maybe. But maybe the better way is to ask the questions and find the answers?
> Hackers/programers/scientists/problem solvers is also extremely, to the point of obsession, interested in identify root issues when talking about problems. To find root issues, one need to ask questions, like are there similar issues like this one? Are they caused by the same problem? What suggested fixes are there? are those proven to work? whats does the number says, do they show a trend?
Well, there's your problem. From what I can tell asking those questions is considered anti-feminist and evidence of misogyny. For instance, just to pick one example, there are various studies showing that an impressive proportion of men actually admit to raping women. These get used as evidence of a rape culture in which men specifically - not just society as a whole, but men and men alone - consider it acceptable and normal to rape women. Now, since the studies in question didn't ask women whether they committed rape, they actually give you zero information about whether this is something that men do or something that everyone does. They're still used as ammunition to accuse anyone who treats rape as more gender-neutral of hating women and denying its tuge gendered nature. Meanwhile, the studies that would actually be required to test this - ones which make no up-front assumption and ask both men and women the same questions - don't exist, because even posing the question of whether women rape others in this way makes you a misogynist and is apparently a really bad career move. The same happens in a whole bunch of topics around rape, domestic violence, sexual assault, prostitution/sex work, ...
You cannot uphold anything resembling the scientific method in this climate. It's impossible.
This is flat out ignorant. Is it "impossible" to google for credible studies about sexual assault. Like this popular one from 2010 by the CDC that interviewed 16,000 people (including 7,400 men) and found that 18% of women and 1% of men had been raped or had someone attempt to rape them. So to take the point home, you don't have to believe in a "rape culture", but just know that if you have a wife, mom, grandmother, daughter, and aunt chances are (according the CDC) that one of them will be raped or have to fight off an attempted rape in their lifetime.
I did not say the proposed colored card system was the end all solution and that everyone here should shut up and take it. Absolutely we should question and propose different solutions. But I'm not sure that I saw any comments on alternative fixes besides the general theme "women should know what they're getting into".
I think you're saying that i need to understand this is a scientific crowd and they are of course going to question and apply logic. To which i would respond, why then did we end up with a majority of comments applying unchecked anecdotal evidence (which this community is usually very quick to dismiss) to subtly undermine the authors point?
Normally I would just do some hand waving and mumble "people", but I will try to do something more constructive.
I believe it is the same effect as after a random rant article about firefox/gnome/pulse audio/software licenses. Everyone has some personal opinion there, so if the article lacks all form of basic research, people will immediately start to fill that void with their own anecdotal evidence.
The blame the victim mentality sprinkled throughout this comment and a few others is the problem have with them.
"Not at all to excuse the behavior, but..."
"I'm not excusing inappropriate or damaging behavior. It is important, though..."
Those sentences should end before you go on to give the impression that we just have to accept that sexual assault/harassment is going to happen when a room is dominated by men. There is no good reason why grown men who happen to be some of the brightest minds in computer security should be excused from treating their female peers with the same respect that they would want for themselves or their own daughters, wives, mothers, and aunts.
Your comment seems to suggest otherwise, because "In a conference of mostly lonely males..." hey what do those women expect? Apparently, they should have had more "situation awareness". It reminded me of the common victim blaming argument "she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want the (bad) attention".
No. What I'm saying is that educating or helping these people might be a better solution than straight ridicule. Whether the education be how to control self, or how to appropriately engage woman, it would seem to strike the root of the problem.
I really appreciate you being open to discussion - its the biggest reason why I value the HN community and why I even bother to comment. I read your original comment many times and think that it needed clarity, eventually you did get to your point about education but that did not come off as your main point.
I assume the Ada Initiative's goal, at least in part, is education. Even through this post alone they have educated part of the HN community that women get harassed at conferences. But I don't think the problem here is that men need to be educated about these behaviors - every decent human being knows its not okay to grab a womans crotch and hide in a crowd. This article wasn't about borderline cases where it wasn't clear what acceptable behavior was. It was about blatant disrespect like telling a female peer at a conference to "show her tits".
I think the men who are doing the harassment need to be made to feel this is not tolerated behavior in this community. If a few perpetrators get embarrassed about being called out and being given a colored card, thats acceptable if it helps prevent sexual assaults/harassment and alters their behavior.
I can accept bad metaphors and analogies in HN comments; this a technically focused community and the comments are so far above above most online forums that nitpicking about literary devices would be ridiculous. But I can't forgive the hotdog/hamburger/caviar analogy in this full length blog post. It does not convey his message well and really does the article a disservice. This writing should have been more thought out considering it is a follow up to his previous posts on this subject that got quite a bit of attention.
I realize this is somewhat off topic. But as an entrepreneur I feel this is worth noting because I can't overstate how affective a good metaphor (or good, well revised writing in general) can be in persuading others. And as a reader how easily a bad one can turn me off especially when woven throughout your entire piece.
What's wrong with the metaphor? How would you have described the problem differently?
I thought it was a really good description of the situation Facebook is in. People have speculated for years about all of the different ways they could produce insane revenue/profits (the hot dog -> caviar machine), but their current revenue (the hot dogs) is very lackluster.
I think the issue is that metaphors work best when they are about real situations. The idea of a metaphor (usually) is to help a person understand one situation by mapping their knowledge of another, more familiar, situation to the first. No one is familiar with the problem of turning hot dogs into caviar, because no one is trying to do it. If anything, the actual problem is more familiar to those on HN than the metaphor.
I was conscious of my usage although ill be the first to admit i make typos all the time. To elaborate, writing can evoke feelings good or bad, feelings of familiarity or confusion, and these feelings can lend to a more persuasive writing. This was my point in the second paragraph.
Not so subtly the author is telling the reader if you program with Vim you'll be just like "all the really great programmers" who can write 4 line solutions to problems that take ordinary programmers 10 pages. You'll produce "impossible patterns of code and text manipulation", and be able to "fill dozens of registers" (admittedly I don't know what that means). This is all bit silly and reminds me of "hacking" in the Hollywood films.
I understand that this post was tongue in cheek. I also understand that not all text editors are equal, if you see someone writing their first hello world program in Notepad yes you should tell them about much better alternatives. But this post confuses ability to program with ability to use Vim.
Being really good at using Vim will definitely let you say you're part of the club of people who are really good at using Vim. It just might make you more efficient at manipulating code. But let's not perpetuate the elitism that is pervasive enough in hacking, it's a text editor. It doesn't make you more intelligent, better at problem solving, or writing more efficient code.
He's not saying that using Vim will make you a better hacker. You're the one who's confusing remarks on correlation for causation.
Its probably likely that there is such a correlation; those who are willing to put in the time learning vim/emacs are probably those who spend the most time coding, and thus have the most practice.
