I think “deceive the integrity” means that the administration wouldn’t have been in the position in the first place to agree to anonymize the donation if not for Ito’s actions.
Except Ito wasn’t the only faculty member taking money from Epstein, and the Media lab wasn’t the only department. The thank-you letter to Epstein that Reif signed was for money Epstein gave to support Seth Lloyd — a professor in mechanical engineering and physics — and the earliest known money from Epstein after his conviction. The ‘if not for Ito’ reading doesn’t make sense.
Well, the original comment seems to imply that the only reason people care about TFA is because the man was white and allegedly did something which is, at best, needlessly provocative, some might say race-baiting.
One could have trivially found another way to bring up the history of lynching as relates to this instance of mob "justice."
This is more in line with currently existing high crime areas where nobody talks to the police as part of the culture. The demographics of this reality have no commonality with lynching statistics.
Its more closely related to anti snitching culture than us debating novelty of white people being lynched.
It is a total red herring to what this story even brings to the table.
It’s just semantics. There are negative connotations associated with calling someone “normal” versus “abnormal”. I’m sure you’re polite enough to not describe people in wheel chairs as “abnormal”.
The non-controversial terms that people use related to issues like autism are “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent”.
No it's not... I was responding to someone who said there is no "normal". Yeah, there is. Most people behave in a way you would expect. Most people exhibit motor controls the way you would expect. A minority of people, and specifically people with autism, really do think in a "different" way and exhibit strange motor functions at times that most people do not.
I don't think we have to dance around politically correct terms here. I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.
Which is semantics. You’re using a different meaning of the word to fit your point just like the person did in the grandfather comment. You even put the word normal in quotes yourself indicating that you understand how words can be interpreted differently. I wasn’t disagreeing with your interpretation of the term.
This is absurd. How do you have any idea what "you would expect"?
>I'm using normal in the statistical sense. Statistically, most people are very neurologically similar and then some people are (relatively) wildly different.
First, define "very neurologically similar". Second, "most people are similar" in a normal distribution because that's the way the distribution is defined. It's not some biological coincidence.
Even without being able to consciously explain their expectations, humans are often consciously aware when their expectations have been violated. Experimentally, there are lots of responses that can be tracked. Unexpected stimuli causes slower reactions, longer focus times, and stronger memories. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12292
I don't see the part of that paper that explains that people "expect" the same things; that there's some "normal expectations" in the population, which is what the OP is arguing.
There's a funny thing that happens every time an article on autism comes up on this site where a bunch of commenters state they have some degree of autism. This aligns perfect with the OP's argument: everyone is "normal", but I'm not. I'm special.
It's why "normies" is a thing. Everyone sees everyone else as "normal", but they're different. I wonder why that is?
Ah, when you said
> how would you know what "you would expect"
I thought you were challenging the idea that people know what they expect from others. It sounds like you were actually challenging the idea that people can know what others expect?
Blond hair is less common in the US than autism, but it would be considered very strange to call brown-haired people "normal" and blond-haired people "abnormal".
“Queer fans have reacted with concern and anger to an identity they consider defining being used as a mere marketing ploy, a plaything for creatives, a mark of "edginess", or a commodity.”
I do think it’s weird that the parent post started out by saying the sensors were designed to spec, but is he wrong? The article even said as much. (Not MCAS though.) I didn’t read it as an excuse.
It seems like you’re saying that outsourced devs should have as much accountability as home-based devs or the entity Boeing itself. I don’t agree with this. The salary does not reflect that. The work that’s assigned does not reflect that. Anecdotally working with outsourced devs and based from the comments here, no one honestly thinks that.
It seems like you were triggered by the “excuses” part of the post. But what about the rest of it? He made a valid point (which I think you proved) about people using the article to discriminate.
I guess I’m just wondering why you’re making generalizations. I’ve worked with many devs (who weren’t outsourced) who blame everyone else but themselves. I learned to use ‘git blame’ very early on.
It’s a very interesting point. I’ve worked with some very skilled devs from HCL. I’ve also seen them turn over to other firms because of salary and other firm related issues. I don’t think that piece has anything or very little to do with the fact that they are Indian. However the organizational culture is definitely flawed and it does appear to be more prevalent in large fixed bid outsourcing arrangements. I’ve witnessed it first hand being brought in to resolve issues created by the outsourcer on projects as large as 1/2bn. They difference between those projects is the mission. Those project were critical on a financial basis. This was and aircraft with peoples life’s on the line. No one dev or otherwise can say they didn’t know this code was going on an airplane. No matter their salary.
Thanks. I thought your first post was very emotional and didn’t align with the truth of the situation, which is why I felt the need to reply.
You’re right in that the primary focus of the article was not the outsourced devs being Indian. The issue comes from how people respond to such articles, no matter the article’s intention.
I’m not saying that outsourced devs shouldn’t be held accountable for any faults. The point is that there are different degrees of accountability for all parties involved.
The article only chose to focus on one of these groups, which is fine. What’s not fine is HN comments that seem to not realize this.
No matter the salary or experience or contract, outsourced devs/companies shouldn’t be in a position of power to break critical systems on an airplane. (I’m not saying this is what happened with the Max.)
The article mentioned recent grads (working in Seattle for an India-based company) who wrote code on specifications, not “mechanical turk”-style employees. It was followed by a quote from a former Boeing software engineer affirming this.
Is your issue just with the amount ($9) being paid?
I worked at a Fortune 10 in the early 2010s for several years. We had a small army of local and offshore Indian contractors through Larsen and Toubro Infotech, an Indian IT company. They were paid between $10-20 an hour, many couldn’t understand English. These guys have no CS background and would get stumped writing fizz buzz. But hey, management got ball game tickets and other favors from the L&TI reps. One of the directors admitted to getting a cut under the table after he left to go work for a competitor.
To be clear, we paid $120-150 per developer and L&TI paid them nothing. You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of code, no concept of unit tests, integration tests, manual or automated acceptance tests, usability tests, etc.
Shelf life of most of this garbage was a few months if something ever did get delivered. This went on for years.
Why would anyone pay $120-$150 per hour for .net code in India? Most American firms pay $25-30 per hour to the Indian companies. Also, do airplanes run on .net?
>You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of cod
If we are blaming entire nationalities, I have seen code written by an American. His idea of refactoring was copy paste the function, append a '2' to the function name and use it. There were at least a 50-100 functions like this in the project that had like 30-50 source files.
I wasn’t blaming a nationality. Not sure how you’re drawing that conclusion. There’s a legitimate problem of offshoring programming work to “coders” in India who produce garbage only because management gets kickbacks.
I sense sarcasm. Is it because I called out a legit issue? For my employer, it didn’t matter because IT had a reputation of delivering garbage and so our business partners weren’t shocked at what they delivered. If something like this happens at a Boeing (I don’t know if it is), then heads ought to roll and people should be going to jail.
Actually, he sounds very good. The biggest problem in corporate environments is the amount of BS being spouted and people going along with said BS. When someone is actually honest and confronting issues, problems get fixed before they blow up. That's good for everyone.
Of course generally the reason people go along with the BS is that either they're incompetent or mediocre and BS suits them just fine, or they've given up and are just happy to be swept along and collect a paycheck.
throwawayMUSE is clearly right. These firms are playing the same game as used car salesmen--selling you junk that won't make it off the lot, all for $9/hr. It's true even for non-critical .NET apps that the business is getting ripped off. In mission critical systems, it's literally life and death. Sounding the alarm doesn't warrant dismissive sarcasm.
That Indian company is HCL. Ive hired and fired people that have worked in HCL here in Mexico. The culture seems veeery bad, as engineers coming from there have a culture of "do the minimum". And no ownership at all.
As an extreme example, one ex-employee stopped working one day because his wireless keyboard did not have batteries (a kB connected to his work MacBook Pro). Colleagues told him to just buy some AA batteries while I was back (I would have refunded them to him) and he did not want to do it.
Nowadays if I see HCL or Tata in resumes here in GDL, it is an automatic pass.
