And now, Pipes can be mobilized and viewed on any mobile phone using SMS and WAP! Simply get the RSS feed of the Pipe and mobilize it using the 411Sync Mobile API. Within seconds, view it on your cell phone
Oh wow. There is so much in this paragraph that was best left forgotten.
I feel like every few years GUI based workflow tools make a revival, but then slowly die out. In the 1990s the selling point was that your "business logic" could be written by "the business" instead of those expensive programmers, and we all know how that panned out.
There is obviously something here, however, especially when you consider what people are doing with Simulink. But why do these tools remain niche? Is there some threshold of complexity past which these tools don't scale well, but source code does? Considering these tools are effectively representations of a program's call graph, could there be a future where I toggle between text and graphical versions of my program depending on what works best?
Simulink is hardly niche, it's running right now in hundreds of millions of car engine controllers. And it isn't a programs call graph; Simulink models usually don't have control flow at all. It's all about data flow.
The project banner depicting a damsel in distress on the railway tracks is going to make some people twitch. I'd avoid that distraction by picking something gender neutral. My 2c.
I'm not offended in the slightest. Except by your misuse of the apostrophe. I agree that nobody was hurt in "it is making." Note that this is my idea of fun, and you don't have to be offended by it.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that gender charged images are going to draw attention in the tech industry, and that is worth avoiding. I made no commentary that suggested the image was not fun, or was offensive. You made those extrapolations all by yourself. Someone out there will make a very similar mistake to yours, by extrapolating a nonexistent gender message in the logo of this project.
That's where the real time wasting starts. My advice to the project maintainer is to skip all that bullshit by picking something neutral. I genuinely wish this was not the kind of stuff we have to worry about, but I have at least one friend whose industry reputation was needlessly tarnished by people who didn't see the same joke he did.
The only time wasted is the complaining about a photo that is obvious to the intended audience. You are specifically nitpicking gender for no justifiable reason.
Please explain: how is it fun exactly? Do you enjoy the image of a bound woman about to be hit by a train? Does your girlfriend / wife / mother find this image "fun"?
It is a reference to Taylor Swift combined with Ruby on Rails. That sort of makes sense. I assume they wanted to combine rails and Taylor swift somehow and this seems like on easy way of doing it.
I reacted a bit like you, but given that this only makes sense with Taylor Swift, I figured okay, whatever no need to moralize over this one.
Haha! I just googled her, and that picture makes sense now. Yes I'm an adult male from Texas, but I'd never heard of her before. Hell I just had someone explain to me who Beyoncé is at a Christmas party a couple months ago.
I appear to live under a rock. But anyway, clever joke. I like it.
Parent comment is just trying to be helpful, and people are down voting it. The comment points to a legitimate concern so ... like all advice, take it or leave it, but I think it would be gracious to say thanks rather than pile on.
Also you really can't legally use the image of a performer without their permission, if you care abut such things.
His Amazon account wasn't even logged into, the CS rep gave up his information without the attacker being authenticated, and the attacker used that to login to other non-Amazon systems.
This is perceptive. As a society we must tolerate a diversity of opinions. Everything must be open to question and debate. But after questioning and debate, there must be a final disposition that lets us move on to other challenges. How we reached that disposition should be so clear that it invites renewed debate only in circumstances where new insights have been made.
I feel like we already use this pattern in a variety of settings. The legal system comes to mind, where we build this collective body of decisions that either prove useful and are built on, or modified and removed if not. But there is not a sense of anything being "inappropriate" to question. The very core of the legal system is challenged on a regular basis and we don't feel the need to censor those who challenge it. We have a general level of confidence that the system has checks and balances that let justice prevail.
Two observations. One is that this reminds me of eventually consistent systems. The law lags slightly behind reality but we know it catches up eventually. Reality is always changing and so we don't expect the law to always be up to the minute perfect. Perhaps we can embrace this notion of imperfection as a reason to keep discourse constantly open.
Second is that the law is effectively the source code for running society. It has procedures set up around it very similar to how we'd run a successful open source project. Integrators, reviewers, unit testers, engineers, project managers, pull requests …
Perhaps in the case of Yale and other institutions, what is needed is the same level of transparency we have in a well run source repo or legal system.
1) everything is written down somewhere, is properly attributed, and openly discussed.
2) systems are in place to propose changes, understand the impact of those changes, and integrate or reject those changes.
3) there is an understanding that this is an evolving system, it has a past, present, and a future.
4) history is recorded so that present and future discussions can be made with the appropriate context in place.
I feel like this is the solution for incorporating dissenting views, converging on the set of beliefs that identify the underlying priorities and preferences of the participants, and making it clear why certain things are the way they are.
It is entirely possible that institutions may converge around policies that are abhorrent to some, but being clear and transparent about that at least makes people know what they're getting in to. It's possible that a system like this at Yale would result in some students or faculty deciding that their views would not be welcome there, which is better than discovering that after the fact.
"announced the acceptance by the journal Theoretical Computer Science of a more efficient algorithm for pancake sorting than the one proposed by Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou."
I kind of love the idea that it's an optimization because the universe would have a shitty frame rate if light's quantum state wasn't lazily evaluated based on whether anyone's viewport was aimed at it.
I wholeheartedly agree with the need to make cultural fit bigger than just "happy hour" fit, but primarily on moral grounds. I haven't seen strong data to make a technical case here.
Do we observe discrepancies between company performance that are correlated with diversity? They say this is observable at the team level in controlled studies, but at the macro level do we see it?
Put another way, if diversity was a strong influence on success, why do elite institutions in banking and tech not appear to exhibit much of it?
The article comes across as whiny because he's a New Zealander. So cut the guy some slack, he can't help it :)
As an Australian working for a large tech company, I totally feel this guy's position. It never leaves me, the sense of being an imposter in this country on limited time. I've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes in this country, hired dozens of Americans as a manager, and mentored many of them to greater heights. I am lucky to work for a company with deep pockets that wants to invest in my green card process, but if I step outside this bubble I step immediately into the world this author describes.
It is madness for the United States to put road blocks in front of skilled immigration. As a hiring manager, I can tell you that I always prefer to hire a local American where possible, simply because it's easier. That in itself is not great - to serve this large American company's interests on American soil, I should hire the best possible talent, not the most convenient talent, no matter their origin.
But in my case there is little American talent to hire. It is not because I'm a picky arsehole (although some would say I am), but just a function of the kind of positions I hire for and the place I do it. Once you cut it down to:
1) people who want to relocate to the Bay Area
2) people who want to work in the South Bay
3) people who want to work for this company
4) people who want the job
5) people who can actually do the job
There is just a tiny trickle of people left, and frequently I'm in competition with other tech companies to acquire them. And for foreign candidates, you can tack two small items on to that list:
6) people who want to move to the United States
7) people who qualify to get a work visa for the United States
Folks carry around this assumption that foreign workers are cheap Indians on H-1Bs who can blow in and out of the country on a whim, and that a large % of unemployed Americans are waiting in the wings to swoop in and take those positions if tech companies only paid the prevailing wage to attract them. The reality is way more complex than that. Not every immigrant is an Indian and not every unemployed American is a reprogrammable robot, able to do any open position I have on my books.
What I want to bring to this country - not that the United States government factors this in to my immigration status - is growth. That is what gave me the opportunities that got me here, and that is what I want to give back. Right now, I can go talk to my boss and create a job. I can create a job out of thin air! That pays >$100k a year! Me, a foreigner, I can do this. There is always more work to do.
And if I can hire the best and brightest then I can be more successful, and create more jobs. I stand a decent chance to create economic circumstances that bring opportunities across a spectrum of skills inside and outside my company. With more jobs, I can take risks on hiring under-qualified Americans to train them, just like people took a risk on me, a university drop out. And with more success I can attract more of the best and brightest Americans too.
My tangible contribution to this conversation is that work visa holders should have a full year to find another position, and should be allowed to start companies during that year. That would enable valuable economic risk taking for the people already here. For those trying to get in to the US, that's a diatribe for another day.
@hagmonk
You have made some very good points. However "Not every immigrant is an Indian and not every unemployed American is a reprogrammable robot, able to do any open position I have on my books." is true but incomplete. Not every Indian is a cheap immigrant who's willing to work for less than their American counterparts. H1b was meant to "supplement" American workforce and not to "replace" them. Also in majority cases, H1b is filed by companies and the not individuals, so the way it is used is largely dependent on the business model of that company and how it best suites them. It's sad to see that an educated person like you boxes all Indian Immigrants as cheap laborers.
I agree that comment was probably unnecessary, but to be fair he said "... this assumption that foreign workers are cheap Indians on H-1Bs". He did not say all Indians are cheap or on H-1B's.
Yes, @dreamcatcher is misinterpreting my sentiment, or I was not clear in communicating it. I absolutely do not support any racial stereotypes of Indians or anyone else - my point is that others do this because they wish to oversimplify the immigration argument.
I have an Indian guy on my team going through the visa process just like me, so slandering of Indian workers hits especially close to home. He's the only other person in my entire office who knows for sure that cricket is the superior sport … without him I'd be alone and defenseless amongst baseball nerds!!
N.B. "Long time" means an unpredictable value typically between 30-300 seconds
1. Terminal windows take a long time to become ready to accept input.
2. My "irb" program takes a long time to load.
3. Finder takes a long time to list files, even when there aren't many files in the directory.
4. Finder takes a long time to generate previews of files
Only perhaps related to slowness, but extremely annoying: incorrectly implemented iPhone sync leads to my conversational counterparties hearing the ringing chime well after the conversation has begun.
Have you tried to troubleshoot the cause of this slowness? What you describe is not normal behavior for any OS. Some aspect of your system is broken. If it's a hardware problem, installing a linux distro won't help. If it's not, installing any OS from scratch (including Yosemite) will fix it.
Oh wow. There is so much in this paragraph that was best left forgotten.