doorstar

ADA rules also add a lot of expense that is important, I believe, but certainly limits the amount of 'uniqueness' that is possible when building new structures.

In the anonymity of the internet I am not going to pretend that I've never wondered about relationships with people who are unavailable, or despite my own unavailability. It is certainly possible to find people attractive whatever one's personal situation.

I still can't say I've found a better match.

'Happiness' studies show up now and again and I've got to say that I've always found them suspect. The polling, the questions, the conclusions are so fungible that I find it hard to believe that there's any value in them.

Satisfaction is a more interesting measure and isn't necessarily reflected in questions of how "happy" you are. I bet a poll would find that start-up founders are less happy than people with stable jobs at large corporations. Does that prove anything about whether or not someone should do a start-up?

Kind of a strange article with the implication that we've got a wide selection of people willing to marry us and the challenge is to choose the best one.

I really only ever found one person I wanted to marry and I married them. We have similar tastes, we have similar values, and they challenge me at an intellectual level.

If the author feels like that is the wrong criteria - well I'm not sure what the alternative is. There just aren't a lot of other people I want to spend every waking day with.

> maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerge

Whatever ups and downs my marriage may or may not have, I would change nothing whatsoever when I look at the amazing children we have produced together.

Plenty of places have more than two engineers and still paid ransomware. This is like any other cyber-crime, which is to say it happens all over, it's not always publicized, and it's very hard to stop.

I watched a couple of presentations on security recently and just felt like we are all in a losing battle. There are always more bad actors, they get better and better, and they are a lot more motivated than any security team you can put together.

I'm guessing that our hypothetical student must or might take a college-level Biology course as part of their undergrad degree, and that exposure might cause them to change their mind about their chosen field.

I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.

I think it's still going to be hard to get 'middle class' parents to embrace this for their kids - and I am a 'middle class' parent.

If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.

I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.

College vs. trade school isn't just about money or 'social acceptability', it's also about opportunity. A 18 year old who goes to trade school to become an electrician is going to become an electrician, they are not going to be able to change their minds in two years and become a biologist.

That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.

That's an easy allegation to throw out. Someone can advocate for a social safety net and still have bills due next month.

Keeping kids out of school _is_ a decision, and not an easy one when having kids at home means the parents can't work.

> a well-functioning court and jury should easily be able answer these questions,

I'm going to ignore the qualifier of 'well functioning' which obviously up for debate. The process of being charged with a crime, being put on trial, wondering at the consequences of the outcome etc., is no joke. It is a tremendously time-consuming, expensive, and stressful processes and even if you are acquitted there is no undoing the damage that has been done. There's a reason doctor's spend huge chunks of their income on malpractice insurance, and if we decide that engineers need the same protection in case they get sued than the biggest beneficiary is going to be the insurance companies.

If insurance companies also had to sigh oaths we might make some progress, but the nature of their game is to spread the risk - which is to say they take money from a lot of people and hope they never have to pay them back. There's only so much regulation can do about that.

It shouldn't just be thrown out as 'well if you make a decision in good faith then you are sure to win your court case'. It is not a reasonable burden to put on someone who cannot anticipate all the possible outcomes of decisions they make.

Have you ever worked at a company where they bring in a brand-new CTO or Lead Architect and they decide after a week or so that the entire dev org has been Doing it Wrong and it's only them, with their clear outsider's view, that can see the true way forward.

I certainly have. It usually leads to 3-4 wasted years of dev time on the brand new architecture that will never match all the features of the old stack, and during that time the old stack has fewer and fewer resources and the tech debt piles up.

It is absurdly easy to come up with a better plan in 10 minutes if you have absolutely no idea how it really works or how complicated it really is.

I'm accepting it, make of that what you will.

About the only thing I can give up to help this situation is my job. I'm not yet willing to make that trade.

Our schools are going virtual when they reopen but there are plenty of parents who object. Several reasons come up

- Virtual learning did not work at the end of last year, and most parents think it's unlikely to work this year. I'll wait and see, but I'm also pessimistic about virtual learning for kids 5-18. It's just not engaging in that age range.

- Related, families with two working parents are going to be very limited in their ability to work with their kid, e.g., make sure they are attending/paying attention in their zoom meetings, keep track of their assignments and make sure they are getting worked on, really sit and help with challenging projects and assignments.

- Along the same lines, families with two parents who are or will be working outside the home are really in a bind.

- Finally, there is continuing uncertainty about kids getting/transmitting Covid to the point where some people feel it's worth the risk. There is also a persistent group of parents who think this is all overwrought - they believe otherwise healthy kids and adults under the age of 60 are so are just unlikely to get very sick from Covid, certainly not more than any other virus.

There's a wide range of feelings. I don't think the schools should open, but I'm also quietly prepared for this to be a lost educational year for my kids.

Maybe I should!

I sometimes feel like sending one to Bjarne Stroustrup too, because C++ is still an incredible language. I see Rob and Ken talking about how they hate C++ and I worry about poor Bjarne's feelings.

I'm afraid you've describe my friend to a T. Ah well, it takes all types. If we couldn't work with some strange personalities, we wouldn't make it far in this business.

The more I program in Go, the more retroactively irritated I get at C++. A buddy of mine did a few 'brown bag' sessions on advanced C++ templating and my jaw just dropped further and further at each one. Who has the energy for this? It's hard to write, it's hard to read, it's hard to debug.

For someone who a) knows what they're doing and b) really needs to squeeze every last millisecond out of the code I suppose they could be useful. It made me want to send Rob Pike a thank you card.

I just faced this - I was trying to write a somewhat complex MongoDB query and I decided it was finally time to read a book rather than just cutting-and-pasting from stack overflow until I stumbled across something that seemed to work.

So of course in our status meeting yesterday I had to say I hadn't accomplished anything. In the long-term it's good to have someone on the team who really understand MongoDB. In the short-term it looks like slacking off.

- Of course my conclusion after reading about MongoDB queries was to decide that I wanted as little as possible to do with MongoDB queries and am going to avoid them at all costs.

Don't misunderstand me, the parents did nothing wrong.

Their problem was their mental model where their child's success was entirely due to their child's talents and drive, and that since they ( the parents ) had not provided any seed money, they had nothing to do with their child's success.

Whose isn't?

Point being - there are a lot of factors outside of one's control that affects one risk adversity

* having a place to live if you go broke

* a place within some manageable travel distance ( i.e. same state/country/continent )

* a place where you will feel a warm sense of welcome

* a place where you will have creature comforts: a comfortable bed, a private room, an bathroom with minimal wait times

* a place where you don't need to contribute to living expenses, at least not right away and not until you can get back on your feet

* a place which is a good launching point for your next career

* (US) health care

Successful founders I know have all of these - every last one.

There are parents with ample incomes and large comfortable homes that will welcome their child with open arms, proud of them for risking everything on a start up and encouraging them to try again.

There are parents with little extra cash and homes without space for permanent guests who are going to accept their children back with some disappointment and disapproval for taking large risks and failing.

Children of the first set of parents are just going to be more comfortable going out and taking chances.

A room and a meal, possibly not.

A room and a meal indefinitely with absolutely no pressure to leave or contribute? With the freedom to find the next job or opportunity that fits, not just desperately throw out their resume and accept the first offer? Not so much.

<shrug> I have a supportive, middle class family and if I went broke I'd be sleeping on an air mattress in front of the TV and trying to figure out how soon I could start contributing to the monthly expenses. It enough to keep me from wanting to take any large risks.

I also didn't mention location, but my relative's parents are withing spitting distance of the valley. Someone who has to move from Mountain View to Omaha is going to find it really hard to get back into the thick of things.

We have a silicon valley success story in our family. His parents were telling me how he built everything up out of nothing, clearly unaware of their own contribution.

He could pour all his money into his start-up because if he'd lost every dime he could have moved back in with them. He'd have his own bedroom, bathroom, and a fresh-cooked meal every night. He could have stayed with them as long has he wanted. Very few people have that kind of soft-landing.

The third solution is to suck it up and wait it out until there's a vaccine, which still may be as soon as December.

I hate having my kids out of school. Virtual learning is mostly useless. They are ( I think ) quietly becoming more and more withdrawn and I don't know how well they'll recover once things open up. We have two parents working from home and barely managing to stay productive.

Still I think sending kids back to the classroom is a terrible idea. I wouldn't be a school nurse for any amount of money. It's just not safe, and we can all still wait.

Does it lead to the same conclusion though. At the end of the day, do you believe that the lack of minorities and women in tech is justified?

If so, that only supports allegations of racism and sexism in the tech industry.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction. If there are differences in 'population-level' intelligence, then some populations are less intelligent, correct?

If some populations are less intelligent, then it is OK to not hire them in the tech industry.

In your opinion, how do you tell the less intelligent populations from the more intelligent populations?

The OP has clarified that he thinks that women inherently do not have the skills needed for the tech industry. It's not an unusual attitude, and challenges your assessment that this is a 'pipeline' problem.

As long as tech workers think that some races have 'cultural' problems and as long as some tech workings think that there are differences between men's and women's brains that make women less suited for tech work, I think we have to stop dismissing this as a pipeline problem.

The prejudice is real and all over this thread posters are happily justifying it.

> women experimentally have a narrower IQ distribution

A glance at Wikipedia shows that this statement is contested. Pretty much every statement about men, women, intelligence, and IQ is contested.

> This is also the expected result if you're familiar with GMV

OK, I'll bite.

https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-019-02...

"few sex differences (if any) remain statistically significant"

It amuses me that any article about racism and sexism in the tech inevitably devolves to "It's not racism and sexism if we just think that other races and sexes don't perform well in the tech industry."