I've never used a piece of software from HP that I've thought was of any quality. We use several of their enterprise development tools where I work, due to an ancient contract and some political contrivances, and nobody is happy with them.
And don't even get me started on their printer ride-alongs. It's just a printer, HP. I don't need 10 programs to use it.
The slack action from a mile-long train is one of the most awe-inspiring, bone-jarring manifestations of raw power I have ever experienced. The first time I felt it, it established in my mind the idea that freight trains are forces of nature rather than vehicles.
Passenger trains also experience it (though the gear on these trains are slightly stiffer), but those cars are designed to have a much smoother ride, and they are also much shorter (8-10 cars instead of 80-100+). On a long train, it sounds like thunder coming from the front, and then a split second later the entire world shakes.
Absolutely true. I think when people say that robots are going to replace low-skilled workers only the uninformed are imagining an entirely self-sufficient factory that only has one door that the raw materials goes into, and another door that the product comes out of.
What we really should be imagining is a factory floor where instead of 50 people on an assembly line, or instead of 20 waitstaff at a restaurant, you only need one or two guys who know how to replace parts on the robots
If college really isn't for you then so be it, it's your decision. But dropping out because these famous people did it is really stupid. For every one dropout who turns into Gates, there are thousands who go hungry every night (anecdotal, yes, but I know at least two).
Dropping out != a path to success in its own right. The reason these famous dropouts are successful is because they were either intelligent and worked hard, or they got lucky (iirc, Zuckerberg only dropped out after he had a viable product, so that should hardly count).
It seems to me that the media is pitching dropping out of college as a magic pill. If you're ready to put your head down and work your butt off then more power to you, but getting out of school isn't even half of step one.
I love the irony of calling someone out for hyperbole and then saying there isn't "a single person ever" who went hungry because they don't have a degree. Really, there's not a single person in the history of the world who ended up starving but would have succeeded with a degree?
As I said in my post, it's anecdotal yes, but I know at least two people who are in this situation.
Take one of them for example: She can't afford to eat every night. She can't get a good job in this economy, and she's got debts from the portion of college she did attend that are weighing her down. The loan providers aren't going to forgive those debts just because she didn't finish.
But yes, I knew someone was going to call me out on hyperbole as soon as I posted that. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the vast majority certainly don't become humongously successful like we are being led to believe they will.
She probably should not have gone to college in the first place if she had to take out a large amount of debt.
She doesn't sound like a Gates or a Zuckerberg. They voluntarily dropped out of college because they knew there was something better they could pursue. Did she drop out because she had a business idea or did she burn out? There is a difference.
I knew a feminist in high school who wanted to photocopy my draft papers so she could sign up too. Definitely not legal, but she was absolutely adamant that if men and women were to be equal, women should have to defend the country too.
Feminism is about equality, when it's done right. Unfortunately, it's been perverted into "down with the patriarchy". We call those people "Feminazis".
I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'. This happens in any workplace (my mother was a secretary, and had to leave one of her companies because her boss was consistently making advances), but in technology especially so.
Perhaps this is a symptom of the social environment a lot of programmers seem to have in common. A lot of us spend our teenage years alone or with a small group of very close friends. Because of that, certain people might not develop a full understanding of social customs, or worse: deride them as 'silly'. This is a fundamental mark of immaturity, and most people and most programmers grow out of it. Some people don't, and I think it's especially common among programmers because they (and yes, this is stereotype) tend to be very solitary.
People like us tend to spend a lot of time online, where you can make sure you only talk to people who are very similar to you (case in point: HN). Not being forced to talk to people with different opinions results in stunted social growth. A huge part of life is learning to interact with people who are different than you.
When you throw someone who doesn't have a lot of experience with social norms and is used to having everything their way into an office work environment, they generally don't mesh well.
> I think a lot of what you're talking about has more to do with an apparent inability of some people to act with any sort of common sense around other human beings rather than 'class'.
Some of it, maybe. A lowered standard of functional adulthood for such people doesn't seem like it would do them any favors; instead, it'd deny them the very feedback they need to learn better.
Immaturity doesn't strike me as the major problem here, though, unless you want to argue that the average degree of social maturity in our industry resembles that more commonly expected on a grade-school playground.
Even if that were true, then the maltreatment under discussion would be a lot more evident than it is to those of us who aren't its targets, because those who engage in it would lack the necessary cunning to choose their target and their context so that a complaint can be dismissed as he-said-she-said. Such cunning requires at least some capacity, whether cognitive or intuitive, for social analysis -- enough so, in fact, to exceed the minimum threshold for "I didn't understand what I was doing was wrong".
This being true, your choices are either to assume the existence of a feminist conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of the existing industry, or to assume that those men who are most responsible for the problem under discussion know very well that most of us would utterly refuse to put up with their shit if we saw it going on, and that's why they make sure that we don't.
It doesn't look like anyone in this thread is denying anything. Most of the comments here are about how amazingly accurate every single one of these is.
I think I'm out of the loop a bit on the chain of events. Last I heard, the FCC were the ones holding back the tide by classifying ISPs in a way that prevented them from limiting bandwidth. And then recently a court stripped them of this ability, opening the gates for ISPs to manage their bandwidth how they wanted. Is there a step somewhere after this that I missed where the FCC turned into the enemy? It seems strange to be protesting the FCC like this, when afaik they were the ones who were on our side for so long.
But please, someone correct me if I am wrong. I'm not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be on this.
You don't need to be overpaid to buy expensive image-"enhancing" crap, you just need to be very stupid about managing your money. I see plenty of people on the subway wearing Beats who don't look like they could buy their next meal. I'm sure there is at least one person in the world who has spent money from their third mortgage on those things.
And don't even get me started on their printer ride-alongs. It's just a printer, HP. I don't need 10 programs to use it.