Bingo! Coming from C# and C++, I had exactly the same realization using Python (before I switched back). I always ask Python programmers "but are you just keeping track of the types in your head?" because it's impossible to keep myself from doing that. If Python (and dynamic languages in general) are just pushing the type checking into the programmer's lap, I'm not sure what the advantage is other than less verbose (looking) code.
There is some type funkiness: a Perl variable can have both string and numeric components. However, which one is in use is only a problem in serializers (JSON, etc.) -- in normal usage you can rely on choosing the right operator for the type at hand.
I think they made the right decision. I've seen way too many open source projects run by academics die a sudden death when the two or three professors that were maintaining them decide they didn't want to do it anymore (or retired). In my experience, most academics are using open source tools not because they are better or even "open" but because they are free.
Few users (if any) ever contribute code back to the project beyond
the occasional bug report making them essentially just as dependent
on the core maintainers as they would be on any commercial company.
Sagemath is a gargantuan project with hundreds of contributors from all over the world and tens of thousands of users. In fact, I suspect it is one of the largest open source projects out there. It is not in any danger of dying because "two or three professors" stop working on it. William could stop working on it tomorrow and Sagemath would continue on just fine.
In fact the history of mathematical software shows precisely the opposite of what you claim. Companies go belly up and unless that mathematical software is open sourced, it dies completely. There are many examples of this. Sagemath in fact contains some code which came from a formerly commercial source (Maxima, formerly Macsyma), which was later open sourced.
You also miss that Magma is run by a group of academics at the University of Sydney, and there is real concern what will happen to it when the person running the project retires. Magma is not open source, and it is a very real risk that it will just die.
William Stein's understandable frustration is at the paucity of funding for a project as large as Sagemath, on which so many people are relying. He has written a series of blog posts over the last little while outlining his frustrations. It seems that his last post on the issue led to someone being "100% sure" the Simons foundation would write a cheque. William is demonstrating how very false that is. The assumption is that it should be easy to find a source of funding for such a large and important body of work. But counterintuitively, this has not proved to be the case.
Lots of people contribute to Sage. If anyone here is interested, check out the many SageDays happening across the US and the world. http://wiki.sagemath.org/Workshops
http://wiki.sagemath.org/days69 is a workshop going on right now, which is being funded jointly by a donation from Microsoft research and a donation from a retired Silicon Valley software engineer.
That's a compromise. The UBI is less than poverty level, so that the conservatives can say that no one is getting a free ride, and people will still need to work to get by. But it's still around 90% of poverty line, so that the liberals can say that the government is still providing a great safety net.
There are 123M households in the US, for a population of 319M, so the total cost would be $200 * 123M + $75 * ( 319M - 123M ) per week, which is $39.3G, or $2.1 trillion per year.
The U.S. had official income of $3 trillion in 2014, so UBI would cost about 68% of the federal budget.
Like $3000 a month? Not enough to live in a major city, but you should be comfortable living somewhere in the US. Major city livin' is in short supply and is thus a luxury--- we'll never be able to have a high enough UBI for us all to live in NYC.
Harassment includes verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and >expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.
And who gets to determine if I'm doing any of these things?
The conference organizers? If I attend this conference, how
can they assure me that I won't be at the mercy of conference
attendees that suddenly decide I'm harassing them simply because
I say something within their vicinity they disagree with a la
Adria Richards?
Although I guess Richards would have been taken to task for
"harassing photography". Although by that point it would have been
too late anyway.
The problem with these speech codes is that they're just as easily
used as a way to silence and shame people who's views differ
from those of organizations like geekfeminism (i.e. not radfem).
You don't have to be a feminist to treat women respectfully.
This comment has practically nothing to do with the article. As usual, any submission concerning improving the ratio of women to men in our industry immediately becomes a coatrack for digs about "radfem".
For those of you who read the comments before clicking through to the article: this one is a list of things an event organizer did to try to boost attendance among women. None of them appear at all controversial. The "code of conduct" section this commenter takes issue with is table stakes at most major conferences. But that doesn't mean rude commenters will miss an opportunity to beat a dead horse.
The problem is you're hijacking a thread about specific, quantifiable steps that one group took, and the results they achieved, in order to spin the kinds of hypotheticals that have a proven track record of spiraling off into wank.
Don't do it. Write a blog post or something. Call your mom.
I'm doing nothing of the sort. The code of conduct was clearly cited as one of the steps taken. I have issue with that step. And I have as much right to comment here as you do. You're free to ignore me. Please do.
It's an article about how a group running a retreat targeted their message to change their customer demographics, no more no less.
Whether or not the mechanisms for doing so have sound philosophical and social underpinnings is quite beside the point--they did X, Y, Z, and it appears to have worked.
Go piss and moan about gender (in)equality elsewhere.
It worked in attracting women (perhaps a certain kind of women, but still). That doesn't mean it didn't have side effects.
I don't understand your problem with people criticizing some of the things they did. It's just saying they wouldn't be attracted to the conference. It's a piece of information the organizers can ignore or not, it's their conference.
I suppose in economic terms it will work out because having more women will attract more men. What mix of people they'll have is another issue.
No, Richards would have been fine, because these things are only prohibited when they reinforce "social structures of domination."
This is in line with the standard "reverse *ism categorically can't exist" claim. Discrimination is only bad when it favors the more powerful group, or so the claim goes. So a person might be rejected by a conference solely beause he is a white male, but because the system of power is (on balance) in favor of white males, that is not racism or sexism and not prohibited.
> Discrimination is only bad when it favors the more powerful group, or so the claim goes
The claim is not (or shouldn't be) that such discrimination can't be hurtful, can't be problematic, or isn't a legitimate target of criticism under some circumstances. The claim is that bigotry and bias in the "other" direction do not constitute structural "*ism."
What's the context of someone being rejected from a conference solely because he's a white male? If someone is rejected because the conference is trying to get broader representation then the rejection isn't just because he's a white male, it's because he's a white male AND white males were overrepresented.
It's unfortunate from a rhetorical standpoint that sexism easily seems like it could mean "any sex discrimination" but is also used to mean "the structural oppression of women."
I welcome the day when the objection is genuinely only about the arguable linguistic inconsistency, but I can't help but thinking the concept is the big hangup, not the word for it.
To answer specifically for Hacker Paradise, "who gets to enforce the code of conduct" is something we have been discussing internally. Casey and I are very much hoping to be part of the group, and as such we are in a somewhat biased position when it comes to addressing any issues that arise. One idea we've been playing with is having a remote neutral, third-party ombudsman that anybody can email (anonymously, if they prefer) to address any issues. The ombudsman would then ostensibly do some investigation and bring the issue up with us if it feels appropriate.
We're still thinking through this - one month to go until the retreat begins - and would love to get HN's input. Has anybody tried anything similar? As an organizer for a ~15-person group and a white dude, I realize and acknowledge that some inherent bias exists. We want to address it as effectively as possible.
A) Codes of conduct are best enforced by example. So be very, very mindful of your own behavior and that will do a lot to deter problems.
B) When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, harassment got reported to HR. HR interviewed people separately. So that might be sort of a vote for a neutral third party to turn to.
(I got interviewed after I emailed a male on my team and copied our boss and told him in no uncertain terms "don't you ever speak to me that way again in a meeting." I was never told the outcome but my suspicion is that he was probably sent to sensitivity training. So, presumably, they decided in my favor. He avoided me and was angry for a time. I spent some months winning his trust again. I eventually smoothed things over. But, no, he never spoke inappropriately to me again.)
Can you cite any examples of people who have been silenced or shamed by a conference harrassment code?
At a professional conference, it should not be that hard to control your behavior. Just pretend your grandparents are with you. Adults routinely modulate their behavior based on the setting and it really is not a burden.
You can come up with all kinds of theoretical scenarios where you're a conference martyr. But I would really like to hear some specific, shocking examples of this happening to anyone. Because I've heard a lot of specific, shocking examples of women being verbally and physically harrassed.
It might be useful to remember how the conference organizers handled that incident:
> Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied.
But let's grant for argument's sake that this was an example of public shaming that cries out to the very heavens for justice. What are some others? Just to balance out the huge number of reported harassment incidents from tech conferences, and the bigger number that must go unreported.
The harassment numbers are not really huge. Feminists try to maintain a list and I think it clearly shows that incidents are rare - and half the items on the list are even cases I personally wouldn't count. But even if you count them all, given the huge amount of IT events, it is a very short list.
I think at the last Chaos Computing Congress there were a huge number of incidents and feminist campaigners threatening people with self-made "red cards". Just to mention one example that might be easily googleable.
My argument is that the kind of thing you're concerned about basically never happens, while harrassment at tech conferences happens all the time.
That's an assertion of fact, which you can disprove by giving examples. Maybe I'm wrong and all kinds of men are being kept from conferences, and shamed into silence, by harrassment codes. Tell me their stories!
There are enough examples of men being ruined by female accusations. Most recent I remember from HN is the GitHub founder being fired. Then there was the guy who reverted the gendering comments on some open source project (was it NodeJS?) and received a shit storm. Another one I remember is the Ruby conference where an employee flirted with her boss at a restaurant (letting her colleagues drink from her navel) and then called rape when he ended up slow-dancing with her. Adria Richards is also a good example - why wasn't she expelled from the conference, what good is a policy if it isn't being enforced?
Your question is of course also absurd because you ask for examples of the absence of something. It doesn't create much publicy if somebody decides to skip a conference. I personally would think twice about going to a conference with such policies because I consider them insulting.
Another victim could be women - if the safe way to attend a conference is not to talk to women. I remember a post on HN by a woman who has long been a coder/hacker and got along very well with the male coders. But recently she noticed that they don't dare to invite her (or was it just the newcomer women whom they didn't know so well yet) to parties and after show events anymore for fear of unwarranted accusations.
I'm not concerned about how often it happens. I'm concerned about the potential for it to happen. The Richard's example shows that potential. Your insistence on more examples as some metric of proof is none of my concern.
You're worried about the potential of a code of conduct being used abusively. Meanwhile, they exist because of the real, not theoretical, abuse encountered at some events.
> I could name a hundred and you still wouldn't be happy. Why bother.
I could support what I'm saying, but that's too hard. The reality is there aren't many examples of someone being unjustly sanctioned by a code of conduct.
So if Evan Speigels had been female, black and poor (i.e. not privileged) he would have taken the money and that would have been the right thing to do? Why because people without privilege are incapable of being stupid or greedy?
It would be interesting to see what the socioeconomic/educational attainment breakdown of the long-term unemployed looks like (Link anyone?).
I think the assumption is that most of people in this group are unskilled high-school drop outs but I wonder how many of them "have some college" or a degree and are just unwilling to "lower themselves" to working on an oil pipeline or any other kind of work associated with being blue collar. The assumption that people will take any job they can get, at least in my experience, is just plain wrong. For instance (I know this is just anecdotal) but I know quite a few people in NYC who attended elite schools that are perfectly happy to collect unemployment while they wait for a high prestige job opening (e.g. "I'm waiting for the New Yorker to have a job opening"). The thought that a government grant would get these people to go work in an oil field in South Dakota is absurd most of them are horrified at the thought of leaving Brooklyn. I was thinking of this article from Mike Rowe:
Unfortunately, if you do take a job that's "beneath" what your qualifications would suggest, you'll sometimes wind up torpedoing your career prospects going forward.
I think a developer who was "consulting" or "freelancing" (read: unemployed) for the past six months would get more callbacks than one who'd been working at McDonald's, or needed to telecommute from North Dakota.
I suppose you can mitigate that effect by leaving it off your CV, but working a "crappy" job is still going to take away time and energy that could otherwise be spent improving your skills for your desired career.
This is the typical response (and there is evidence to back it up) but then are these people really deserving of long term unemployment benefits? If you've been unemployed for five years and I say to you "hey there are jobs in xyz" and your response is that taking that job will "ruin your long-term career prospects" (it's almost funny) maybe unemployment is no longer serving it's intended functions (as a stop-gap between jobs).
> maybe unemployment is no longer serving it's intended functions (as a stop-gap between jobs).
That's basically true. I'm of the opinion that we need a real basic/guaranteed income program, because what we have right now is a terrible hodgepodge of TANF + unemployment + SSDI (http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/) which only serve to paper over the fact that we have more people than there are jobs.
This problem will only get worse in the future as automation hollows out the middle of the labor market.
At what wage? That's what I say to those claiming that hundreds of thousands of jobs are unfilled in any sector, be it IT consulting firms clamoring for h1-bs or agriculture firms looking for cheap fruit pickers.
If immigrants can survive on (and desire) the income provided by the jobs which you deem to be 'low wage', why should Americans disdain and forgo the positions?
Put another way, you seem to suggest that because people cannot find jobs they want, they should be considered unemployable; Why is this true?
I think it generally helps to follow the money. The big money is in big business increasing the bottom line by lowering wages in the economy. They can do that by increasing the labor pool enough so that there is a critical mass of workers that will accept employment at a lower wage than the current market prevailing wage. That is why the minimum wage, for example was legislated in to action.
That is the commonly stated reason for the enactment of the minimum wage, the so-called 'baptist's reason' (in the bootleggers and baptists paradigm [1]). Historically the minimum wage has been used to discriminate against minorities and other targeted groups by making their wages higher than their value to an employer[2], this would be the so-called 'bootlegger's reason'.
edit: if you follow the money on the bootleggers side, you will see that unions and companies with high capitalization support increasing minimum wages.
Companies with high capitalization? What do you mean by that?
Some corporations support raising the minimum wage only in the sense that it would bankrupt their competitors business models. (cf Costco vs Wal-Mart). Although as someone in support of a higher minimum wage I don't see that necessarily as a bad thing.
Unions are less than 7% of the private sector workforce and shrinking, their influence has been quashed, for the most part ever since Reagan dismantled PATCO in 81.
Economically, a minimum wage sets a price floor for labor. At higher levels it also can induce demand by increasing the velocity of money through the bottom rungs of the labor force. Especially since the poor spend a much higher % of their income than the wealthy do.
And with respect to your [2], I counter with [0]. Minimum wage actually has very little if any empirical affect on unemployment.
Ok but if your problem is that no one will look at your resume because you haven't worked in five years surely one of these jobs will solve that at the very least.
Academics on the whole are not a good demo for advertising and don't want to pay for anything related to their jobs/research unless they have absolutely no other choice. How are they going to make money? I can't even see them being a good acquisition.
I'd love to see their business plan, too. As of now, since they don't charge anything, you have to assume that the users are the product.
From what I can make of the publicly available information (mostly interviews with Richard), AE's primary business model is to spot research trends early and then sell this information to customers (e.g., industry, governments, etc.). One seemingly simple example of this would be to identify trends in drug/medical research and sell it to the large pharmaceutical companies. Anyone who has worked in academics knows that the lag between when research is done and when it is published is substantial (months to years). A drug company getting 12 month research head start on the competition would be huge. I can only imagine that this carries over to a large number of other fields (economics, aeronautics, finance, any field related to energy, etc.).
CHARGING FOR DATA
A few other ideas about how they could charge institutions for data (the current job board doesn't seem to be very data-driven):
- Information about trending majors and research areas so that the number and type of faculty matches at a research school matches the market demand (e.g., of research journals, grants, students, etc.).
- Headhunter info for schools looking to recruit promising young academics as either students or professors. Elite schools would likely pay big money to find the multitude of really smart, really talented, and really motivated students who just never think of going to an elite school (there are A LOT of them). Additionally, some extremely capable grad students get lost in the tenure track professor mix because they didn't attend a name/feeder school (for whatever reason).
- Honeypot for Big Bro.
OTHER THINGS TO CHARGE FOR
A few things AE and their competitors could probably charge for (note that I think that grad students are a much larger market than their professors):
- Marketplace for editing.
- Autogenerated lists of "interesting" articles/books based on user input (e.g., articles the user likes, keyword analysis of a draft of a paper, etc.). The tech and algo concepts exist to do this, but I think the people how can do it have bigger fish to fry.
- EndNote competitor that works really well. All the pieces for a (near-)perfect product are out there, but no one has really put them together in one place.
- Repos for grad student work and papers and/or for research teams. There is a lot of potential here, many of which I would have loved to have on both the student and professor ends:
a) tracking student research progress (e.g., data collection commits, draft commits, etc.)
b) collaborative resource development and/or sharing (e.g., data sets, citation lists, etc.)
c) peer review (both inside and outside of a student's school and department)
d) aggregated publication outlets for stance pieces or small exploratory studies that rarely get published but often provide valuable insights
e) a variety of writing models for other students to learn from
FOR THE GOOD OF ACADEMICS
A few things that they could reach to do for the good of academics but probably won't due to minimal profit potential:
- Facilitate the development of a large number of online journals with decent standards. All of the pieces are there on a site like AE, but there needs to be a ringleader or evangelist. This proliferation of peer reviewed publications with a decent level of standards would remove a lot of the politics from academic publishing and would let the market of ideas determine which research is most important.
- Connecting researchers (both students and academics) with similar research interests. You would think the internet would make this easy, but my personal experiences and the experiences I have witnessed of others suggests otherwise.
- Tracking and teaching people about their intellectual heritage -- for example, what are the branches of Whiteheadian philosophy, which branch are you in, and how does your branch compare and contrast with other branches.
Richard is a smart guy, and I wouldn't be too quick to bet against him. While AE isn't the most pleasant site to use in its current state, I think there is a lot of potential for something great to happen. I look forward to hearing more about AE's journey to bring that greatness to be.
