It's honestly impressive how tech people continue to exhibit a complete lack of social awareness. This is a product no one asked for (NYers actually enjoy bodegas as they are), and the PR seems to be blatantly pro-gentrification (i.e. getting rid of one of the few viable business opportunities for lower-class immigrants is spun as a good thing).
If that's true, they'll fail. What I worry about in regards to businesses like this is cream-skimming.
For example: these bodega guys sell the most popular items at higher margin; those items drove additional foot traffic into the bodega who then bought the next tier of items. Or someone needed the next tier and picked up the more impulse items while there. Once the cream has been skimmed, the economic model of the bodega is no longer available, so the shops vanish, which inconveniences everyone.
This is the Uber model too: pick off the wealthier passengers, leave the dregs to taxis who are required by law to pick everyone up.
This model has destroyed dry cleaners in SF; as a bonus the dry cleaning startup failed as well, but by that time the damage was done.
It's capitalism, sure, and in case you're wondering I'm not advocating for regulation to prevent innovation. But personally I try to avoid these cream-skimming businesses even though I am in the "cream" demographic.
> It's capitalism, sure, and in case you're wondering I'm not advocating for regulation to prevent innovation.
Capitalism doesn't require regulation to prevent innovation. It requires regulation to prevent exactly this from happening: Large anomalous but short-lived ventures killing small-scale existing markets.
Interview pass criteria are not based on the gender/race of the candidate. The criteria are the same for all candidates for the same role. The goal of diversity/inclusion programs is to find more diverse candidates to interview in the first place.
Damore asserts that it is actually affected by gender.
I used to be at Google. I heard the same thing from recruiters themselves. That a woman could fail an interview but still make it through to the next rounds. Their justification for this was like so:
1. This isn't discrimination because the final hiring decision by the committee takes into account all interviews, so the bar is equal at that point.
2. Our lawyers say this is totally OK.
I heard this many years ago, when I first joined Google and was learning how to be an interviewer. It disquieted me a little but I didn't challenge it - I figured, if the lawyers say it's OK, then it's OK. And the logic that in the end, the final decision was unbiased was something I accepted.
Well, I was young and naive. If men are being dropped and women are not, then more women will make it through to the final hiring decision than would naturally occur, that's the entire point of doing it. This is, in effect, a way to lower the bar for women - literally, men and women can jump to the same height and one will cross the bar and one won't, based on gender.
That's what Damore meant when he said the bar was being lowered by reducing the false negative rate.
Is it illegal? I have no idea. But it's definitely not fair on men.
This is at odds with the claim that minority applications get a second pass. Even in the absense of discrimination, this provides a statistical advantage.
There are also programs to find more applicants, but this isn't critical of those programs.
> As long as the person you are saying it to understands that you respect him/her
what kind of person would say that with full vitriolic sincerity to someone they respect? Why say that when you could say, "I strongly disagree for the following reasons..." or something else similarly diplomatic and actually productive?
Oh right, and I forgot Marc Andreesen. This was from The Hard Thing About Hard Things:
To: Marc Andreessen
Cc: Mike Homer
From: Ben Horowitz
Subject : Launch
I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy.
— Ben
To: Ben Horowitz
Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman)
From: Marc Andreessen
Subject: Re: Launch
Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is.We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault.
Most people can see through "I strongly disagree for the following reasons..." as a euphemism for "your idea is stupid, and this is why..." And the more you emphasize "strongly" in the former, the more likely "fucking" materializes between "is" and "stupid" in the latter.
That kind of bland vocabulary makes one's statements sound like limp static. Corporate dialect is contrived to remove strong (corporate-environment-inappropriate) emotion from your speech. If you're well acquainted with your colleagues, then I'd hope you could express yourself more genuinely. You're probably more relatable than a peppy talking head who never offends anyone.
In this cases, shouldn't the discussion be purely about the technical merits of the idea, rather than emotions of the people speaking about it? I would count removing unneeded emotions from the conversation as a positive thing.
I'm a machine learning engineer so "unneeded input" is something I rarely consider as a valid statement. Oftentimes when you're arguing the merits of one approach versus a different one, you have to use your rhetorical skills to influence another party. You both believe you have the best solution. You believe your logic is consistent and complete.
Emotion is a very powerful signal during discussion. It's a counterpoint to logic; they work together. Rarely does logic by itself win anyone over. Trying to remove "unneeded" (who decides what an unneeded emotion is) emotion is folly. We're not Vulcans.
So, all things being equal and arguments having the same merit, the less polite and less rational person wins. If i am able to contain emotions and argue by facts only, I will be at disadvantage.
Diplomacy is not always necessary to get productivity.
Tip-toeing around the issue can make things much worse.
It is much easier to say, "Stop. That's stupid, try again."
Than to try and cherrypick what they've done right, because often times, there isn't anything useful there.
Considering that Gates, Jobs, and Torvalds all have stories where they tell someone what they're doing is stupid, and actually get a decent product out at the end of the day, it doesn't seem like diplomacy is necessary at all.
If you can't say ~why~ it's "stupid," your comment is not useful. And if you do say why it's stupid, those reasons are much more important than the inflammatory adjective "stupid," so just say those instead.
> FORTRAN’s conflation of functions (an algebraic concept) and subroutines (a programming construct) persists to this day in nearly every piece of software, and causes no end of problems
I'm not really sure what the author's point is here. I think "subroutine" is a more descriptive name than the more commonly-used "function," but I'm not aware of any problems this has caused.
Functions have properties which are completely defined by their inputs and outputs.
Subroutines (I prefer the term procedure) are just a sequence of commands. They may use arguments and return a value but they can also do anything else.
Functions, real functions, can be reasoned about, composed, mapped over collections, and otherwise trusted to behave themselves. Very few programming languages provide strict functions. One may write them, of course, if one is careful, but that is doing work a compiler could be doing for you.
There's also a disconnect with using a PL's concept of a function (procedure, calling convention) instead of the simple intellectual concept (composition) whether or not you're concerned with the mathematical concept (purity); language compilers or runtimes often perform poorly because as a matter of course every function call adds to a stack (failing to perform obvious inline or tail call optimizations), involves a dispatch that might be more expensive than the function itself (just in case inheriting code overloaded it or because every procedure lives in a run-time mutable table), or causes potentially large copies of arguments (to pretend at them being immutable by called code), etc. -- paying costs which in many cases could be avoided.
Functions can be memoized, procedures cannot. This means that you cannot use anything from mathematical logic for compiler optimizations or program checking/linting or verification. It basically means that you go from at least the possibility of proving something about your operating system/compiler/distributed system correct to it being impossible to prove the most trivial things.
> trigger-warning=just google it. there are people that go in panic when they hear certain stuff (kinda insane really)
There are people who experience panic disorder/ptsd. Being "triggered" into a panic attack can literally require hospitalization. Just because you are fortunate enough to not experience this doesn't mean that all people are.
I'm not disagreeing with you, panic/ptsd triggers are a real and terrible thing, but in this context I think the use of "triggered" is referencing the current-internet-pop-culture-meme usage of the word.
Some examples:
"Have a nice day ma'am"
"Did you just assume my gender?!?"
(paraphrased from Tropic Thunder)
"What is it with you people?"
"What do you mean 'YOU people'?"
http://i.imgur.com/l2tY2wf.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4Kw9O5g.png
http://i.imgur.com/199QTf6.jpg
For marketing, which has been positive for a lot of artists. It's definitely allowed people to get their works out there, but let's not act like it's for serious photography.
> but let's not act like it's for serious photography.
I (strongly) disagree. There is some incredible work on Instagram from (many) thousands of 'amateur' and professional photographers alike. "Serious photography" isn't just restricted to DSLRs/MF/etc.
In many ways, the constraints of mobile photography (lower res, fixed focal length, small viewport when consuming) has benefits, just like constraints elsewhere in photography.
(I follow many photographers who primarily or solely publish to Instagram; many who aren't marketing their paid services.)
They are using Instagram as an easy publishing platform. It's assured the big ones find it very lucrative. The biggest issue with Instagram is all of the bullshit accounts with millions of users, that are just posting the work of other artists with a "credit" if they are lucky.
I would even argue that Instagram has in some ways redefined professional photography (by enforcing different constraints than a professional photographer is used to).
Aggregator accounts are one of the best ways to discover high quality users.
