How much do you have to save on your phone bill before you can buy a house?
The difference between a cheap Android and an old iPhone isn't going to be enough to buy a home, or provide food for the family every day, or pay for (or off) an education, or pay for medical expenses, or buy a reliable car, or any of the other truly expensive things that those with wealth take for granted.
Judging the spending habits of the poor on small luxuries is a common way we shift the blame of poverty onto the poor. It allows the rich to feel better about themselves and about the society they've built.
I understand that poor people aren't to blame for being poor (the vast majority, at least). But this mindset only serves to keep them going in the same rut. "Poor people deserve small luxuries", "Can't you just allow them to have a few rays of sunshine in their bleak lives?", etc.
In order to escape poverty, at some point you need to stop thinking and acting like a poor person and start thinking and acting like a middle class person. When and how do you propose that happens? Frugal middle class don't smoke and drink their money away, nor buy top shelf electronics and food products if money is tight. They cut coupons, buy off-brand, save, and invest. At some point, poor people need to be somehow taught these things that we intrinsically know.
Poor people need money, but they need (perhaps even more) education and role models to emulate which is something the government can't easily provide.
It's probably the oldest and most difficult problem to solve in the history of humanity because it requires a large amount of people to be empathetic and charitable with not just their money, but their time.
So damn true, it's so difficult to get statistically significant A/B test results, and the popular tools actively lead you astray. It's rare enough for a startup to have the traffic to meaningfully get results on their homepage before the heat death of the universe, let alone random landing or in-app pages.
I'd recommend anyone reading this who does or wants to do A/B tests read: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html It was one of the trickiest lessons I had to learn.
Once you realize you need to set your sample size in advance, you actually have to do the math to figure out the traffic you'll need. That's when reality hits you.
Yup. The best thing for running an A/B test you can do, by far, is setting up the rules in advance. Our protocol was something like this:
This test is going to have 2 variations, looking for a 5% increase of the conversion rate that is currently X%, and to do so the test will run for Y iterations (based on the company standards for significance and power).
If the test shows a >= 5% increase, it wins and we use it. Yay! If not, we assume it is no different than the baseline, record the results and discard it. You are welcome to peek at the results all you want, but no tests are stopped early and no decisions are made until it reaches the set amount of iterations. This isn't the only good or valid A/B testing protocol, but it does force people to consider the costs of their tests in advance (in terms of time and iterations required), which I think had a positive effect on the type of tests people ran.
Just having the calculator discourages people from running tests with tons of variations looking for tiny increases (like the famous try different colors of your submit button), because just looking at the iterations required by the calculator it becomes obvious to everybody that those types of tests just cannot show any meaningful results for your average website.
Four hours without comment, not many upvotes, and clearly a flag or two. Hacker News doesn't want to face the demons in its own industry.
Seems that nobody wants to know that the darling Tesla is rotten at the core. Culture comes from the top. It's ok to love the technology, to the love the cars, but hate the culture, hate the sexism. You don't have to be complicit in their discrimination just because you see electric vehicles as the future. Hold your heroes to higher standards.
I'm also surprised at the lack of activity. I found this to be a very well-written, well-researched look at the topic (and it's one I'm always a little skeptical about as a woman in tech who has never encountered any harassment or discrimination).
Well I upvoted this to read the comments that would be posted here, but I'm not enthusiastic about reading about most topics on the New Yorker, which always over-narrativizes and inflates the word count of its pieces.
Great publication, but I'm frequently interested in the discussion rather than the article itself.
I "vouched" for this to unflag it. Whether you agree with the content or not, the New Yorker is a legitimate source (famous for their fact checking, as a matter of fact) and the gender imbalance is a real and glaring facet of the tech industry.
That's good news if true, the women who make it and get promoted earn the same as their counterparts. Still lots of work to be done removing the barriers that keep them from getting these jobs and promotions in the first place.
Are you being coy? I assume you know about the disparity in engineering jobs between men and women, particularly in management and executive roles, but are blaming this on something else. Say what you mean.
The universe is eternal, which means it has always and will always exist.
If there is something that always exists, then it is impossible for there to be nothing.
It is impossible for there to be nothing.
Not a very satisfactory answer. The interesting question just becomes: Why is the universe eternal? or Why does there exist an eternal universe at all?
First two comments come right out the gate and cast doubt on the authors experiences. One goes on and says women and minorities, particularly blacks, are not smart enough to make it through difficult CS classes.
I don't doubt her experiences - I have no trouble believing that people are more likely to ask black women if they're lost. IIRC, this kind of stereotyping is well-documented.
I do take issue with her blaming the CS107 professor for contributing to sexism. She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out. She notes that women seem to drop out disproportionately often, but this might not be something the professor has the power to do anything about - she certainly doesn't say anything the professor does which might be part of the problem, other than just making the class hard. Watering down core classes in the name of increasing diversity doesn't help anyone.
The biggest barrier I've run into while mentoring lower income kids is time on a computer. They don't know how to type. They haven't had time to explore or play around.
It does take some privilege to have a computer. Maybe the kids who are dropping out haven't had the time. Maybe they just need a longer runway to get up to speed.
There are many informal ways study groups organize that leave various groups behind. They can form around extracurriculars, and freshmen in computer clubs tend to have significant previous exposure and some experience. Groups can form around independent living groups, which often are gendered and often have large libraries of past class notes. And, of course, social circles often bias themselves based on race.
Connecting students with upperclassmen in their majors, assigning study groups, creating additional projects or courses to help newcomers learn are all ways to counteract the negative effects of study group bias without watering down the material at all.
Someone can still be a great engineer and struggle through an early class - there's plenty of reasons for this to happen and universities/colleges need to address these problems.
For example - someone who has never coded before in their life - there shouldn't be some expectation that you had a computer growing up, built a website for peers in middle school and are already an expert by the time you hit your first class. There's plenty of capable people who a) never had the advantages/wealth to support some of these things b) haven't discovered their interest and "weed out" core classes don't help with that. You may take longer to get up to the same place as someone with the advantages above, but that doesn't rule you out from being an effective engineer/computer scientist.
Friends who majored in music theory (not performance, which is worse) tell me that you have to pass a competency test to be admitted into the school as a college freshman.
(At least, at the good schools; this may not be true at third rate schools, I wouldn't know.)
This requires that someone spent years playing an instrument, typically with lots of instruction, both of which are very hard to do with no money.
Some may get this free in high school, but the high school I went to had performance exams to get into those high school freshman classes.
There was no music at all at my junior high.
I got 6 months of instrument training in 6th grade, and that was all that public schools offered me, and I know that some people had even less than that from the schools in their area.
The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.
It definitely does need fixing, but not by simply admitting/hiring more minorities until the statistics are agreeable (easy) but by actually making those deep structural changes to enable true equality of opportunity for all (much harder).
Yes; I really dislike adjusting statistics, because it's off-target, whether it's easy or not, but I definitely agree that opportunity is the desirable thing to equalize.
Each racial group has subsets that trend towards different desires; e.g. as a white guy I knew lots of other white guys in high school who were anti-intellectual, and thought that going to college inherently meant you were a snob.
I don't know how to change subgroup attitudes like that, but at any rate it sure would be nice to give opportunity to those who want it.
The primary way that that is hard is that it costs hard money. In my example, money for student instruments and money for music instructors (typically far more than for the instruments, although both are nontrivial).
(In my areas public libraries have been cutting hours (and days) for decades. This is part of the ridiculously negative trend that we, as a society, must stop being foolish about, like these other issues.)
Statistics, OTOH, averages together those who don't want, along with those who do want, which is clearly unfair to those who do want.
Yes, there's definitely more that needs fixing. My stake in this fight is coming up with things that can happen so my industry (and really, the organizations I work for) can get great talent - and that involves training more & recruiting diverse engineers.
> The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.
> I do take issue with her blaming the CS107 professor for contributing to sexism.
If the professor doesn't have the responsibility to make the class accessible to a diverse group, who does?
> She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out.
She does not say that. You implying that she says that or that that is the reason is BLATANTLY racist and sexist. The reason that there are not enough black women making it through that class is NOT because they are stupid or lazy.
I find your attitude offensive.
EDIT: I'll take your downvotes with pride. Care to actually indicate how I am wrong?
> One goes on and says women and minorities, particularly blacks, are not smart enough to make it through difficult CS classes.
No, the commenter said many of them were weeded out because the classes were hard. If you have affirmative action helping people get into university with lower test scores, isn't that exactly what you'd expect to see?
When you don't have logic on your side, just call people names, right?
> If you have affirmative action helping people get into university with lower test scores, isn't that exactly what you'd expect to see?
Ah, and here we have uncovered the elephant in the room.
Damn elephant.
I'm sure this woman has a legitimate complaint, I'm sure at least two people have asked her if she was lost before. I'm also guessing she may be bloviating a little bit. Nobody in college gives a damn if you're lost, lets be honest. If you're lost, you ask for directions. Happens all the time. Unless, of course, you actually look lost. Even then, people usually don't give a damn.
I went to UMD, College Park, and the weed-out classes were damn hard. UMDCP is only a top 15 program, I can't imagine how hard Stanford would be.
The incessantly being asked if you are lost is the most unrealistic part of this story. My wife and I were looking for a room in Stanford last year - we really were lost. No-one gave a s..t.
At UMDCP people asked me for directions all the time, and I was happy to help. Not once did I ever ask anyone if they were lost. Nobody gives a shit. They really, truly just don't. Anyone who "does" care actually doesn't, they're just trying to break the ice or whatever.
I'm not assuming she got in on affirmative action. I'm stating that affirmative action, as a policy, has consequences. One consequence is that certain demographics who initially benefit will suffer from it later.
Please learn to separate demographic differences from individual differences before calling someone ignorant.
Can you comprehend how there are other factors that could effect minority achievement besides your assumption that they're letting in people not smart enough? Does your "consequence" have any backing or did you just make it up?
That's nice. The rest of us are saying that racism, as a problem that exists rampantly in this society and this very valley, has consequences. One consequence is that certain demographics don't benefit as others do.
And you wanted to assume "affirmative action" had some part in this without knowing a thing about this woman. Horrible.
Please learn to stop perpetuating racism by blaming the victims. It's ignorant, disgusting, and cowardly.
The woman is still in the class, so obviously affirmative action hasn't affected her. However it is a fact that Stanford uses affirmative action (see https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic... for example). I think jquery was pointing out that this affirmative action might explain the reduction in diversity after the "weeding out", which the article author mentions. It's nothing to do with racism or assuming that black people are stupid.
This complaining about 'first [two] comments' is getting tiresome. The comment ordering swings around a lot, especially when the article is fresh, and doesn't necessarily reflect number of upvotes - for example, right now in my feed, the top comment is '0 minutes' old and your comment is 36 minutes old.
Clearly there's more to comment ordering than karma - I find it hard to believe that in less than 60 seconds, a comment is posted, then the page is refreshed enough times by enough viewers to find the fresh karmaless comment, who then upvote it in time for me to load it on my pageview.
In short, stop it with these "top comment(s) = HN hivemind" whines.
I don't think I've ever seen a top-level comment complaining about the top comment actually be referring to the comment that's at the top when I read it. In fact, the complaint is usually either downvoted to negative or above the comment it's complaining about.
As an aside, it could be a small indication that this community is a.) growing a bit via reddit, and b.) reaching a critical mass where maybe StackOverflow rules should be considered.
Something like, not being able to reply to the "root" of a comment tree without some paltry number of karma, like 10.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care about karma scores, but as you point out, it isn't very hard to "farm" karma if one so chooses.
Absolutely agree. Reactions like this make it that much harder for folks in the industry to recruit talent through the pipeline because we're discouraging and reducing the ability of potentially qualified people from getting through.
I'm not sure exactly which comments you're referring to. However I think the comments are casting doubt on the author's interpretation of her experience, rather than her experience itself. Nobody doubts that people asked her if she was lost. There is just some doubt as to whether it happened because of her skin colour.
Initially when I read this story I was gobsmacked. How could there be so many racist idiots at Stanford? Then I thought of other possible explanations: perhaps she was just looking around at the architecture and just looked lost?
I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I don't think it's fair to automatically assume racism. Could she not just politely ask one of the people "no, I'm not lost, why do you ask?"
[edit] please a comment explaining what you disagree with, rather than just downvoting.
Implicit in your comments is the idea that you can't work with women without the risk of lawsuits. This is classic victim-blaming.
The problem is not the lawsuits. The problem is harassment, and further, the men who are so incapable of not harassing women that they segregate their workplaces.
We should recognize that the number of lawsuits pales in comparison to the incidence of actual harassment. We should be blaming the perpetrators of this harassment, and the men who would avoid working with women rather than change their behavior. We should not be blaming the women who raise these suits, or decrying their nature, as there is a very real and serious problem of sexual harassment in our industry.
Allegations of victim blaming tend to be used to shut down conversastion rather then contribute to it. There are times when mentioning victim blaming is appropriate, but you have to be extra careful with this concept.
If anything, this case is system-blaming. More importantly, it is looking at how the system works, and what unintended effects are attempts to improve have. Specifically, observing that the increase is lawsuits leads to the creating of single gender environments, harming other metrics of gender equality. There is no concept of blame in this observation. It is merely a conjecture about cause and effect which can be used to make more informed choices.
Having recognized this we may decide that sexual harrasment lawsuits are not worth it, in which case I may leave the country. Or we could look for ways to conduct these lawsuits in a way that is less damaging. Or we may decide to use/develop other responses to sexual harrasment before going to a lawsuit.
This is a discussion that needs to be had, and your response preculudes it.
Nothing of that nature was implied; rather, you read misogyny into the comment due to your own biases.
The original post was very careful not to put either sex in either role. It even went so far as to not exclude homosexual relations by suggesting that you'd want three people in the room despite a segregated workplace.
Your post, in contrast, insists that harassment suits are always filed by woman against men. It goes so far as to suggest these hypothetical employers must be men and that their motivation is an inability to control themselves.
The implication was simply that as sexual harassment cases become more costly, it may be pragmatic to take more drastic measures to prevent them. I'm very disgusted by your post.
Allegations of "Victim blaming" are a classic tactic to shut down discussion by implying that anyone who steps out of the appropriate mental box will be deemed an accomplice.
You can invent whatever descriptions you wish, but it is victim-blaming. Vague threats of a public backlash against sexual harassment lawsuits is an attempt to blame women for filing them and attach implicit suspicions to their claims. Reminder that Tinder has confirmed the inappropriate messages.
Discussion about what, exactly? That women are not trusted enough to not bring false allegations, therefore men should always have witnesses to make sure that men are not victims of even false allegations?
Seriously, if you are the victim of a false allegation that is later proven to be false, then your reputation is not destroyed. If you are the victim of one instance of a false allegation that later reveals a pattern of bad behavior, then you should not have behaved badly in the first place.
N's tend to be big-picture, conceptual thinkers, whereas S's are detail-oriented and concrete.
J's are to-do list sorts of people, they enjoy finishing tasks, tend to "get a lot of stuff done", but can be stressed if there isn't a plan. P's prefer starting projects to finishing them, they tend to work off-the-cuff, probably appear to get less done, but are more capable of dealing with changing circumstances and priorities.
