Can anyone explain the interrelation between sports players and college for me? We don't really have such a concept in Australia as far as I'm aware. Am I understanding correctly that to play a sport professionally a person must first attend a college and complete some degree? Why does the US even have this system? Do any other countries do this as well?
We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no comment" responses.
That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.
A great deal of intent is telegraphed by how you say things and the words you choose to use. Starting out with something like "[the agreement] could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies" definitely is putting a positive spin on something which I find a bit odd given the text of the agreement isn't even public .
I don't think "making out like bandits" is accurate at all. Tenured academics don't seem like they make all that much money and I think most would make more in corporate.
It's almost entirely analogous in my mind to the idea that because there are books that perhaps feature words like "sex" and "miniskirts" that this is offensive, the entire author community is broken, and this is why women don't read books! GUYS GUYS, we absolutely need to start censoring what people can write about! FYI, I think we should all base our moral code on the American christian values...just sayin'!
Here's an idea - women aren't all delicate flowers you need to white-knight on the internet. They can handle seeing words like "bj" and "shag".
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Android yet. When you add in the Android factor, Java is probably still one of the most widely used programming languages today.
It's funny the article straight away brings up the verbosity argument as well. You want to talk about verbosity - take a look at Objective-C and Cocoa (again, hugely popular today!)!
I wonder if people will look back at this period and shake their heads or if things are only going to get worse from here on out? Is our obsession with these gizmos a temporary aberration caused by their newness and the fact that we haven't yet adapted to having them in our lives?
This video sure does hit home, if only because I see a little of myself in there.
I think maybe only two or so years ago BlackBerry had over 17,000 employees so in total we're talking about more than half of the company being cut in the space of a few years.
I think the difference here though is conferences like this are intentionally positioned at being more casual and less formal/professional. I doubt lawyers even have similarly casual conferences of this nature. In the tech world, we've intentionally positioned our conferences to be this way. I honestly think therefore that people will be more likely to bring their normal set of standards to bear in situations like this.
Now, I have a question for you. Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now imagine those men have any time recently walked past a magazine store where upon they saw hundreds of magazines depicting women naked (ie. every single magazine store anywhere).
Or imagine those men are discussing the latest episode of Boston Legal, a typical TV show depicting a professional setting (legal firm) which contains highly sexualised themes (like, again, pretty much every show on TV today).
I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm simply making the point that the standards people seem to be applying in the tech world seem to me to be completely out of whack with what society in general deems appropriate.
I wonder if the biggest reason why things like this keep happening is because we're all on a state of "high alert" in the tech community. Hear me out.
Right now in the tech world we've got ourselves in a big damn tizzy over anything even slightly sexual in nature.
By contrast, almost every single other medium we encounter on a day to day basis (TV, movies, magazines) is HIGHLY sexualised and makes absolutely no apologies for it. I've seen TV ads on primetime more offensive than some of these presentations.
I wonder if we're just going to keep running in to this issue again and again in the tech world simply because our standards are so out of whack with what the average person deems appropriate?
In case anyone is wondering, what motivated me to submit this was simply the fact that while I've known about this section forever, a quick poll of people I know who visit HN revealed that it wasn't common knowledge.
I have no idea why this and other sections (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) aren't linked from the main page in a prominent visible manner - especially /best which is great for people like me who check in every few days.