I guess my history is almost opposite while achieving similar results. However, I get bunched in the same group and expected to feel privileged and guilty.
I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions.
Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record".
Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans.
Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools:
People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad.
The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher.
After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates.
So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool.
Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled.
It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well.
The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better.
I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience:
The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation.
Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.
> I guess my history is almost opposite while achieving similar results. However, I get bunched in the same group and expected to feel privileged and guilty.
My history was also the opposite, and I do not like getting bunched in with privileged.
I've had a job since I could push a lawn mower up and down the street at the age of 12 or 13. In HS, I worked overnights in a grocery store during the summers. My family only had 1 car, so during the school year I had to get up at 5am and take my mom to work so I could go to work right after school. Then I would pick her up on my break and go back to work. I didn't have a computer at my house until I was a freshman in college, and it just happened to be during that time when they gave everyone credit cards (I guess that was lucky?).
The point is that people get to where they are in life all sorts of ways. Some win the lottery, some work their ass off, but most get there through some combination of both.
> I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section.
Being born one or two standard deviations away from median on the intelligence scale is a whole lot of luck and privilege.
> The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better.
My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh, but raised my brother and I in an upper middle class household in the US. He's the first to admit that he got lucky. Had he been born as someone of average intelligence, or not had parents who made education a priority, or he hadn't had extremely fortuitous timing in his career, he'd still be in Bangladesh. I'm pretty successful myself and I'd count myself doubly lucky. Had I been born in a village in Bangladesh, I'd have failed out of the rigid unforgiving school system. (I skated by in US K-12 based purely on test-taking ability.) Hell I'd probably be doing manual labor there instead of being a white collar professional in the US.
I really dislike the language of privilege in this context. I'm not sure what point it serves other to diminish someone else. Some people are smart. That's as much a part of them as their skin color or sexual identity. Should they feel apologetic about that?
Also, as a counterpoint, I know brilliant people who wasted that talent on drugs and other things.
I agree totally. I have a friend who has a daughter special needs that includes both cognitive and complex physical challenges. During her divorce proceeding her ex's attorney asked her, "isn't it true that your daughter attends XYZ School for Exceptional Children?" She said yes. The attorney followed up the question with, "so then it is your privilege to have a gifted child, correct?" Her response, "well I guess it depends on how you look at the gift but it is certainly a privilege to have her as my daughter."
It appears that a physician who put himself through school because his family was without means to help is lucky because he had the brains and drive to make good grades. After getting his MD he chooses to focus on finding a cure for cancer and discovers protocols that inhibit cancer cell growth. When asked what drives him he says he lost his sister to cancer when he was a child and since that day he has wanted to be a doctor? So was he lucky to have had a sister w cancer?
Sometimes privilege and luck are not mutually exclusive. He certainly was privileged to find his calling at a young age and I would guess there was a fair amount of luck in there as well (getting into the school that nurtured his passion etc) but you cannot discount the power of personal drive either.
I'm very sorry to hear the trying circumstances in your youth... but I'm very glad that you did manage to break out of it and be successful. The solutions you suggest to changing culture will unfortunately definitely not work. If its one thing I've noticed, its that if you try to ban something it drives it underground and makes it even "cooler". I don't know what the solution is, but changing the culture like that just isn't valuable.
There is also this fact that a lot of people who grew up in better circumstances (including myself and most of my friends) just never get to meet, interact with and understand people who grew up in tough cultures like you did.
I think you touched upon my original sentiment and that intimated by several others, which is that parents look out for their children and try to put them in the best situation. This is why we see competition to move into the best school districts, pricing many hard working and worthy families out. Unfortunately, we see this played out in irrational and societally negative ways like white flight.
As a society, we lack role models which do not derive from a promotional/capitalistic agenda (ie. sports stars, musicians).
Clustering people by socioeconomic status probably only serves to further deprive lesser privileged children of role models.
There is no easy answer. Some solutions are known, but NIMBY is a powerful force.
I'll point out that the poorest parts of the country are actually in small towns with few opportunities. The schools do not tend to be as dangerous or toxic, but home lives for students can be just as bad or worse (statistically speaking).
That's not to have a rural/urban competition, but to say that poverty is not localized and the culture of poverty has many expressions. It has been plugged a lot lately, but urban people who want to be multicultural, intelligent, and informed should really read books like Hillbilly Elegy.
you're experiance sounds horrible. your solutions seem to create a narrow path through but only for people like you. and from what you describe, the problems are far beyond education reform and reflect back on social structures, as you already suggested. Growing weath gaps and shrinking saftey nets -- these and other areas, outside of hign school, should be higher on the list of needed reforms. it's not going to be fixed with better schools
Never experienced anything like that on Riot. I mostly call from Android to other Android and iOS phones though.
I'd say we had a 40% chance of actually connecting a call with Wire. Suddenly there was an update to the app and calling didn't work _at all_ until the next update came (this happened more than once).
A close relative finally gave up and yelled something along the lines of "who the f* uses this POS app", and I couldn't really argue. :)
e2e on Riot/Matrix is in beta. I've had some experiences with someone else in a group chat only being able to read messages on one of their devices, and this is apparently not uncommon.
I'm a firm believer that Matrix is the future. But right now I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't an early adopter.
We're not aware of any crashes at all on Riot/Desktop (especially as it's an electron app, so crashes will be due to chromium bugs). Please can you make sure it's filed on https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues? thanks!
Non-functional and ugly? I'd say this is subjective, but I find this assessment objectively wrong.
It's complete accessible, and totally functional for what it does -- present a series of sections and display code examples. And it's also quite obviously well designed from an aesthetic perspective.
(There's no black box in the actual site in Chrome, but even with the black box, it's a totally fine functional design).
As for the NYT, it looks like a compromise between looking like a print newspaper of yore, a portal of slightly less yore, and a modern news website cramming everything in the same start page.
I was responding to a post about design, so this reply was about design.
Yeah, it's a subjective opinion. Something looking good is also an opinion.
What I mean by non-functional is that the attempt at design was non-functional on my browser resulting in dead space and unattractive design.
Since this book is about programming, it already sets a precedent for potentially pretty but non-universally-working solutions. Something I personally try to avoid as much as possible.
Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.
Honestly, this all wouldn't normally bother me as there are tons of books whose online sites have OK at best design. And maybe it's a great book, but complimenting it on design specifically seems wrong.
>Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.
"Huge unattractive margins", or use of ample "negative space", has long been a staple of the design vocabulary. Nothing inherently unattractive about it.
If what you want to say fits in a small space, don't make it take over the screen, and don't try to cram every level of information on a single page.
And it's the opposite of the overly busy, migraine inducing NYT website you mentioned as a good example of web design.
Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an <img> tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN
It looks like the SVG's style block[0] applies a black background to the svg element:
svg {background: rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)}
which fails to render in chrome due to the floats but renders fine in firefox. If set to white or removed entirely, it will display correctly in Firefox.
I also stopped using after 0.3 and tried it recently again to speed up some NLP code in Python3 and it hasn't been faster than Python3. Back then I didn't like the poor support for pyjulia, slow string processing, people using unicode symbols as variables, module import system, lack of libraries for more obscure NLP algos, and startup time. I know these aren't major issues for the core users of Julia, but these were my concerns.
The way I wrote the current code in Python was abusing sets and dicts a lot to take advantage of those fast data structs. Rewriting in Julia was fun because it was different and because multiple dispatch is fun.
However, it was roughly the same speed as Python. Ended up sprinkling some Cython on top of Python and resulted in 10x speedup. Didn't take much time to add types/pass pointers instead of strings to functions. I am not at all familiar with C++/Cython.
I think even if they speed strings/dicts up by a lot, there seem to be lots of breaking changes between releases so I wouldn't try it for something big.
I think if Julia is to succeed in the near future in the same way Python is successful for data science, it needs to be more usable for general tasks. Things like web servers, fast JSON parsing, maybe static binaries or easy parallelism. Basically, some more selling points. So far, for me personally Python is faster and easier to read for most of the things I write. At least given comparable amount of work.
You mean like Elon, Thiel, etc.? If so seems to me as if they're all doing just fine. [1]
Beyond that, point of engaging Trump would be on a topic I would assume everyone agrees is important - and if you think hidding and hoping things will magically get better, well, good luck!
Thiel was attacked nonstop and people were organizing to stop using PayPal which he is only tangentially affiliated with.
Uber CEO had to stop his collaboration as Lyft started catching up for the first time in a long time.
Elon also faced a lot of heat and had to qualify his statements. Negative reactions towards him were counteracted by his accomplishments and clean energy contributions.
I think people should collaborate but in a clandestine fashion.
Inviting Trump to Bay area would unleash all the rage against Trump towards the startup community. I'm just afraid it would be a bigger "throw stones at Google buses"
Thiel knew he'd be attacked, took a risk, and there's zero reason to believe he's not happy with the results; if you think Thiel cares what the "Bay Area" thinks, I'd be interested in your reasoning.
Uber's not even worth covering, they're currently a cluster F$&@ waiting to happen and the idea that it was somehow born of talking with Trump is what it is.
Bay Area and for the matter the greater tech community needs to engage the world, not withdraw from it.
Right, one is addressing a single person that's said they afraid of talking in public for fear of blowback and another is directed to the Bay Area and greater tech community asking them to engage the world.
That the blowback from tech employees is a real thing which directly contributes to lack of dialog between people with different political opinions, and not caring about the individual while imploring the community at large to engage is a ridiculous and contradictory position.
A pair of riots in Berkeley within a month, San Jose during the election, the Brendan Eich situation, myriad letters from CEOs post election. To quote sama's recent post [1], "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."
Care as much or little about the concerns of people not like you as you want, just don't act like you want to have a conversation with them too in the same breath.
There is no contraction, engaging the world, especially those that may not agree with you, is potentially dangerous and if you're afraid to do so, then don't.
I think it's worse. It might provide some low quality entertainment as a TV replacement, which just takes up people's time. It might be in that person's interest at the time but not in the interest of society in general.
I don't like to tell others what is the best use of their time, or what "society" wants them to be doing. People are free to choose what to do with their own time.
I disagree with the company/individual distinction premise but even if you ignore individual contributions it's fairly even. Doesn't seem like a distinctly partisan issue.
> Would you also disagree with a company/labor union distinction?
Labor unions are corporations, and corporations will fight for the corporation's interests. Those interests may align with the interests of their shareholders, but they may not always.
I feel sorry for her, and her story is probably an example of sexism at the workplace. That is when her boss says that Martin's style is feminine and that that is bad.
However, the linked Martin's story is not a good test of sexism, because the one customer example is anecdotal and sometimes if you pretend to swap customer reps, you end up with a better experience because the customer feels like they are "starting over".
The week-long experiment is also a bad example because it is not a double blind test. Martin could have acted differently than he normally does knowing that he signs as a female.
And even if they did do a double-blind test, another reason for more rude replies directed at female employees could be that social expectations are different. That is the same word choice by people of different genders/sexes can imply different things. This is not necessarily "bad".
How would you implement graphemes compatibility if you can have unlimited number of code points combine into a grapheme? Designing an efficient storage solution for such text seems like a nightmare.
Any time you define an upper limit, someone will come up with more emojis that will require larger number of code points per grapheme.
I think treating (1) by lowering requirements is bad because now people will stereotype that that person got there on ez mode.
(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That might get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?
The whole point is changing it in such a way that everyone "wants" to do these in-demand jobs. Chinese students aren't unhappy with their job choices.
Edit:
I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.
We could similarly restrict all food production to rice and people would get used to it and even enjoy it, but that doesn't mean it is a solution towards a more diverse diet.
You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?
Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because
a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone
We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc
B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.
I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions.
Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record".
Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans.
Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools:
People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad.
The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher.
After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates.
So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool.
Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled.
It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well.
The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better.
I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience:
The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation.
Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.