181–190 of 205 posts
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
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My goodness, I didn't realize there were so many Black Friday sales on self-righteous indignation. Giving it out for Christmahannukwanzakah, are we? Personally I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the author. Some of us are builders. Some of us are growers. Some of us are finishers. Unfortunately the former two often unintentionally conspire to make life difficult for the latter, whether by poor architecture, bad code,…
It is never right to attribute negative characteristics to an entire race or gender. Anyone who does so under any circumstances will find me speaking in opposition. -------------- EDIT in Reply: 1. Your comment is, however unintentionally, quite interesting. Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. The closest analogy I can devise is an infinite regression of ignorance, a pe…
Either you don't hang around HN much or you're just prone to hyperbole.
> Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously
I'm curious whether it was the tacit acknowledgement of the dominance of white males in technology or some other device in the writing which triggers this reflex for you. If the former, that's a pretty low bar for that, and of course a totally disingenuous accusation.
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It is a fair comment. In design you at least have a chance at clean work safe from messy reality.
I'm not sure about that - designers have to build a UX that works in the real world, and sometimes there are really complicated processes that need to be exposed in a nice way. I imagine this has similar tradeoffs as programming (i.e. difficulty in implementation, balancing power/intuitiveness)
Well, I can understand the feeling, but the industry needs more programmers like the author.
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Could you explain? Because she sounds like the opposite of an LoB enterprise programmer to me.
In the enterprise environments that I've been in, there has always been a big push for over engineering. The idea of iterating and improving is generally frowned on and the waterfall mentality tends to shine. Waterfall planning revolves around trying to understand the entire problem, plan every step of the way and then methodically deliver a solution that's prematurely optimized. Once the project is over it's handed…
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There is plenty of place for polish and deep understanding in the user-facing sphere. Apple is renowned for their work in this area. My company's product, Skylight, has made a virtue out of "all the little things" - understanding problems deeply and solving them well. I think it's reasonable for people to wish that more of user-facing software worked this way, even though it's out of sync with how Silicon Valley and…
The flagged sibling comment demonstrates how emotionally invested people can be in their technology choices. Similarly worded comments about other subjects would not have been flagged to death. If anything, I think this demonstrates how talented Apple's marketing team can be, as well as how meticulous their UI team can be. I myself am a huge fan of attention to detail, and we need more of it. I've used Skylight befor…
Maybe she should quit doing user-facing stuff and try getting into systems programming for a change. Or some other area where sloppy solutions lead to tangible reduction of business value and thus are not tolerated. Tech is big, no need to quit all of it.
This was my thought as well. And don't work at a small company or startup; go work in a mission critical industry such as aerospace where perfection is the rule of law.
I apologize if you assumed this was a story about a difference rooted in race and gender, because it is not. That’s not where we are going. That's not an apology. You deliberately manipulated your audience by playing on their fears of being deemed discriminatory, their anxiety over real ethnic tensions, and perhaps most egregiously, you intentionally encouraged gender stereotyping of women for your own purpose of obt…
"I offended everyone" is not defacto evidence that you're doing something right.
It's a very common political quip. The usual attribution of the original version is to Churchill, with the specific phrasing I used reappearing in various contexts in the United States for the last fifty-odd years.
The author makes some great points that I initially wanted to dismiss, but I think are actually really interesting. Unlike many other types of engineering/craft, most experienced software developers have settled on an aversion to perfectionism. A good carpenter wants to build a solid house even if no one will ever see its frame. Ditto to an auto engineer at BMW, or a hardware engineer at Apple, or a mechanical engine…
I think it's mainly because software engineering is still more an art than a science. Although we may have formal engineering education, most of us end up making business logic where there are few rules on how to do it. You can't compare it with building a bridge, which has a strict mathematical workflow.
The use of the word "still" here implies that it will be, or that it should be, more "science" than "art". As an act of creation and navigating ever changing constraints, I think it is more art, and will have art be a major component of it for a long time, if not forever.
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More like the later, but less extreme. Disappointed that there wasn't time to talk about the philosophical aspects of computer science in a degree named `Doctor of Philosophy'.
Oh, well that's not really what "Doctor of Philosophy" means. It comes from the same Greek word, which means "love of wisdom", but it's unrelated the field of philosophy. I also think the philosophy of computer science is very interesting, though. I just saw that Oxford offers a course that combines computer science and philosophy: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...
The reason why academic titles have the word philosophy in them is because modern investigations have developed from the philosophical tradition.
For example, philosophers may have a question, "what is value?", or "what is the nature of the world?", born out of the philosophical tradition.
Then, after sufficient discussion and philosophical investigation, they figure out that certain methods, approaches to answering these questions, are very fertile and lead to informative answers, e.g. value as a real-valued mathematical measure, or the nature of the world as a generalization of empirical observation.
Such methods may prove to be so fertile that you may have academics spending decades or centuries investigating the implications of that method. Hence you have economics and philosophy.