HelloWorldInWS's comments

> This tutorial does not cover Windows. This tutorial will not work on Windows; nor will this tutorial generate packages for Windows. The creation of packages for Windows is covered in tutorial 4.

Tutorial 1 tells you how to build a cross-platform Ruby release, doesn't tell you how to build it for one of the 3 major platforms until tutorial... not 2, not 3, but 4. They even tell you in Tutorial 4 that "there are caveats!" and the document almost begs you not to bother.

OSX and Linux users aren't the ones having trouble running Ruby programs. You're not traveling anywhere if you only support POSIX systems that either come pre-installed with Ruby or are a minor command away from having it. This seems entirely pointless to me.

Off topic, this reminded me how verbose research papers are.

> ... even though the user wants them separate ...

Which "the user" is this? The same user that uses GitHub's OAuth as single-sign-on credentials for other partnering sites like TravisCI, etc? If I was in the MS ecosystem and already had an identity that I could re-use (and didn't already have a GH account), I'd probably use that, just like those who login to various websites with their Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Twitter SSO identities. I don't see how expanding SSO to Microsoft accounts would hurt anyone.

I think everyone can agree that Microsoft is going to push Azure very hard once they start sinking their teeth into GitHub-- that's not surprising.

However, I'm very skeptical about the idea that GitHub is going to somehow become an Azure-only walled garden. It makes little sense business-wise. The entire point of buying GitHub was to acquire an audience that they are aware is not necessarily interested in Azure or their stack. Forcing it on them will only cause them to leave (there is plenty of competition in the code hosting space now), which will in turn reduce revenue. I give MS enough credit to know that the only way they succeed in this space is to provide value, not vendor lock-in. This is true now, and it will be even more true in 5 years when other big companies inevitably start following Microsoft into this space and competing for market share.

If they wanted to just sell services to people already using MS products, they already had VSTS for that.

> Microsoft tried to kill Windows gaming

Huh? If you mean "gaming on Windows", I can't imagine how that could possibly be true, and if they tried, either nobody got the memo or they did a really bad job at trying. PC gaming has always been defacto Windows gaming. If you mean "Windows Games", that's still a thing, they're just integrating closer with their XBox platform, which makes perfect sense given that XBox is integrating closer with Windows 10 from the other side.

> they tried to kill Firefox

So did Google (they're still trying). So did Apple. Are you holding grudges against either of them?

> Their operating system design is nearly abusive

Heavily subjective. Windows has had its regressive moments, but overall it's consistently been more usable than anything on the market. 95 was a joy, 98 was a joy, XP was a joy, Vista was bad, 7 was a joy, 8 was bad, 10 is amazing. Compare that to MacOS* which only started competing with OSX and peaked at 10.5 (Leopard) and has been basically going slowly downhill since, with regressive behaviors, hostility to anyone that doesn't want to live in their walled garden, hostility to legacy software (many Windows XP programs still run perfectly with explicit compatibility settings, meanwhile OSX barely supports apps that are built for 3 major releases back-- that's only 3 years of support) and deprecation/removal of core OS APIs with zero intention to replace them. You want abusive? Try developing on a platform that competes against its own developer community and keeps APIs private for competitive advantage. Try developing on a platform that strong-arms you into paying yearly fees just so you can deploy applications that work out of the box on client machines. Comparatively, Apple has been much more hostile to developer communities than Microsoft ever has.

> I want nothing more than for them to disappear

Clear indication of an unhealthy long-kept grudge. Even if Microsoft has done all the things you claim, you don't really have a moral high ground if you're sitting there rooting for their failure. You can feel free to not use their products, but to want them and all of their customers to fail because you don't like what they've done in the past isn't really a "moralistic" viewpoint, it's just brooding.

...and you're going to have to move past the brooding if you want to make it to Acceptance.

But they don't really need to fix it. Sure, it'd be nice, but they're targeting developer machines and utilities with WSL, not a server replacement of Linux. Nobody would buy a Windows license just to serve from LAMP stacks on WSL over Azure or something. Speed requirements for dev machines are a little less stringent, and as long as they are hitting better-than-Docker numbers, they will still be providing value.

Sidenote: looks like I/O performance is really not that bad in most cases already, and sometimes even faster than Linux distros like Ubuntu: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wsl-febr...

Your two examples list physical differences, not mental ones. Forgetting the fact that your examples are both wrong (you don't have to be tall to [play basketball][1], nor do you have to be biologically female to model bikinis), mental differences are markedly different from physical ones, because unlike a requirement such as "you must be capable of lifting 200lbs" which _may_ skew male, almost all humans are innately & biologically capable of the critical thought required to program. The differences we see today comes from nurture, not nature.

There are no biological "skills" that men might possess innately that should make them a first-choice by default, nor is there any reason to ever pick a candidate over another because of some biological "fact". At the end of the day, you judge a candidate by their output (performance, displayed intellect), not their input (nature OR nurture).

This is the whole point of Google's unconscious bias training: humans create incorrect correlations between input (nature|nutrue) and output (perf, intellect) in the form of biases-- i.e., "if you're too emotional you can't think as rationally as someone who is less emotional, therefore you cannot perform at the same level as a less emotional thinker". The problem here is that the correlation doesn't hold; it's a bias, not a fact.

Here's the point: your "biological facts" are biases, evidenced by the fact that you think you need to be tall to play basketball or biologically female to be a bikini model, and neither of these things are actually true.

[1]: http://www.complex.com/sports/2013/05/the-15-greatest-short-...

This isn't _entirely_ accurate. Gender binary may be an oversimplification or diminutive concept, but the idea that it "never existed" is a little extreme. It would almost be like saying religion never really existed because it's a figment of human imagination. In that sense, sure, binary genders are a bandaid over a complex subject, but it does exist. In fact, it is quite literally birthed from the genesis of more than a few religious ideologies. It exists just as much as the religions that buy into them exist.

Anyway back on topic:

Open field text boxes come with a practical cost of being much more difficult to aggregate, and let's be honest, the gender data is probably not important enough for GitHub to expend too much energy on. The more costly you make the data to mine, the less likely that the data will be used effectively.

> Why so much sugarcoating?

Because empathy is important to communicating effectively. You're looking at the words, but you're not looking at phrasing and tone, which are just as important.

Try this exercise: read the sentence out loud to yourself. Taking a line out of Myers-Briggs, does it sound more perceptive or judging, to you, when read aloud?

To me it sounds judging, as if Coraline already has pre-conceived notions about the person she is communicating with. At the very least, it sounds unnecessarily defensive. The wording is definite, with no room for discussion. In fact, all I see in that wording is a mini "well, actually" lecture.

The reality is that she doesn't know if this was an intentional or unintentional oversight. People leave things out, forget to finish sentences, paint in broad strokes and fine-tune later. From the description, this likely wasn't in its final stages. Maybe it was going to get changed, or maybe it wasn't, but you need to start from the idea that the person on the other end of the sentence also wants the best results.

It's a nice idea to think that people should say whatever they want as long as it's the objective truth, but humans are humans, which means they are subjective and have feelings. I find that people are much more effective workers when they are attentive to the feelings of others.

Another phrasing which is probably just as effective, much less aggressive, and only slightly more wordy:

"Have you considered how people of different gender identities might engage with this question? Transgender people might be confused if they identify as both male (or female) and trans. Perhaps we can find a way to make this question a little less ambiguous for this class of people?"

Sure, the proposed solution is not directly in that sentence-- but that's kind of the point. You have to get on the same page before you start throwing out answers at people. Maybe the data scientist already knows this but just didn't communicate effectively-- otherwise you end up dangerously close to "well actually"ing someone who already knows the thing you're telling them.

In fact, to me, the weirdest part of the article is how ironic it is to see Coraline be so obtusely unaware of how unempathetic this kind of phrasing is, since she is so vocal about it on Twitter. It definitely strikes me as slightly hypocritical to see people arguing that we should be allowed to get straight to the point of a technical argument without any fluff or nicety. I believe this was the exact opposite argument being made from the same camp when Code of Conduct discussions were being had.

Defining "best" need not imply an objective definition in the same way that describing the "best" database architecture for a given set of requirements isn't entirely objective: "our programmers like to work with SQL more than MongoDB" is a subjective but sufficient argument to tip the scales.

Defining the "best people" is _obviously_ subjective. _People_ are subjective. There isn't just one "best"-- there is a set of "bests" that you can strive for. Just like the above example, it depends on your requirements, your priorities, etc.-- but most importantly, it doesn't need to be objective to work well, which brings us full circle to:

> "Best people" can mean the best team.

If you prioritize teamwork among individual contributors, this is what best people would imply.

The awesome part about a capitalist system is that companies have the freedom to experiment with these configurations of how they define "best". GitHub may define it differently from you, but that doesn't make their definition less valid.

Meritocracy is an idea, not a specification-- there is no one true meritocracy implementation. The discussion needs to start from there.