ekiminmo's comments

ekiminmo | 7 years ago | on: Living Out in Faith

The definition I’ve been given of faith is that is is a “belief which is acted upon”. To “have faith” is then to believe something and act accordingly. Taken out of a religious context it’s clear that in order accomplish anything in life you must first believe in something and then act upon it.

Under this definition, faith can be a path (or perhaps the only path) to new or prevoiusly undiscovered truth. For example to prove P = NP (or P != NP) one must first believe that such a proof exists and then act on that belief in search of a proof.

You are right though in that it’s a stretch to call faith a “reliable” source of truth. For every truth that is believed and acted upon there are far more falsehoods to believe and act upon, some of which are really popular.

ekiminmo | 8 years ago | on: The rich are hoarding economic growth

Forgive my ignorance, but why wouldnt we expect to see exponential growth in wealth, and as a result a greater discepency between the top 1% and everyone else?

ekiminmo | 8 years ago | on: Contempt Culture

This is exactly the attitude that the author is taking issue with.

Many inexperienced developers use PHP and make a mess. But try to remember that there are also many brilliant engineers at Facebook and other companies using PHP and doing amazing things with it.

ekiminmo | 8 years ago | on: Hyperproductive development

I have had the opportunity to both design a complex application from scratch as the sole developer and to be thrown into a complex system developed by someone else (who had since left the company). I have found the same truth: being the original developer makes you 10x (or more) productive than anyone else. It takes a lot of effort to bring anyone else up to that level and it will slow you down as you try. What makes perfect sense to you as the original developer will rarely make sense to anyone else, and understanding is critical to making changes.

Being a 10x developer is always situational. You have to be 10x faster than someone, and that difference in speed should not be attributed to "natural talent" when clear organisational issues already exist to explain it.

ekiminmo | 9 years ago | on: U.S. Accuses Tech Firm of Bias Against Asian Software Engineers

According to the article, 85% of applicants were Asian. Does anyone ever ask why that ratio is so high?

My wife (who is Asian) graduated from Australia's top high school, where 90% of students are Asian. She and her friends now go to the most prestigious universities in Australia where they study medicine, law and engineering.

She explained to me that as a child of Asian parents if you can't get into medicine, you get into law. If you can't do law, you do engineering or commerce. It really doesn't matter if you want to be a musician or a photographer or do something else with your life. The end product is that we have a huge number of Asian kids graduating from top universities in professions that they don't personally care about, and I bet that comes out in the interview.

I don't believe that people should be discriminated on for their race, but I wonder how much racial diversity gets swept under the rug in the debate. Sometimes racial values stand in direct or indirect opposition to the values of other cultures. Perhaps Asian culture has opposing values to the culture of the software industry, and when that emerges in hiring statistics law suits get filed.

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