jibjaba's comments

Sorry, it's not what I think. I am basing my analysis on the many polls I have seen on what government services people expect. For example a large majority of people expect to have Medicare available to them when they turn 65. I am not talking about European style socialism.

To me this is a symptom of the twisted politics around taxation in the US. You have one very powerful group that is continually fighting to lower or eliminate taxes and another somewhat less powerful group that wants to bring in enough tax money to fund government services. One side cuts taxes or refuses to raise them and the other side finds new things to tax or other taxes to raise.

Normally such a tug of war is not an issue and is basically a natural consequence of a functioning democracy but in the US it has gone to the extreme.

Personally I blame the anti tax group. They seem to have no use for logic or evidence and only demand more cuts regardless of the previous ones or the consequences. They are refusing to provide the funds necessary to run a modern government.

Thoughtworks using any opportunity to market themselves as usual. I hated working there.

HN needs down votes for crap like this.

I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very stressful in comparison.

The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well.

I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.

There are a lot of very entitled comments to this post. I have a feeling that many of those commenters have never experience true hardship. It's easy for such a person to overlook the myriad of advantages they have and have no conception of the difficulties faced by people without them.

Before making the typical ignorant "you have the power to change your life" or "stop being lazy" comment ask yourself how much do you really know about what the bottom 10% of society life is like. This question itself has issues of course, one of which is that many people do not know how little they know. Spend some time ding a little research online. Several interesting stories came out during the run up to last US election. Typically of conservatives whose idealogical world view proved inadequate when they ran into real people with real problems.

I could not agree more. Great read.

I wonder who was deciding what to do at the bench and how those decision makers were spending their time. I would be willing to bet they spent a lot of work hours reading up on the latest developments.

How about life without nonsensical ancient superstitions? I am very much not being purposefully offensive when I say that. The initial premis of needing to fast is highly flawed when looked at rationally.

A college student should be putting every significant "side"-project on their resume. You need to show that you enjoy programming and problem solving and for a student showing off projects is the best way to do it.

If Kyle is being honest in this article he is a sociopath, no question about it. He obviously has major problems understanding social norms.

Anything that pushes back against the insane gun lobby is great. Let them build their own sites, the more insular and backward they appear the better.

There is one huge factor this article is overlooking: Do Asian-American students take more SAT training than other students. In China and Taiwan there are strong traditions of after school "school" where student basically go to another school to train for tests like the SAT or to study their regular class work in order to get ahead.

If it is true that Asian-Americans take this kind of SAT training more often than others then their SAT scores may be higher then the level of the rest of their application. In other words they might be getting A+ SATs but the rest of their applications may only be B+s. The SAT is not the only factor.