mhjas's comments

To some extent, but I also think people severely overestimate what it takes to be notable. We live in such an extreme consumer culture that even a small amount of effort added to what you are already doing will set you a part from a lot of people. That doesn't necessarily mean you get a visa or that it is possible in every snarky field. But if you can write, speak, organize things, help people out and have a good attitude about it, showing up counts for a lot.

> if you give $5k to someone living on $20k vs $200k annual income, the $20k person is much more likely to spend most or all of that $5k on food, housing, etc.

That would normally be the case, but I would argue that salary and housing has a strong connection in places like SV. People need to get a certain salary to be able to stay (and start a family) in the Bay Area. Which means that people have a high incentive to increase their salary and that some of those who don't have to leave. As overall the people who stay have more and more money the cost of housing increase, in turn giving people even more need to increase their salary.

That would all normally stop at some point, but since so many wealth companies centralize in the Bay Area the spiral continues.

This seems to be mostly about random startup topics e.g. "how do I sell my product?", a little bit about hardware startups and not a lot about "hard tech". Which they also seem to define as essentially "traditional engineering".

There are reasons to believe that the free market isn't healthy at all when it comes to labor. Low salaries for low-skilled labor enable companies to delay modernization, automation and other increases in efficiency. High salaries for high-skilled labor creates inflationary spirals for things like housing.

There is absolutely reasons to believe that equalizing pay, across companies rather than occupations, could be part of the solution. Less efficient companies underpaying their employees would fold. More efficient companies would get more money to hire even more people. Prices would stabilize, careers would likely be more predictable.

This was part of economic policy in Sweden in the ~1960s and as far as I can tell generally considered successful. Though it will, and did, also created large wealth inequality without other measures.

> I suggest reading the introduction to the book in Amazon. Plenty of "scare quotes" there too, just pushing an opposing narrative.

I don't see the relevance of the tone of the book. Especially not if the author of the article suggest that his own arguments have more merit. Nor does the introduction of the book [0] actually seem to have many scare quotes. A scare quote is when you question something by quoting it, most often without elaborating. That isn't the usage of quotes in the introduction of the book as far as I can tell, it is the usage of quotes in the article though.

> I'm not sure the article has embellished much given the introduction.

Again I don't see why it is relevant what the book does nor that this is actually the case in the book. Things like "colourful mud-slinging on the basis of anecdotes" and "can be dismissed as lurid gossip" is certainly just that and present in the article. If it was true that Brotopia only contains anecdotes that can easily be dismissed then why do we even need the rest of the article?

> The article actually points out the book's main bias, "Chang does not consider any alternative theses that might cause gender disparities in occupational sectors."

Since we don't really get to know what the theory of the book is in the article I don't think that is that relevant either. When I read an "analysis and review" I want to know what the theory of the book is and its merits. That the author of the book didn't consider a specific theory might be an argument in the overall discourse, but isn't necessarily relevant for the merit of the book's argument. Unless it can be specifically tied to what the book is actually saying.

> That's where you'll find better data and better theories to explain the data.

If he wants to discuss the overall issue, and not just the book, there are plenty of other research studies one could and should refer to.

> I think the article is correct to point out that tech is getting an unusual amount of attention given the gender disparities in other fields.

Again I don't see the relevance since we are talking about a book on this exact issue. How do you correctly measure the amount of attention something should have? I would say it is pretty safe to skip that discussion all together and just argue the issues instead.

The majority of these points have now been about other things than the contents of the book in question.

> The article is also correct to point out that redistributing work means taking women out of other sectors and displacing men to other sectors (although obviously hyperbolic in suggesting we just swap with nurses), and this change won't necessarily lead to better outcomes overall.

Even from the scare quote summary earlier in the article I can guess that the book argues that this should happens because the state of the boys club isn't the natural state, but an injustice. You could certainly argue that that doesn't matter, but then you would also have to argue against being a meritocracy.

> why is it necessary to "break up" the boy's club in tech when we clearly didn't need any such call to break up the boy's clubs in medicine or law.

Didn't we? In these discussions people tend to argue that medicine and law is much more formalized and that it therefor is easier to effect change from the top. Since the book presumably is about the informal structures in technology that seem like a relevant argument.

> But note that while those fields overall are roughly gender equal, the genders have still segregated themselves into various specializations, eg. surgery is still male dominant, pediatrics is female dominant.

Which largely isn't the case in technology i.e. its an overall problem not in specializations.

> The sexism narrative can't explain this, but the works by the psychologists the article cites actually can.

If you, like the article, dismisses the book in favor of a particular study that might be the case, but that just isn't a very strong argument. To make that a strong argument you would have specifically address the points, and the overall thesis, of the book and then make a counter argument based on that. That is exactly what I would expected and didn't get from the article.

> Anyway, I could trot out plenty of citations on this, and I have here on HN in the past, but there's little point. It almost always devolves into pointless squabbling.

I am not asking to write as long as you did. I much prefer one or two points and we could argue. I just don't think there is much support for that in this article which is exactly what I argued in my previous comment.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/women-onc...

This also helped with reverting to username from real name after unlinking.

> Still, he makes plenty of other good points.

Could you summarize, or mention a few? Because I struggle to see much of any merit to the article. It starts out with scare quote even in the first paragraph which is, if not just outright bad, criticized enough to be a faux pas in itself. It continues with rhetorically embellished opinions about the book, which most of us haven't read. Then presents a bunch of numbers that we again don't know if they are particularly relevant. Finally it spends most of the rest of the article discussing other theories that the author prefers.

I would expect an analysis like this at least partly present the theories discussed in the book in a relatively natural light to then discuss those theories.

I mostly disagree. Saying "this should be like that" isn't a problem. When you are saying "this should be like that because it is proven by x" you have to actually prove your theory for it to be valid. Anecdotes and emotions can be valid in opinion, opinion can be valid in reasoning and reasoning can be valid when presenting facts. What you can't do is to mix together emotion or opinions with facts, at least not without bridging the gap. And that problem is in my opinion much larger in right wing discourse.

Edit: On second though it is very unlikely we will have a productive discussion here. People never seem to have been able to handle this type of discussion on HN and judging by the response this isn't the exception.

So since the quality of both the article and the comments are low I would instead recommend people to flag the story.

It is straight forward to compromise the BMC, it isn't straight forward to hide a backdoor in the BMC in front of some of the best security researchers in the world. Especially with such attack being well known and seemingly trivial to check for.

I just don't think the relationship between those two things you are describing exists. If the Chinese government approaches a Chinese manufacturer with the goal of compromising US software companies adding some sort of chip that reconfigured the hardware would be the most straight forward thing for them to do.

If anything I think the idea that a Chinese manufacturer with complete access to the hardware having to execute some exploit towards the web interface to get access is far fetched. So is that you could pretend to update the firmware (surely no one is going to notice that the new version doesn't have the features you wanted?) and that dumping the firmware would be inconvenient (it would be the first thing you did if you suspected something).

I don't really see why everyone is calling this implausible. Modchips have been around for at least 15 years. The idea of the clipper chip is 25 years old. At every hacker conference there are people "hacking" devices by various buses or interfaces.

If there is anything working against the Bloomberg story it is that it is too plausible. Often reality clashes with imagination, but the Bloomberg story contains almost everything you could imagine happening.

I just don't get the narrative. I can appreciate walking away from, and not being part of, something you don't like. But at that point the damage was already done. Seemingly they main thing that was achieved here was making the cost of the acquisition $850M cheaper for Facebook.

How to regulate this is up to each and every country, just like it is up to each country how to regulate things like pollution, traffic and infrastructure.

That a bank who can't handle security compromises their customers user experience rather than their customers security is a good thing.

The reason the regulate these things aren't because it is fun. It is because there are fundamental security problems that needs to and will eventually be fixed. Companies like Apple have largely already, or at least potentially, fixed these problem just only for themselves. If you want to fix it for everyone you very likely need some sort of mandate.

"Do you accept cookies" is only relevant because there isn't a separate login mechanism in HTTP. Actually knowing whether you are sharing data with the website, and what website that is, would be a major improvement. Security measures don't have to be 100% effective. Just like road safety you should focus removing the impact of flaws, not to prevent flaws as such. A separate authentication mechanism would remove a large amount of security issues, including potentially phishing and password leaks entirely. These common security issues of compromising the system of the user or the company would simply not have the same impact anymore.

A not insignificant part of the large Internet companies power comes from that they are the only ones who can handle, or people trust to handle, security. It isn't that hard today to create your own e-mail system or smart phone. But managing those systems, especially for a reasonable cost at scale, is just beyond what most new entrants in the market can handle.

> The parent was arguing that security is hard [...]

It isn't though, at least not compared to the state of things. Pretty much any government would be competent enough to mandate some sort of two-factor authentication that would greatly improve security and make a lot of phishing and hijacking a thing of the past. Of course different governments would have different success rates, if not in terms of security at least in terms of elegance. But that is like everything else. People die everyday by the lack of road safety and healthcare.

I can't disagree from a technical perspective, nor should everyone else. But that just isn't that relevant. Sure, you could hack the entire world 20 years ago, but there just weren't that much impact.

If you read almost any constitution they protect "life and liberty". Today those things are being impacted by a lack of security. Peoples messages, private pictures, assets, infrastructure, opinions and even geopolitics are all affected.

Yesteryear the most you could do was largely to expose someones password, read their university e-mail and steal some source code. Relative to the impact security is a lot worse today.

> "as to enforce equality of income". This is what puts me off of Europe!

It is one of the few ways to have an equal society. With to large income inequality the welfare state becomes unsustainable. The poor can't pay for services performed by the rich and ultimately you get a society like the US or worse. Everywhere doesn't have to be the same, no one is forced to live in Sweden. Swedes have very good visa conditions and generally do very well abroad.

> How are you going to convince them to go to Sweden instead of US?

Sweden is a small place. To the extent it needs top talent there is plenty available. People who want to make $300k shouldn't and largely won't move to Sweden anyways. This isn't a competition Sweden can win. Sweden is largely successful because it competes, or have competed, on its own terms. Not by trying to be a worse copy of something else.

Swedish society can, or could, attract people that wants things that are in line with what it is good at and not readily available in other places i.e. its unique selling proposition. Things like education, family and quality of life. There is a foundation to provide those things that has been lost in the last 10 years or so. A lot of people move for opportunities, making money is only one opportunity.

I think it is telling that you are also leaving the Netherlands as a significantly lower tax rate couldn't keep you there either. Note that I am not saying the Sweden is attractive at this point, just that I find it unlikely that taxes are the main problem.

Personally I don't like Hong Kong, but it will certainly be different. Don't miss out on going to Shenzhen.

While I find your perspective interesting I disagree with some of your conclusions.

> It's effectively cap to enforce equality of outcome.

It isn't so much to enforce equality of outcome as to enforce equality of income. What you are experiencing is to a large extent being on the wrong side of inequality. Just that isn't income inequality, but rather things like wealth, real estate, inheritance and education. Inequalities which people in Sweden largely aren't aware of, or accustomed to. If you had arrived 10 years earlier you would have, at least to a larger extent, been set for life. Other than that I can certainly see your perspective because it is almost impossible for a "salary man" to catch up in Sweden.

I think that outlook was more likely a few years ago. In the grand scheme of things it seems like places like Stockholm and Berlin have largely capped out. I think it is getting harder to see that there would be significant growth for these places in the future, especially without things like debt and real estate capturing much of that growth. They have largely been growing because there were excess potential, but failures to continue that trend means there isn't as much potential anymore. Maybe they will reinvent themselves, but that is yet to be seen.

I don't know about Switzerland (nor that much about Lambda School), but even the most flexible schools in Europe tends to be quite rigid. Apply months in advance, study for years, deal with grades, admissions and administration etc. What most people need isn't "academia" but "training". That said I think most MOOCs are doing it wrong as well.