pmcg's comments

From my perspective, your reply supports the article's point.

Yes, the inner and outer circles are paid well. And yes, nothing is completely black and white, there are spectrums in many dimensions. Everything is complex, but it is sometimes helpful to look at something from a perspective other than your own to maybe notice things you don't normally notice, in this case the mass of people that the author calls the "service class" and the "untouchables", and the way they are perceived and [mis]treated by the "higher" classes.

I'm not accusing you of mistreating people in these groups. But you admit you don't know many people in them, and I think the article is valuable in pointing that out.

I was an engineer in the "outer circle" who quit and lived for four months with "untouchables" in a homeless camp.

When I was an engineer I definitely felt the artificial distance between me (a human being) and a large group of other human beings serving me who were treated far worse than me. I did not think of them as lesser people, but the system certainly treated them as such.

When I was homeless I definitely felt the being ignored (or seen as a nuisance) by higher-class people. It's very obvious how people's behavior toward you changes when they see you walk out of a tent camp on the street. Actually, it's not just being ignored when people create artificial complaints about your group to get the police to brutally displace you.

Everything is complex of course, it's not black and white, there are spectrums in many dimensions. IMHO the point is to try looking at things from a new perspective and maybe notice things you didn't notice before, that feel wrong. It helps for people with power to notice things that are wrong, since then they can become impassioned to change things.

I don't think this applies to division by zero.

But I expect that in general, for most things humans consume, as efficiency has increased, consumption has increased too.

Coal consumption increased steadily since 1865 and is almost at its all time high right now. There was a tiny dip in the last few years, but oil consumption is still increasing.

Google has team offices for some teams. My first year here my team was split in two 5-person offices with doors. For the last year we were in an open office space. Soon we're moving again and some of us will be in team offices again of 3-4 people. I don't know the percentage of team offices vs open offices across the company though.

Also, since moving into our current building they've added sound-resistant walls and barriers in various places which has helped significantly.

(Speaking for myself, as a happy employee.)

Does HN need a top banner saying that it's April 1?

Some places are really beautiful, but would not be less beautiful just because people can enjoy them.

Maybe the solution is to preserve these places until we have relatively cheap tech (like quadcopter drones) that can carry people to some of these places. Allow them to come in only at certain times or whatever so normally the place is still as wild as ever. Or VR connected to drones that people can fly around... there are many possibilities in the not-too-distant future that probably.

But right now the only practical way to make these places accessible is with paved roads so that's what happens.

Hopefully they make a way for arrays to be stack-allocated and passed by value too and take a step ahead of C# in this department. :)

Anyone writing Minecraft in C# would use a struct for the position vector. There's no good reason to frown upon it in this case.

There can be two allocations when you call String.Split, one at the calling site where you create the array of delimiters to pass in, and one inside that creates the String[] to return.

The parent refers to the first, which you can avoid by creating your char[] of delimiter[s] once and reusing it.

As a long time paid Fastmail user, Fastmail will probably stay as good as it is for longer if we don't tell everyone about it! :)

> "Don't worry! There won't be any permanent damage..."

What I don't understand is how we can know that?

I agree that computer literacy is becoming as important for everyone as reading/writing and arithmetic skills.

What I'm unsure about though is which specific skills and knowledge are most important. For instance, a huge number of people would benefit from more advanced skills with something like Excel, both in their home life and even more in any kind of job where you use a computer. But then there's a set of people who would benefit more from knowing how to do some other thing on the computer.

Everyone's subset of knowledge of English reading/writing is only slightly different. But with computers two people can know a lot about computers but know hardly anything in common. So what should be taught?

I've long thought that the most important thing is to be curious and willing to try things on the computer, because you'll end up figuring out whatever you want. But maybe there are people for whom computer skills would be very useful but they'll only learn them if it's taught. I know there are a lot of things I learned in college that I wouldn't have discovered on my own because I never would have known to read about them.

> I guess the really right way to put it is -- That's what the google crawler has seen written most frequently -- and assume it doesn't really mean what you or I think about things.

Not what the crawler has seen most, but what people typing the same thing as you have ended up searching for most frequently. (We may be thinking the same thing and just confusing the words.)

I don't believe it's supposed to be "what you're most likely to be thinking", it's just a commonly searched-for phrase. I don't think Google's trying to autocomplete with your opinion because people aren't just searching for their own opinion, they're searching for words that will hopefully return the information they want.

It's not necessarily what google expects you to think, but rather what you are most likely to be searching for.

Sometimes people search for content that they might not agree with, because they want to see what is being said there out of curiosity. Not every search is someone submitting their opinion to google, I'd expect that most are not.

> "Newly minted college graduates soon entering the job market could be facing another hurdle besides high unemployment and a sluggish economy. Hiring managers say many perform poorly—sometimes even bizarrely—in job interviews."

First paragraph immediately stuck out. How is this a hurdle for new graduates? The fact that other graduates perform poorly means a given graduate will have an easier time than otherwise.

Chrome has a default zoom setting. I have it at 150%.

Do we all disdain math, writing, science, and history because they are forced? I imagine most of us did to some extent, but then again, some of the forced skills have turned out to be useful.

I'm not arguing for either side but I question the idea that CS deserves less attention than the natural sciences in a school curriculum.

There's that, and also the fact that cpus aren't getting faster as much as they used to. I imagine if my cpu was still doubling in single-core power every couple years that there would be dev tools that could make use of that power and I would want to upgrade.

And games would definitely be doing much more as well.

But it's not practical to make software that will take twice as long to run if cpus only speed up 10% every two years.

For me to be able to even guess at where I fit, either "coder" needs to be defined, or the poll needs to be "how many coders do you think are better than you" not as a percentage of coders, but as a percentage (or number) of people in the world.