Locke

I wish we responded to situations more proportionally.

In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not.

Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.

Then, folks take the discussion to github and twitter (and, eventually reddit and hn). Presenting only their verdict: "A newer member made a sexist joke, and was called out on it as being inappropriate." No links to the joke. No evidence that the joke is sexist. This makes it so much easier to imagine something really bad. No, we just get a verdict and we should all rise up against this sexism (which absolutely is bad, of course). Let's get our pitchforks. This amplifies one side of the argument and shuts down any useful conversation. Worse, it's used to rush through a CoC change without allowing any thoughtful discussion.

Is this reaction proportional to the original joke? Is the reaction itself exemplar of how we would like to conduct ourselves?

Hi Sid,

Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate it and I'm glad that my feedback might help improve your hiring process.

I don't mind your comment, and I hope you understand that there are no hard feelings at all. I hope you understand that my goal is not to damage Gitlab or yourself in any way.

I would like to say, I've been impressed by the openness and transparency at Gitlab, and I think this goes hand-in-hand with a desire to do the "right thing" in every way.

It is with that in mind that I posted my experience, because I think there are problems with the way our industry approaches hiring (as seen in our poor diversity numbers, age discrimination, etc) and more openness can only help. I wish more people shared their experiences, and I wish more companies were open to refining their hiring processes.

As a thought exercise, suppose I have my User class and now I would like to write it as json. Do you think it would be strange if the established solution were this?

    class User < JSON::Base

Where by extending JSON::Base, I now have access to helpful methods like to_json?

Instead we have JSON.dump(user). And, if I need to customize the way the User json is written, I can opt in by defining a method. Thanks to Ruby's open classes, I can make the definition of such methods optional, suppose a separate file includes something like:

    class User
      def as_json
      end
    end

Requiring this file will bring in the extra json behavior without littering my actual user.rb with the details of how a User is written to json. Whether this is worthwhile or a bad idea is debatable, but I like that it is possible.

Now imagine if persisting a model to the database were similarly flexible? What if we could do this?

    ActiveRecord.save(user)

Maybe it would be a good thing, maybe not.

As it is, I've come to accept the ActiveRecord approach, but when I create a model that extends ActiveRecord::Base, I think of it, not as a User, but an ActiveRecordPersistedUser. Where it makes sense, I separate my BusinessModel's from my ActiveRecordPersistedBusinessModel's for clarity.

Nostalgia warning: I also grew frustrated with Rails / ActiveRecord and jumped to Merb / DataMapper with excitement. Perhaps it will sound like a small thing, but I remember feeling especially frustrated that every ActiveRecord model became such via inheritance. This drove me crazy:

    class User < ActiveRecord::Base

Why should my `User` extend from `ActiveRecord::Base`? Is a User of my app also an ActiveRecord::Base? What is an ActiveRecord::Base anyway?

So, when DataMapper came along and favored composition over inheritance I was sold.

However, my experience with DataMapper was that it didn't have the stability of ActiveRecord, nor did it reach feature parity.

And, then Rails killed Merb. At the time I thought it was a tragedy. The competition Merb provided did improve Rails, it would have been nice if that competition had been longer term, though. On the flipside, I wonder if there would have been enough community to support two large Ruby web frameworks.

In the end I made peace with Rails and ActiveRecord (and, believe it or not, even ActiveSupport!). I don't have great love for Rails, but it is a powerful tool, so I accept it for what it is.

That said, I think the author's criticisms are well stated and hopefully there will be some influence on the future direction of Rails, etc, and the way devs approach Rails.

I read somewhere recently that replacing the dollar bill with a dollar coin would save about $5 billion over something like 30 years.

The trick is no one actually wants a dollar coin.

I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable.

The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into:

    1. I have an idea!
    2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
    3. Oh, in that case we could just...
    4. But, then...

The "quality" of HN and it's community is a function of many variables. It's hard, maybe impossible, to tweak the site and expect predictable results (and, there are always unintended consequences).

It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.

Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So, let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-side css hack to make HN look even better? Do we end up with more or fewer designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?

I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while longer.

Earnings are important, I'm sure -- but don't mistake them for wealth. I've known people with ludicrous earnings who still lived pay check to pay check. In fact, I suspect it's all too common.

Here's an eye opener: You're a mid-level employee at a medium-sized company and you realize you're as wealthy as your spend-thrift CEO who is making >10x as much as you are.

This is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. Chances are you will fall in love and it will disrupt your life whether you're starting up or doing something else entirely. If you're fortunate, you're new significant other will be a disruptive, yet motivating force. Moving you towards new heights that you had not imagined. But, it's more likely to be a struggle to balance your life's goals with your desire for this new person. Ultimately, you're startup hopes might be replaced by new goals: a family and all that entails.

These things are not mutually exclusive. If you take an all or nothing view, you're being naive. You can have some percentage of a solid relationship and career (whether a startup or something else).

Life is messy. You'll have to decide if your relationship allows you enough time to meet your personal goals and if that even matters. Only you can make this determination.

As for me, I've been with my wife for over 10 years (most of it dating), and... honestly? I think this relationship has had an adverse effect on my goals. I, kind of, think I'd be much more rich and successful had I never met my wife. On the other hand, when she's gone for a weekend, I always think, "I'll get so much done when she's gone"... but, I often end up mired in the "blahs" until she returns. And, honestly...

I think I've slowed down a lot as I've gotten older. I think back on things I accomplished in 3 week coding marathons when I was in college and, while I think I'm a better programmer now... well, I don't repeat those accomplishments. I get more done in less time, but I'm not able to sustain a marathon for multiple weeks. You may be different, or that might be part of getting older.

Ultimately, I've been moderately successful (my business represents the bulk of our income), but not wildly successful. I've come to think less is more... and, I'm happy with that. I doubt I'd be happier single with a larger business and more money.

But that's me...

I don't think this article is making a claim about whether or not these phrases indicate that someone is about to lie to you.

The phrases themselves are often untrue.

For example, if I say "It’s not about the money, but...", what follows is not necessarily a lie. What the article claims is that I'm about to make an argument based on money and that I'm trying to preemptively deflect any counter-argument. Therefore, the phrase "It’s not about the money, but..." may, strictly speaking, become untrue. But that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what follows.

- Write a video game emulator (any old console or computer platform)

- Create a programming language

- Restore an old broken down pinball machine

- Build a mame arcade cabinet

- Write some Interactive Fiction

- Learn to make awesome programmatic artwork with something like Processing or Nodebox

- Create a roguelike

The quote is fine. I worry about this glorification of violence. The original article and this thread seem to be filled with adolescent fantasies of revenge against bullies past and future.

I hope this is mainly internet posturing and bravado.

I'm not sure every child has the perspective to recognize hyperbole. There are times when violence may be necessary, but that doesn't make it any less horrible, whether justified or not.

I don't necessarily disagree with the original article or this sentiment. However, I have a hard time reconciling telling your child to stick up for him or herself when bullied vs "send him to the cemetary" or "As soon as he turns around, hit him in the back of the head as hard as you can. If you’re much smaller, pick up a hard object and do it."

These are children and their judgement is not always the best. Do you really want to risk that your child kills another child by accident while following your advice?

Will your child know how far is far enough? Is there a chance he or she might over-react to a situation that is not truly threatening?