The "I am trustworthy" part is totally taken for granted and too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative they are pursuing.
Ethos is the hardest claim to assert. You have to live that one out; your community must, quite literally, bear witness to your actions which earn trust.
It seems that many like to believe and follow leaders who affirm their beliefs even when they are caught lying repeatedly about important things. Posturing loudly and demonstrating confidence seems to trump all of the other principles for many.
It's similar but more emphasized with chimpanzees.
The problem is that we're not chimpanzees. We are smart enough to make very powerful technology, but not smart enough to use it sustainably.
This requirement places too high a burden on one person. Only a saint (or God) could achieve the standard claimed here. Objectivity on topics should be sufficient. Scientists who lose their objectivity cease to contribute usefully to the discussion.
Only God could be Objective; that whole Descarte's Demon thing makes True claims based on empirical observations a lot more fraught than you'd really like it to be, even in the best of cases where everyone agrees on: what language game we're playing today, what "an observation" is, that it was faithfully reported, and so on.
Nobody's perfect; what builds the sort of trust that permits action is a history of publically doing one's best:
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
Do that, and you'll earn your Ethical appeal easily enough.
Ethos is very hard, but pathos is harder, especially in secular society.
Let me be clear, I think arguments about ethos generate the most argumentation and heat right now, but the silent killer is really pathos. People feel comfortable arguing ethos. Most people will not argue pathos openly though.
We have a crisis of pathos in our culture. How do you claim that something is important without an appeal to authority? You can't. We live in a culture that is fragmenting its sources of authority; different groups of people have different sources of authority.
Here's a good example. The external dialogue that a lot of conservatives give on climate change is that scientists can't be trusted. The internal dialogue that a lot of them (though not all) engage in goes something like, "The earth doesn't matter. God is going to come back and set things right. So we don't need to worry about it anyway."
Nah, the Pathetic appeal is easy. It isn't sustainable, but the simplest form of Pathos is "Hey, fuck THOSE guys, right? You're better than they are, you're special! Git 'em!", and we're practically swimming in it right now.
I don't know. Ostensibly it looks like pathos is easy right now. Politics seems super intense right now, but it also seems super fake. Mostly I think shows of pathos are fake right now. Getting people to actually do things and act seems like the hardest thing right now. Posting on social media doesn't count.
> too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative
This is particularly apropos in the wake of Russell Brand's recent video on FB's Fact Checkers for Covid 19 vaccine information [1] funded by BigPharma, having a huge financial stake in bigpharma, and intentionally hiding their funding by BigPharma, and not adding a notification that the fact checkers are in fact funded/invested by/in BigPharma.
I am starting to read completely disinterested 3rd party sources more, because weighing the pros and cons of a thing is more challenging when the supposed experts are deliberating concealing material relationships. Some old Emeritus professor, already retired, with several phds and just a passing bit of information often gives great criticism of a thing without having any stake in the outcome.
I don't think shipping every week is a good idea or sustainable. At what point do you take away features that are no longer useful or don't work out? Or does the ball of mud accumulate forever?
In this case, shipping a deletion of a feature/code, would also mean shipping? As in adding new commits to codebase, not exclusively shipping new features/software?
One area where curation will fail is in "fancy bias". As in, the same bias that keeps crowd pleasing entertainment from winning awards.
People who are in the curation business (critics, reviewers, etc.) tend to favor things that make themselves look good to other people in the curation business. That is often opposite what the "unwashed masses" of people enjoy.
Prime example - Michael Bay movies. Michael Bay makes big, loud, entertaining movies with lots of explosions, bright lights, shiny objects, violence, and sex appeal. A "curator" is usually too snooty to recommend a movie like that.
An algorithm doesn't much care if a movie is artfully crafted, it only cares if people watch what is recommended. In the long run, an algo is more likely to give people what they want than a curator is.
If anything, curators over the long term seem to make a living telling people what they aren't supposed to like (or have access to).
One could make a case that the nation was better off when not everyone was forced into being a two income household and more parents stayed home to raise their children. Closer knit families, better long term relationships, more skills and wisdom passed down from generation to generation.
Paid maternity leave doesn't fix time apart from your children over the first two decades of their life.
On a largely content based app/site, most of "scaling" comes down to caching. However you do that is up to you, but somewhere between caching at the browser layer, proxy layer, web server layer, or memcache layer, things should be fast and scalable without getting too fancy.
Some people hate pair programming. I happen to be one of them. It kills my personal job enjoyment/satisfaction and if I was coerced into pair programming too often, I would find a job elsewhere.
So, the cost of losing one or both of the programmers in the process must be considered too.
True. It's also true a lot of people hate solo programming, and do not want a non pair programming job.
My other point is that pair programming is a learned skill. If you just put two unprepared programmers by a computer, you'll most likely end up with two annoyed programmers, and not great code.
My other point is that pair programming is a learned skill. If you just put two unprepared programmers by a computer, you'll most likely end up with two annoyed programmers, and not great code.
This is a popular argument among pair programming enthusiasts, which suggests there may be some merit to it. How do we reconcile it with another popular argument, that many programmers will naturally pair up on an ad-hoc basis when they're working on something challenging and/or interesting?
I can't imagine not wanting a second opinion from time to time, and I've certainly missed having one sometimes when I've been working solo on something and there was no-one else to talk about it with. But personally, I also can't imagine being comfortable in a full-time pair programming culture with necessarily restricted schedules and limited solo time. Sometimes, I just want to do some research or think through some ideas or play with quick and dirty prototypes for a while, even if I might be very interested in discussing my results or initial conclusions with other interested developers afterwards.
I've literally never worked for any employer in any development role where spontaneous pairing or larger group collaborations didn't happen often. It's just human nature. I see others commenting in this very discussion with similar anecdotal experience, so apparently I'm not just completely weird in this respect.
I don't doubt that you can learn a great deal and obtain other benefits as a result of pair programming. I'm just questioning whether making it a formal, quasi-full-time arrangement is necessarily better than the ad-hoc version I see happening all the time for similar reasons and with similar benefits.
Sure, people help each other in various ways in most places. But that's the solo programmer on a task asking someone else for help. Two people work on a something together, from start to finish, is a quite different thing
Just to be clear, I'm talking about two (or more) developers, gathering together to solve a problem collaboratively, with the end result that the code to do so is written or at least the significant questions have been answered and what remains is little more than a mechanical exercise. But I'm talking about that happening spontaneously, and not necessarily starting from a complete blank slate, being done on a specific schedule or according to any specific process or using any specific tools, or being required as formal policy.
Next time on Hacker News: an article about the economics of strong typing, with someone threatening to quit if they have to use a strong typing system, demanding that be factored into the economics as well.
Perhaps true, but not really the point the authors were looking at.
If you look at @programminggeek's point without passive-aggressive exaggeration and then at the wiki, you'll see that it's specifically called out as a potential problem.
Sadly, it's dismissed out of hand as a "people problem" and "irrelevant". It really deserves more attention.
First of all, if you're looking for programmers to maintain a VB6 app, you really should factor into the economics of that endeavor the fact that most people don't want to code in VB6.
Second, no matter how potentially beneficial the pair programming approach is, there is a question of psychology in play. There are people who are introverted enough that the constant company required for pair programming will wear them down and cause them to quit or change teams. Dismissing it as a "people issue" and misrepresenting it as being unable or unwilling to be a team player is an oversimplification.
I don’t know if I would say I “hate” it, but the one time I tried it (at the behest of my then-employer), I and the rest of my team found it to be unworkably impractical. We had half as many computers as we had programmers, so we each shared a workstation. However, each of us had our own individual e-mail addresses, so we’d have to take turns checking and reading e-mail while the other one sort of looked away. When we started using something new (I think it was Apache Struts back then), we’d have to take turns reading the documentation - we even tried putting two different copies up side by side so we could scroll individually (but we still had to take turns moving the mouse). Beyond that, everything seemed to take way longer than it might have taken individually because neither of the people in the pair would be comfortable doing anything experimental unless they could quickly explain it to the other, so there was a lot of time spent talking about whether some approach or other might work instead of just trying it to see what happened.
There are so many anti-patterns here it's painful...
If you're pairing, don't read your e-mail. Even if you're just in a solo work session, don't read your e-mail. It's incredibly disruptive and constant inbox checking will drop your productivity like a rock.
It's okay to pair with multiple workstations (or a single workstation set up for multi-user mode, that's the dream I guess). Looking away from the "main screen" to check docs (or VCS, or the build, etc.) is perfectly fine, just don't get drawn in so deep that you forget about your partner. And certainly don't use that as an excuse to check your e-mail or slack!
One strategy to apply is "show, don't tell". If you have a hard time explaining what you're going to try to do, just do it, the code will probably be clearer than your explanation alone. If it's not, use the conversation to drive the uncovering of assumptions, which can then be encoded in the source.
Remember that pairing isn't simply two people, one keyboard. There are defined roles: the driver and the navigator. The driver handles mechanics, the navigator observes and questions assumptions. Then switch roles. The driver should fearlessly try the experimental things. If the navigator wants to experiment, ask to drive.
Note that this story has been told and retold for years. Whatever difference in pay he paid has more than paid for itself in press attention and marketing.
I think Kinect would have been fine if they didn't bundle it with the XBox One.
As in, it would have been a solid niche input device, but most games don't need it or benefit greatly from it, so adding $100 to the price of the console made it bad business.
There is some amazing technology there, but as a gamer it didn't make me want it. It was like VR kinda still is - a very cool niche that hasn't caught on yet.
It's okay for niche products to exist and be profitable if you don't require them to sell millions of units.
We have a collective based system, not an individual based one. So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.
It's not optimized for individual success at all. So the people who win are those who take individualized action above and beyond the norm.
If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.
> So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.
I went to a Jesuit high school, and, due to this, had far better advantages and outcomes than anyone else in the same socioeconomic background as myself. I didn't get here on any merit of my own and didn't really pay attention prior to high-school, I just became a step-son to someone willing to spend the money.
Even if you want to talk about public schools, you can't say that everyone is on the same footing due to a host of reasons: poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher rates of lead in their paint which negatively affects people in various ways; better teachers will self-select for "safer" or "better" areas; or children might go to school and be unable to pay for lunch, thus harming their education. The notion of same baselines opportunities is unfounded. Similar curriculums, as well, aren't true: AP classes, dual-enrollment in local colleges, &c. are all enhancements to the baseline curriculum.
> It's not optimized for individual success at all.
You presuppose that a school system should optimize for individual success, but I'm not convinced that optimizing for a more cohesive, civically-minded, and educated population wouldn't produce better outcomes. This hyper-focus on individuals seems to be tearing society at the seams--by not imagining ourselves as a part of a community, only as individual agents, our conception of nation and society crumbles. Your idea of education seems that it would only exacerbate the collapse of community.
Except that schools are drastically different depending on your neighborhood, so poor kids have far less exposure to knowledge and mentoring that would allow them to succeed individually.
I taught science across the Chicago school system. One of my worst schools literally had 3 kids exceeding standards...only 3 out of 500. It's simply not on the children's shoulders alone, they need force multipliers like good teachers, computers, home stability, even food and sleep and safety from gang violence are not assured.
So, individual action is multiplied by opportunity and mentoring.
I'm convinced that the single most important issue is a stable home where the parents have the time and energy to engage in their kids education.
But any time I try to unpack this issue it becomes a seemingly impossible systemic problem. How can you possibly have time for your kids if your marriage isn't stable or you're working multiple jobs?
This leaves me equally convinced that we need to raise children as communities, tribes, villages, and not as individual families. But I have no idea how to make that happen.
