Oh, you've missed the calls to fix the income inequality gap by just taxing men an extra 25% and giving it to women? You've missed the continuous refrain of every SJW ever that what offends women is all-important, but what offends just men is irrelevant? You've missed the suggestion that the best plan is to just kill 95% of men and jail the rest on an island somewhere so they can't cause any harm to real people? I see that kind of shit all the time.

But this says it all, really. (That's Jessica Valenti, of course, but the attitude expressed is common enough.)

Any evidence that there's actually a problem once women graduate? (Women being dissuaded from technical interests in middle and high school is a real and studied problem, of course.) All the companies I've worked for actually did favor women in the recruiting (but not interview) process. I've done plenty of "new college grad" interview days that the field of candidates that were flown in were 40-50% female, which sure as heck isn't the ratio of grads. We interview everyone the same of course, but every place I've been for the past decade has made a special effort to try to recruit women at the start of the process.

Sure, by your definition accusations by a feminist have no possible defense, I guess? OTOH, painting the vast and diverse world of "gamers" with a stereotype that's only relevant to the few games that are predominately teenage boys is bigoted and unfair. (If your argument is "14-year-olds are rude and should behave better", you're preaching to the quire, also they should get off my lawn!)

... they say, and then go on to vigorously attack "gamers", starting a culture war that won't soon end.

In what way is downloading copyrighted material any kind of crime? Is it even a tort?

What are you on about? The standard for accusation at a US university is vastly below any judicial standard for rape. At some places, the accused isn't even given a chance to defend himself.

"Harvard's policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense." -- Alan Dershowitz

Indeed. Being a top-notch developer is about making your team great.

Every third-wave feminist is, along with most SJWs.

They have every advantage in family law. There are colleges where men are just assumed guilty of any charge of sexual assault, and cannot even question their accusers in the adjudication process. There's no wage gap for those under about 35 if you adjust for hours worked. Sure, there are certainly still areas like "competitive power lifting" where women are at a disadvantage, but so what?

Clearly you don't. You say this a lot, some of you (others wear shirts saying "I bathe in male tears"), but then go on to claim that women need special treatment in one way or another.

Equality in society means equality of opportunity: the same rules apply to all, the same social services are available to all, blind to sex and race. It does not mean equality of outcome. Different individuals make different choices, and have different skills and abilities, and the very nature of liberty is that your success in life is influenced by all of that.

Everyone has the right to walk their own path to happiness. You don't get to define "success" for another, you can only measure it against what people chose to pursue in life. You also can't guarantee that people will succeed even there: some people pick a stupid path to their goal.

Ah, so it's the victim's fault then? 8 Gaming sites/magazines simultaneously published articles attacking "gamers", which is to say, their readers. It's not a leap to deduce that something is rotten in the state of gaming journalism.

The core issue here seems to actually be semantics, oddly enough. People have legitimate complaints about the culture of the tiny corner of gaming that includes CoD and similar games, and call those people "gamers". But anyone who plays Candycrush or WoW or that PvZ shooter or whatever 20+ hours a week is every bit as much a "hardcore gamer", and the overall population was incensed by the offensive stereotyping. Funny how that works.

Sorry, system3d is two versions away.

Check out he prices for EC2 reserved instances, if you know you'll need that server for 3 years. Prices are similar per core to buying entry-level Dell rackmount servers with 3-year support contracts. Of course, the physical Dell has more memory and disk than the VM with the same core count, so you come out ahead there if you needs lots of memory, or local disk, but not by a lot.

I help develop and operate a service that makes a hefty sum by doing all those things you deride, implementation-wise. It all works quite well - well enough that if routing patching causes any customer-visible disruption, you're in for extensive analysis, paperwork, and perhaps ritual abasement before an angry VP.

Yes, yes, there are many technical problems involved with consuming "eventual consistency". In the 20th century these problems were seen as blocking, and anyway just buy a bigger DB server. But the 20th century was along time ago, and while there's still a need for a transactional store, most problems can be solved without one, given sufficient thought - and at sufficient scale, it's really worth figuring out how.

Not that safe patching is incompatible with SQL, of course. In my last job we routinely pushed patches to farms of many thousands of SQL servers, and again if there was any disruption visible to the mid-tier, important people would become seriously angry about that, and we didn't use fancy servers, beyond RAID controllers (and even that concession I abhorred). It's always safe for a single server to fail, or be rebooted for maintenance, and if two servers holding your primary copies of the same data should fail, you better have taken serious, well-reviewed steps in planning to limit the number of DBs affected and the minutes of data lost and the minutes until you're back up.

And even that, which was a nice system, feels outdated now that Amazon went and announced this, which productizes the modern SQL DB and wraps it up in a pretty bow. /jealous

SAP? SQL? Party like it's 1999! For me, having it matter whether any given server suddenly fails would be a career limiting move. We push-restart patches to services every week or two, and if that affects a customer in any way TSHTF.

"Quark nuggets" are ordinary?

Well, I guess that would be technically correct (the best kind of correct!) if true, since 85% of matter is whatever dark matter is. Our matter is the weird stuff.

It can't be "ordinary baryonic matter": we know it doesn't interact with photons even at extreme energy densities, and we also know it doesn't move at or near the speed of light. Both are clear from the CMBR data.

Large companies often require multiple levels of approvals, often from teams in multiple time zones, before you can even get on with the business of coding. A couple years back I had a project where getting the approval took 6 weeks, and the code took one day (yes, I left that company not long after).

Indeed. But junior developers, almost by definition, aren't good at this. Most large software actually corps have this firmly in their interview process: give the candidate ambiguous requirements, and see whether he asks clarifying questions or just jumps in and codes some arbitrary take on the problem. It's a good way to assess the senior-ness of a candidate.

Practically, "how big of a design/project can you own" is the best measure of a developer. A senior dev drags projects across the finish line despite all the obstacles created by the company being stupid. A junior dev can follow clear requirements, but gets stuck and needs help at every ambiguity (or worse, doesn't get stuck and just solves some arbitrary problem).

And I'm certainly not a manager. Tried that once - my ability to anticipate people problems before they happened were sorely lacking. But managers should be focused on the people first, and the technology only enough to tell when a developer is BSing (or just wrong) about the difficulty of some task. Making decisions about how to staff competing projects so that the best work gets done, morale stays high, and devs grow their skill set - that's hard work. Preventing personality clashes, recruiting, firing people who aren't making the cut, that's all hard work. That why there are senior devs - to provide technical leadership so that the managers can get on with the people leadership.

Yup, very strong programmers certainly exist, but "10x" the code is not the reason they're strong. It's a pet peeve of mine, because writing that code generator instead of the 10x model classes looks like you're doing less work, to naive managers.

I know you were talking about people, but that line made me laugh - imagine saying that about code in this century.

Nope, I'm just saying that banging out lots of code is really important for your first promotion, after that it's still good, but becomes less important as you advance. "10x" is just a silly name for a talent agency.