A popular video game randomizes race and gender and many white men are furious - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/4/17/11442730/rust-experimental-race-gender-random <comment><USER2> Blogspam, all the quotes are taken from a Guardian.com piece, linked from the article but in a sneaky way.

> Or worse, such complaints would fall on actively aggressive ears. Consider > Gamergate: The movement began in part as a response to journalists trying to > encourage more diversity in the gaming industry — not just by opening the > door to more women and minority developers, but also making sure that games > reflected the potentially diverse audience playing them. This was widely > perceived as such a vitriolic concept to a large group of gamers that they > rose up and harassed the journalists and activists pushing for this increase > in diversity, which Gamergaters said was an attempt at ruining games with > political correctness (which doesn't exist).

This isn't discussion, it is exactly what gamers are at places like /r/kotakuinaction are complaining about, the rewriting or at least bias editing of history, providing only one side of the story.

Edit:

>The issue is that many of the same people complaining now would probably be rolling their eyes if a Hispanic man or black woman asked why they aren't well represented in Halo, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda,...

Again, Call of Duty is set in WWII (the earlier games at least), which let's face it wasn't mostly black women fighting, it was mostly white men fighting against white men, MGS & The Witcher I'm not familiar with, but Link from the Zelda games isn't even human, he's some kind of anime elf creature. Probably Japanese.

<comment><USER3> What's the side of Gamergate where women didn't get harassed just for sharing their ideas?

This article isn't calling out any games for forcing the player to play a white male. The article is pointing out the outrage over one game that forces players to (sometimes) play non-white and/or female characters.

<comment><USER2> The other side of gamergate are documented to have pulled similar if not worse stunts, but this goes unmentioned. There are no winners in GG, and few of those involved can claim to wear a halo. When a journalist fails to mention important facts like this the article loses any value it may have had.

>This article isn't calling out any games for forcing the player to play a white male.

I think the 2nd para I quoted does exactly that. Additionally, a journalist without an obvious agenda would provide a balanced discussion and bring up, Idk, things like the fact that Rust players are talking over mic a lot, so when you are playing as a woman but your voice is of a gruff man, you sound a little silly and look like you are trying to fake your identity. I can see why players are uncomfortable about it, it reminds me of the trope "every young girl on the Internet is a middle aged man". You friend a woman in-game, only to find out later that that the woman is a 40 year old male divorcee. It doesn't sit right in so many ways.

As the article states too, this was implemented as a patch to the game, so people who paid money, their own money for the game, are now forced to put up with it or abandon their purchase, which seems to me at least to be unethical and not a little bit sneeky.

<comment><USER3> The second paragraph you quoted doesn't judge the games for their characters. It's just showing a quick example of characters that have a pre-set race/gender and pointing out the lack of outrage from women and racial minorities over having to play that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why not C++? - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5313 <comment><USER2> C++ is still plenty viable, but if you like avoiding bugs, John Carmack seems to have come to the conclusion that using a functional style (which is not exactly _encouraged_ by C++) is advantageous: [http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro...](http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php)

"My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.

"No matter what language you work in, programming in a functional style provides benefits. You should do it whenever it is convenient, and you should think hard about the decision when it isn't convenient."

</comment><comment><USER3> C++ is still a fantastic language. It's hard to learn to use it effectively but once you do you have one of the most powerful programming tools available under your belt. The two main points to using C++ effectively are 1. you must protect allocated resources with smart pointers and 2. threads should only be used to exercise multiple CPU cores and never as a way to work around blocking IO.

That later point is a little more complicated/subtle and took me years of threaded programming to learn and accept. When adhering to these two rules, C++ is safe and extremely powerful.

<comment><USER4> Any reading you'd recommend regarding your second point? I've never heard that about C++ before.

<comment><USER5> i think this is strange. i'm not a c++ programmer, but the evented frameworks (node.js or vert.x) are doing it the other way round: use threads _only_ for IO (or computation so heavy it's practically blocking). the complete opposite.

<comment><USER6> libuv (used by Node.js) uses epoll, kqueue, etc. for network I/O. It uses a thread pool for all file operations.

<comment><USER5> ah, well - when reading "blocking io" i first thought about the file system. so does my point still stand? using a threadpool for disk IO does go against "threads should only be used to exercise multiple CPU cores and _never as a way to work around blocking IO._ "

or am i still not getting this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had this to say about c++/go recently:

Working on a c++ project: I feel stupid... and nothing works.

Working on a golang project: go is stupid... but everything works.

My issue with c++ is someone needs to write a "c++: the good parts" I may end up with rust, but right now I look at the documentation and some rust code and it's a bit overwhelming.

Go may be stupid in a lot of ways, but for the most part it's pretty obvious how to accomplish something.

<comment><USER8> It's not exactly the same, but the closest thing to a "C++: The Good Parts" is Scott Meyers' "Effective C++", imho.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, there are no updated versions of his books for C++14 or 17.

I owe a lot to the books though.

<comment><USER10> Effective Modern C++ covers C++14, and specifically points out where it differs from C++11 (I'm thinking about the discussion of decltype, here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Summarising how I usually seeing these discussions go:

The usual argument goes that C++ is bad because of the problems of C.

The counter-argument is that "nobody does that in modern C++".

The counter-counter argument is that:

1\. there's a _lot_ more not-modern-C++ than there is modern C++.

2\. there seem to be dozens of not-really-smoothly-interchangeable notions of what "modern C++" is, because the language is so vast, and there have in fact been several overlapping generations of "modern C++".

3\. It still requires conscious and vigilant effort, over and above the baseline the language gives you, to not introduce game-over security or reliability flaws.

The counter-counter-counter argument is that these are true of every language.

Which, being not strictly and completely true in the particulars, is where the whole thing degenerates into personal reflections about $PET_LANGUAGE, hair- pulling, personal insults, blog posts about monads at twenty paces etc etc.

<comment><USER12> > 2\. there seem to be dozens of not-really-smoothly-interchangeable notions > of what "modern C++" is, because the language is so vast, and there have in > fact been several overlapping generations of "modern C++".

Everyone I've talked to understands modern C++ to be C++11 or newer.

<comment><USER13> C++11 _adds_ to the language, but is there a strong consensus on what parts of pre-2011 C++ are _not_ allowed in "Modern C++"? I have seen C++ code advertised as "modern" that still uses naked pointers, for example, while others claim that all pointers should be reference-counted. There is no agreed-upon algorithm that answers the question "is this source file written in valid Modern C++?", because there's no agreement on what that means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UB- yaeW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UB- yaeW3LgcJ:lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5313+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de)

<comment><USER15> It's ironic that they use PHP.

<comment><USER16> Which is written in C, and all the major C compilers today are written in C++.

The circle of life :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While I admire the amount of thinking that went and still goes into C++, for me the question is opposite: why ever C++? It seems to me that trying to improve a language by ecosystem or convention will always be worse than using a language already designed around what we have learned and what has changed since C++ was born.

If somebody _really_ needs to have the performace or be that close to the hardware, they can still probably find a better language today (Rust, Go?). But all others will certainly be better served by more modern, higher level languages. Just reading the examples in the PDF makes my head hurt.

<comment><USER18> My main argument against Rust is the existence of D.

Over the years several languages have been the 'C++ killer'. For quite a long time it was D, and I know several people who converted. Then the standard library split in two, and the language got fairly unusable for a while. Now things have calmed down with D 2.0, but it's not clear it will still be around in 10-15 years time.

Similarly with Rust -- at the moment it seems to be a one company product (Mozilla). What if they get bored of it? Will my Rust code still work in 10 years time?

<comment><USER19> I asked about this and some Rust folks were kind enough to mention that Dropbox is one company that publicly has a large Rust deployment. Further, I think the main (huge?) advantage of Rust is it was designed to allow in situ replacements of pieces of a large c++ codebase. This really is a killer feature for lots of folks who simply can't afford to rewrite tens of millions of lines of tested c++.

previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10890310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10890310)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only thing that has always been behind, and might still be for a couple of years, is the include system, which causes huge delays when compiling and linking, even when editing one single file.

When I make edits and hit build, the old C include system kicks in and it's a very long process. I'm using C++ but precompiled headers are not a standard (many details will prevent you to use them) and there are not decent ways to reduce build time to bearable ranges.

I'm sure this is the main point that makes C++ so unattractive. If you're a programmer, having shorter code-write/build/test/repeat cycles is important if you don't want to lose focus on what you're doing. I don't know if build delays are specific to C++ or specific to microsoft, but if modules were available in some beta form I would try them ASAP. Even platform specific techniques would interest me...

So yes, I'll love C++, but not only the ABI and build configs are not easily solved by CMake, but build times will never make C++ attractive enough. It's not not realistic to pretend you can be really productive with C++.

<comment><USER10> Modules were just put into a TS so hopefully we'll get them in C++19. I would _love_ to have them now, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> cache

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lambda- the-ultimate.org/node/5313)

</comment><comment><USER22> Site is down so I cant comment on content from the article.

As a working programmer here are some things that I consider to be C++ virtues

a. Control over memory layout

b. Control over allocation policies

c. Deterministic deallocation of objects on scope exit

d. Generics and specialization of generics

I am always mystified how many languages miss out on item a.

</comment><comment><USER23> I clicked the title and it provided a great answer. something about mysql not connecting. i thought it answered the question until i googled it. a better title would be 'why not php'.

</comment><comment><USER24> Because we have Rust!

</comment><comment><USER25> LOL... why not PHP.</comment>


Croatian blogger arrested due the Croatian Homeland War Veterans Register leak - <AUTHOR> http://friendfeed.com/phillipbailey/fc4bf5e8/croatian-blogger-arrested-due-homeland-war

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the FriendFeed Link, but there is no English articles yet.

Briefly, Marko Rakar -- blogger, founder of <http://pollitika.com>, winner of the 2009 e-Democracy Award, and the only Croatian member at the latest TED US, was arrested today in relation to the leaked registry of Croatian War veterans, which was (illegaly, but with great public interest) published at <http://registarbranitelja.com> by yet unknown parties.</comment>


Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-howard-university-coders/ <comment><USER3> I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" name lowers your job prospects [1]. Other studies that show:

"...race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%). [2]"

So all the people acting as though our society is some meritocratic, utopia can keep that bullsh*t to themselves.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that blacks under-perform relative to whites when it comes to academics. There are obvious reason for this, but those reasons don't change the truth. Companies that are heavy on the engineering are going to use academic markers to try and select the best of the best. There aren't enough blacks >= white peers in the top percentiles of CS to give us proportional representation.

[1] [http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html) [2] [http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race- crimina...](http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-criminal- background-and-employment/)

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a good solution is to strip names from CVs when reviewing them.

People are fallible, and often racist/sexist/discriminatory in general, even subconsciously.

I wonder if this effect is the same with black recruiters, or if it goes the opposite way. It's very much normal for people to favour people similar to them, by race, gender, religion, etc.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the effect goes the other way (a lot of people habor anti-black unconscious bias, even black people).

Re anonymizing the names, I think there are a bunch of startup companies that provide such a service (i.e. [https://www.gapjumpers.me/](https://www.gapjumpers.me/) ). It has been shown to make a difference but it is not always practical

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am a non-minority, CS graduate of a HBCU. There were amazing hackers in my program. I believe there were around 200-300 declared CS majors across all levels when I graduated. Numbers are down from those peaks now.

My institution was _heavily_ recruited by big corps, government labs, and east coast companies.

The "best" students, by GPA, were in high-demand for all of the above. Many were heavily recruited into management tracks for non-IT companies. A large number of government institutions and defense contractors were also eager to land new grads from our school. The "best" students, by hacking skills were (maybe stereo-typically for hackers) less interested in classes that didn't involve slinging code, but also all landed programming gigs. Less committed students, from either metric, seemed to still be getting jobs but I can't generalize as to the job type.

I think it is fair to say that my undergrad course-work was not as demanding as (guessing a bit here) Stanford, MIT, or CMU. But my GPA and GRE scores landed me multiple job and graduate school offers.

One aspect of hiring from (or at least my) HBCUs is that there is _very strong network effect_ \- alumni come back to the school and recruit interns and fulltime positions for their companies, help prep students for the process, and students looked to those alumni as trusted sources.

If Silicon Valley _really_ wants to hire from HBCUs, that is the path I would recommend. Hire a few alums from the HBCUs and make recruiting and grooming candidates a priority for those alums.

</comment><comment><USER7> "as the only African American on her team, she didn't feel she had much in common with her colleagues. "When I went out to lunch or something with my team, it was sort of like, 'Soooo, what are you guys talking about?' " she says"

I find this sentence really shocking, perhaps because I'm french and in France we try to assimilate people more (I don't really know), but I would definitely think that as a white software engineer I have a lot more in common with the black software engineer working with me than with whatever random white dude.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by the French try to assimilate people more? I'm confused because France is notoriously horrendous to tourists. I've seen polls rate it as the worst place for customer service with tourists and my own brother's experience got him nearly in a fight with some French guys bullying him.

Furthermore, this is just a cultural thing. I'm white and was in a team with a bunch of white engineers that loved cars and _things_. Our discussions at lunch bored me to tears and I came to realize I had to leave the mega corp to pursue my dreams in the start-up world.

When I arrived at the start-up world, I found people like myself -- people who didn't care so much about _things_ but about _ideas_ and imaginations. I was a lot happier because I found people who thought alike.

It never had anything to do with color and presenting this problem as purely color-based is just being intentionally provocative.

<comment><USER7> Well I'm not an expert but it seems to me that in France we expect minorities to leave a good part of their culture and become "real french", eat cheese, wear beret and never walk without a baguette under their arms, whereas in the US I was under the impression that there's a lot more effort from minorities to differentiate themselves. I don't think we can really talk of a "black culture" in France (at least not in the same degree as in the US, but I may be mistaken).

I wasn't talking about tourists, we are well known for behaving badly with them, sorry about that.

What shocks me is not that she doesn't feel she has a lot in common with her colleagues, but that she thinks that it's because she's black and they're not.

<comment><USER9> America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. It comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with complete mixed ethnicities and a strong nationality.

But that doesn't really work for blacks because they aren't a different culture, they are a subculture. Their culture has been a part of American culture from the beginning. For almost all of American history they were essentially banned from mainstream culture.

So nobody can make them assimililate. They didn't come here as an immigrant. Their ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved here.

FYI the world thinks France is particularly bad at assimilation. I don't know if that is just a stereotype but that's how it's viewed.

<comment><USER10> > America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. > It > comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with > complete mixed ethnicities > and a strong nationality.

I'll dispute that. In my experience, Brazil is a better melting pot.

Anecdotal example: In Brazil, you don't see people claiming they are Irish when their families have lived in the US for generations.

<comment><USER9> >Anecdotal example: In Brazil, you don't see people claiming they are Irish when their families have lived in the US for generations.

That is actually the key to Americas success. The total separation of ethnicity and national identity. It allows an immigrant to keep their ethnic identity and merely add an American one.

It's also helps when a white 5th generation american thinks they are Irish and American. They'll be less likely to believe that a newly arrived Mexican isn't really American. They intuitively know you can be both.

<comment><USER10> I disagree completely, I think that type of attitude leads to the notion of "Real" Americans. Keeping the ethnic identity is the opposite of the melting pot.

In Brazil, you're just Brazilian, regardless of color.

<comment><USER11> 100% of the Brazilians I have met (I'm in the US) are middle class and above.

Also, as if by magic, 100% of them appear white (or mostly white), despite non-whites making up a large fraction of Brazil's population.

It's absurd to act like everything is great for racial minorities in Brazil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > One senior, Sarah Jones, ... "There are not a lot of people of color in the > Valley—and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming."

This statement may be true if "people of color" means African American. Otherwise, it is just not the fact. I do think, through my personal experience, the Valley is probably the most diverse place that I have been. I've seen people all over the wrold here: Asian, Latino, European, etc.

<comment><USER13> As soon as a minorty achieves success (and often disproportionate success) they are no longer considered minorities.

<comment><USER14> If it were a game, it would be called "Whiteness unlocked."

An Indian- or Chinese-American can attain "no longer considered minority" (aka whiteness) but African-Americans don't get that achievement.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure how a first-generation immigrant with skin 80% as dark as a random African-American who celebrates Diwali instead of Christmas, follows cricket instead of (American!) football, and favors rice puddings to apple pies is actually statistically deserving of the "no longer considered minority" flag in America, financially successful or not.

It sounds more like some people are changing their criteria as they go along to lend the rhetorical power of a cry against Racism to a potentially- interesting point, an exercise in intellectual dishonesty which undermines the point if the listener realizes it. Perhaps if we used words to _accurately_ describe the situation we could actually _communicate_.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if you intended it this way, but you seem to be portraying Indian culture as just American culture s/Jesus/ganpati/ s/baseball/cricket/ etc. These things, while accurate, barely scratch the surface.

It really is different here, and not just the food. E.g., asking about family is routine (in a manner uncommon in the US), and I intuitively grasp certain social mixing/separation that is just different from the US.

From what I've observed, these gaps are vastly larger (read: earth/jupiter vs earth/moon) than the gap between various western subcultures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn't Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?"

The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article:

> When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at > Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn't been exposed to > programming before college and had gaps in their college classes.

So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders Prepared for Silicon Valley"?

<comment><USER18> Based on my experience interviewing a handful of developer candidates graduating from Howard, not being prepared is the best way I can describe the impression they left.

It felt like they only had a smattering of CS courses, none of which pushed them very hard.

In other words, they should fix their curriculum.

<comment><USER19> Is this really a problem specifically with Howard, or more a problem with CS curriculum in general? I ask this leaving the likes of CMU, Stanford, MIT, out of the equation - I'm thinking more about the "non-elite" CS programs, of which there are many, many more.

I am mentoring a CS student at another university and have had some challenges bringing this student along because the fundamentals are just not being taught. I took some time to compare it to Howard's curriculum, and I see some really practical courses offered at Howard - a 1 credit intro to OO and Java, Unix Lab, etc. Not that these make one a computer scientist, but when hiring entry level kids out of college, I would expect these skills to be somewhat solid, and that is not the case with really any CS programs today.

<comment><USER20> I cannot speak for CS, but for chemistry I would not hire anyone who did not graduate from a top-20 program. At any other college, both theory and practice are taught with insufficient depth and rigour - in essence everyone who joins one of those programs either is a medical school aspirant or just there for the "college". CS may be different.

<comment><USER21> I can't speak for chemistry, but this is a horrificly shitty thing. There are many factors influencing what schools a student chooses to attend. Finances being an important one.

<comment><USER20> College choice is a problem, especially for first-generation students and those whose families aren't well-off. There are students who could do much better than Tumbleweed State, but they didn't pick the nearby Ivy because they it never crossed their minds that they could have gotten in. There might have been a decent financial aid package. If there wasn't one, who can risk debt in this economic climate.

But I can't fix the world. It's not my fault that at non-top-20 colleges they fail to teach basic things.

<comment><USER22> This is one of the most horribly elitist comments I think I have ever seen on this site.

Cost is a huge consideration for prospective college student, especially since the onset of the Great Recession.

Furthermore, quality education is available at (I would estimate) most institutions of higher learning. It's just that the students have to do some research to find out who the good professors are at the less prestigious schools.

I think you are doing yourself, your company, and the graduates of less prestigious institutions of higher learning a great disservice being so dismissive toward "lesser" schools.

<comment><USER23> For people that can get into Harvard or Yale, they will be among the cheaper options, at least as far as tuition.

Especially people that aren't coming from wealthy families, as their need based aid programs will pay 100%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it that they don't hire black coders? Or is it that there are very few black coders to begin with? African Americans make up 13% of the US population and they graduate college at a lower rate than other ethic groups.

It would also be interesting to look at selected majors across ethnic groups. I suspect that blacks go in to CS at a lower rate than other ethnic groups.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. To put some numbers around the touchy-feely slice-of-life reporting in the article, education statistics [1] suggest that only 4-5% of BSc CS degree graduates are black, and only 1-2% of MSc CS graduates are black, despite most US universities discriminating in terms of admissions in their favour.

If the applicant pool is disproportionately skewed, you cannot expect the employee base to be any different, and minorities will stick out (which in turn is not necessarily bad for the people if they are good at what they do)...

[1] [http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs- statistics](http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs-statistics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looking at the commentary at Hacker News, I would say that the author has done a disservice to the topic by ignoring the minority status of East Asians, South Asians, and Latinos.

With very minor changes, they could have used the correct words to cover the topic they really wanted to cover: that there are fewer black programmers in SV than is desired/expected/needed. And that is a topic that deserves discussion. But because the author minimized the experiences of a huge number of other minority groups rather than focusing on the concerns at hand, we are now squabbling about essentially irrelevant material.

95% of the article could remain intact. By cutting the 5% which is both fluff and offensive to other groups, the rest of the article would be much stronger.

<comment><USER27> In fairness to the author, the title is "black coders". Not "minority coders".

<comment><USER26> Typically, editors choose the headlines, not authors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a human that people in America would call black/African-American I really dislike articles like this. I understand that some black people feel like they cant relate to others, but I find the entire premise of such arguments about homogeneous workplaces and cultures completely ridiculous. The culture of 'black' people in Alabama will be very different from Howard or Washington DC, does that mean Alabama is unwelcoming ?

Secondly, who cares what schools top tier companies are targeting. If Howard is churning out good software engineers that are so good they cant be ignored, a) they wont need Google, et al to hire them b) their skills will speak for themselves when they apply for a job

It seems like so many people (black, white, Asian, etc) actually buy into this socially constructed division by culture or skin color which is completely insane to me. To me it's like dividing people into groups by eye or hair color and saying you feel unwelcomed by the blue eyed people.

Articles like this seem to reinforce the notion that there is this 'otherness' of culture and skin color. If Google ,Facebook, etc are ignoring software engineers that are top notch from Howard and other historically black colleges, that would be a problem, but I doubt that is the case. Most companies want people that can get the job done well and know their stuff in my experience (I've worked in Silicon Valley and Fortune 50 companies).

The article seems to repeatedly make the point that the black people at tech companies were feeling out of place while working at Google, etc. as if any Indian, Asian, or White person do not experience the same thing (someone from India will have to learn the culture of SV just like someone from Howard Univ. or some white person from Alaska). Who cares if you dont watch the same TV shows or read the same books. If anything , I think thats a good thing, as its a starting point to learn more about something you havent experienced. I think the most important thing is mindset and attitude going into situations like this. Curiosity and open mindedness would do wonders for the people in the article who feel like 'others' in SV.

I dont feel like the culture of SV is as homogeneous as they are trying to project, but this 'otherness' is the real projection

I've never been openly been discriminated against, or felt like the color of my skin had anything to do with my success in Silicon Valley or the East Coast while working at tech companies. I've found almost all people of all 'races' to only care about competence and efficiency (other than the occasional jerk or misanthrope)

<comment><USER29> I could not agree with your comments more.

The more we realize that there are cultural divides other than skin color, I think we as a collective species can see that the constructs that have been used to divide us in the past are completely pointless; everyone is very different.

Most people would call me white. But I'm from the north eastern US, I'm catholic, I come from an italian background, and I speak shitty broken Spanish from growing up with a lot of cubans and dominicans. I have nothing in common with a jewish girl from LA that grew up in a family of lawyers that immigrated from Russia other than the color of our skin. And some how she and I have more in common than the black cuban kids I grew up with?

The barriers we as a people tend to see as the most divisive are generally the least divisive in practice. We just like to think that they are the most divisive because it's easy to see.

<comment><USER30> You probably both speak shitty broken Spanish because she's used to talking to the help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've only been to SF twice, but I have to agree that it is pretty white. Not as white as Colorado, but still. I also toured Medium and was blown away by the lack of black folks working there.

It's tough to describe the feeling, but when you're the only black person in the room, you do feel different--a little uncomfortable. However, I don't think this reflects a conscious effort to not hire blacks, rather there are institutional and socioeconomic barriers that leave us underrepresented in tech and many other fields.

<comment><USER32> Yes, there's not a big black community in San Francisco. There's an unusually large southeast asian community though, which is uncommon in many other parts of the US.

Still, even smaller divides can be stark. I am white and I live in St Louis. There are a lot of black people in St Louis. However, there's parts of the city where it's very uncommon to see black people, while in others, black people have asked me if I got lost or something, because I am the only white guy around. There's the famous Delmar Line, where two blocks separate an expensive white neighborhood from some of the poorest black areas of the city. In the middle two blocks, there's a lot of men in blue.

I mean, I've done software in this town for 15 years. That gives me hundreds of work acquaintances. Out of those, FOUR are black, and one is a first generation immigrant from Kenya.

The biggest work contrast is a company that ran a call center in premises. HR, Accounting, IT... one black guy. The call center, paying $10/hr? 75% black.

I am not sure of how much of all of this is racism vs socioeconomic barriers (although I am sure there's some of all), but segregation is so very real.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for your thoughtful, considered response. We need more people like you in the world and in tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The real story here seems less about race and more about how the CS program at Howard was mediocre (or at least didn't produce students that met Google's expectations) and one of the professors with a background of working for Google and attending an elite CS program realized it's deficiencies, improved it, and was able to get a bunch of students hired by Google by filling in their knowledge and experience gaps.

The school happens to be historically black but I'd be surprised if you found hiring statistics from a majority white school with a similarly ranked CS program to be substantially different.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting that it describes Silicon Valley as being too white, when it seems like there are quite a few Asians. Even working elsewhere, a high percentage of our programmers are Asian, higher than the metro's demographics would suggest.

<comment><USER35> Yea. I don't like the way they use it. Asians and Indians get considered white if they don't fit in the specific narrative, an author wants to tell.

I also don't like the idea, that liking pokemon or star wars makes you "white". There is something wrong with this,I can't seem to put into words.

<comment><USER36> Wasn't the hero of the last Star Wars movies black?

<comment><USER37> The hero is a white woman - Finn is a bumbling sidekick.

<comment><USER38> Who also works in "sanitation"

I am still incensed by this. The marketing of the movie totally misrepresented what Finn's role would be. I thought he would be the lead jedi. I doubt I will watch any of the forthcoming Star Wars movies.

<comment><USER39> That was, like, _the point_ , though. I thought it was great when Finn turned out to be mostly useless at Jedi-ing and Rey was actually the main character, because I didn't see it coming after all of the trailers and ads. A bigger twist than, you know, the other one.

<comment><USER40> I was going to disagree but you are right. I only watched some trailers and I thought Finn would be the main character. He even wields a lightsaber in the official poster, despite the fact that he received no training nor he had the Force and only used it because he had nothing else to use and his life depended on it. I doubt he'll use it in the rest of the series—seems like he'll join Poe Dameron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How about this?

Black engineers would prefer to work in IT at a big bank with high steady pay than opt for the highly variable risk/return profile of being an engineer in SV.

And why do they do this? If you look at poverty being an overriding theme for blacks in America, even if they themselves are not poor, then one would clearly prefer a lower risk med/high reward job than an a high risk low or super-high reward job.

Now the above only explains why black Americans underparticpate in start- culture. It says nothing for why they are underrepresented at high paying low risk shops like FB, Google, YHOO, Salesforce, ORCL, etc. Unless, of course, if you need to have first slugged it out at a few start ups before getting a job at a bigger shop. I'd say that's maybe only true for parallel hires and not kids right out of university.

<comment><USER3> As a black guy working IT at a giant car maker, I can say there's truth to this. Nice comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley—and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming"

Oh I forgot, us Asians don't when it comes to people of color or diversity.

<comment><USER43> They might specifically mean blacks when they say "people of color", not that asians aren't a minority, but they person saying that might only be referring to their own race. I am not making a judgement call on what should be a "person of color", I'm just pointing out what they might mean.

<comment><USER44> In usage, "people of color" tends to be malleable. Sometimes it means "black". Other times it means "not white" or "black or hispanic" or something else entirely.

Sometimes this is just ambiguous. Other times, it becomes a source of liguistic slight-of-hand when people use one meaning (without specifying which) but seek to equivocate with a very different usage with a very different meaning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I would say some of the students in the article probably aren't SV material - "They'd begun studying computer science in college"? So you've been involved with computers for 4 whole years and you think you're qualified for a top tier job? I'm sure not all of the students only started in college - I'm also not naive enough to think there isn't prejudice in SV, but didn't start until college...

<comment><USER46> I think its kinda ridiculous to say that to be 'SV material' you need to have started studying CS before college

<comment><USER47> I think they're more looking for a sign that you had an early and therefore natural curiosity to tinker with the mechanisms in the world. Not "CS" per se, but just... computer tinkering. If your family couldn't afford a computer, IMHO, if you at least, say, took a clock or motor apart or something, that would be a good indicator, too.

By the way, this has been brought up as the reason for the dropoff in the women who enter CS curricula in college. Ever since home PC's became affordable, freshman CS classes have basically assumed prior (and thorough) computer experience, and many women who might otherwise become good programmers, for whatever reason (society influence, etc.) have had waaaay less hands-on time with computers than boys, when they become freshmen.

That said, I have met some excellent programmers who started out doing something that is superficially completely different (musicians, for example).

<comment> norea-armozel I never had any distinct interest in computer science. My original interests were physics and art. In fact, I would say those are still my strengths over all. But I went into CS after I found it interesting in regards to what a person can do with a computer with little effort (in as much as the tools involved).

<comment><USER47> I think physics and art are nearly the perfect potential sources of a good programmer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have a few minor issues with this article/approach at Haward. First of all, it makes it appear that companies like Google and Facebook are the end-all-be- all. There are more companies than the top tier. In fact, there are also companies outside Silicon Valley. Not only are they setting up students with potential failure, but they are painting a different view of what the industry looks like and where it is located. They are even discounting NYC, which is just a train ride away.

Also, the problem with Howard not being a top tier school applies to every school that is not in the top tier. Many do not even get the same access to recruiters that Howard does.

I also believe schools should be teaching fundamentals and theory and not be used as job training.

That said, the assimilation problem, "cultural fit", is real, but is often neglected. Many programs trying to fix the minority inbalance simply focus on outreach, the recruiting pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER49> _The slow progress reflects the knottiness of one of Silicon Valley's most persistent problems: It's too white._

It's actually too Asian. And too Jewish. That is, if you're using, you know, math, and a simpleton's understanding of demographics. If you're using contemporary ethnic racketeering, then yeah, it's too white. Even the NFL is too white.

I actually think it would be funny to see Bloomberg come out with an article demanding that fewer Asians and Jews be hired wherever they excel.

</comment><comment><USER50> What surprised me from the article is that only 8 out of 10 students at Howard are black. Howard is a historically black university and I assumed the percentage would be 90%+. I did some research and found out that the latest numbers I found were 91% "Black or African American" students at Howard. [http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/howard- university/stu...](http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/howard- university/student-life/diversity/#)

Offtopic - but Howard has an amazing marching band. They played Rutgers when I was in school (football), and my favorite part of that game was the Howard band at halftime.

<comment><USER51> AFAIK, Howard and some other HBCUs do actively recruit non-black applicants (and may even use affirmative action to do so).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The biggest issue I have with the article is that it presents SV as the only place you can go to be successful with a CS degree.

It very well could be that the article misrepresents the efforts of Prof. Burge and the Howard staff since the article is focused on SV.

But if SV is turning away energetic, engaged, intelligent and capable new recruits, then please send them to NYC, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Triangle Park, LA, or anywhere else where companies are looking to hire.

It might not give you a "direct impact" on SV itself, but it does get your people into good paying jobs where they can further develop their skills and experience (especially for those without a long childhood of working with computers). It's a small industry. Soon enough these graduates will be attending conferences and making an impact on this culture.

More importantly, they'll also be representatives in their local communities, helping to inspire the next generation of students who don't see themselves or their experience reflected in this industry. And perhaps that next generation will be more likely to pick up programming in middle school.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is an interesting question, and probably related to "why doesn't Silicon Valley hire female coders?" and "Why doesn't Silicon Valley hire coders over 30?"

</comment><comment><USER54> I have a dream where people are judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.

Seriously. I'm tired of these people focusing only on skin color. Why don't we let it go, forget about skin color, and live together.

</comment><comment><USER55> WTF, Being in the industry myself I see a lot of non white people in the industry.

This could be used to reinforce the thought that the majority of people that care and judge based on color are mostly African Americans.

"More than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn't looking for candidates at these institutions."

Ah news for you , they are also not looking at candidates from my community schools.

Perhaps the article should be why you shouldn't attend a non racially diverse university or a university that doesn't attract employers in your field?

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash This is a very simple problem and racism has almost nothing to do with it:

White founder has a business idea and they bring along their friends - <USER2> likely white. Those friends bring in their friends and colleagues - also most likely white - to become the executive team. The executives hire tomorrow's managers. By that time the vast majority of employees are white, and even if they work very very hard to hire black people, it will take a very very long time until there is proportional representation all the way up to the executive level. Some execs work well into their 80s, meaning that it could take more than a century until there is population-proportional diversity at any predominantly white-founded institution.

The longer a lack of diversity persists in a company's trajectory the harder it becomes to fix it. The only solution I can think of is for black people to start more companies themselves.

<comment><USER56>
       The longer a lack of diversity persists
       in a company's trajectory the harder it
       becomes to fix it.

Google and Microsoft seem to have had no problem hiring a lot of Indians or Chinese.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Those are huge companies with tons of cash. Referrals are less important when thousands of college graduates are stampeding for a job at a tech titan. Also, how much of the upper management at either is Indian or Chinese?

<comment><USER57> Well, let's see...

Google's CEO: Sundar Pichae

Microsoft CEO: Satya Nadella

Adobe CEO: Shantanu Narayen

It is true, though, that Chinese people are underrepresented in upper management.

<comment><USER58> Is Raymond Chen management? He's certainly one of the more respected Microsofters I know of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> My guess would be: for the same reason it does not hire white coders.. incompetence ?

</comment><comment><USER60> A good article with a horrible, clickbaity headline. Howard's CS department head and even the students seem fully aware that "the problem" doesn't lie in evil Silicon Valley HR departments, but in the challenges of preparing kids who haven't coded until college.

</comment><comment><USER61> A surprisingly high number of the speakers I went to at AWS Re:Invent were Indian, close to half, and they all worked for Amazon. I found it very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm not American but I've lived here for a quite some time and this is my observation purely from my outsider perspective. Ask yourself how many times you see African Americans in a group of Asian, Latino or White people? I think the answer is very simple - Black people segregate themselves not just from White people but people of ANY other race. The majority stay in their cliques and never try to get out and the general consensus is "Why even bother?" I mean, the young lady in the article says she doesn't fit in and all that goes through my mind is how is this anyone's fault?

</comment><comment><USER63> > Pratt also noticed that many advanced classes at Howard and other black > colleges weren't as rigorous or up-to-date as they were at Carnegie Mellon > or Stanford. By senior year, students risked falling behind their peers from > other institutions. "I'd ask faculty members, 'Why are you teaching this > course that way?' " he recalls. "And they'd say, 'Well, I've been teaching > the course for 25 years.' "

That's the core issue right there. The school hasn't adapted to the technology and practices. What use would you be on day one if your coding knowledge was stuck in 1991?

</comment><comment><USER64> I am a Howard University Alum of the Computer Science Department. My experience at Howard was an eye opening experience. I went to Howard because I got track scholarship and I wanted to get the "Different World" TV Show experience. As a first generation Nigerian American, there was a lot of diversity in the sense that I got to meet black people from all over the world. I even got to get the chance to learn about my history. Also, when I graduated a lot of my classmates went on to work at Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, or other Fortune 500 companies. Google IPO'ed a year earlier and wasn't really on campus. Google and Facebook would get students a couple of years after I graduated. I know a couple of those students that are doing well because they got in early at Facebook. There is a decent amount of Howard Alumni at some of the tech companies. Anyways, what Dr. Burge is doing is great. His focus is to get more students to work on projects and get more tech companies on campus. More people in DC and the US are helping as well.

</comment><comment><USER65> "There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley—and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming"

i dont like this attitude, i am not sure what is should be called, but you should feel relaxed in your own skin, accept diversity, and dont mind it when most of the people around you, are not the same color

why is it unwelcoming ... maybe not what you hope for, but why call it so negatively

<comment><USER66> "There are a lot of black people, and I'm white, so that's kind of unwelcoming".

I wouldn't have used that argument in any discussion...

<comment><USER67> Do you deny that you might feel it, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Free Advice:

Look, the US is filled with businesses in big cities that, while are not "software companies", do very much need to write software to conduct operations. Take Houston, Texas for instance. It doesn't matter where you came from, what you look like, or who your daddy is. The game is supply and demand. If you can supply, you are in demand. If you are a native English speaker, then you are already ahead. In this country, if you are willing to move, work your ass off, and actually like programming - eventually you will reach gainful employment. Especially if you can pass a drug test. The first year? Hell no. Look for the hardest shit you can find that people with no patience think they are "too good for", and you will be filling in your experience in no time. Life is not easy or fair. If you are smart enough to do even some half ass programming, you have been given a gift.

</comment><comment><USER69> I started programming at a top computing university where my father was on the faculty while still in high school. I was working with other high school students and college students who were very passionate about programming and computer hardware. I remember working 80 hour work weeks during summers and breaks learning an enormous amount from fellow students as well as faculty and researchers.

Generally, if one wants to get into computing in a highly competitive environment, they should attend a top computing university. Fortunately there are top schools that are public as well as private.

I rarely see blacks (or Hispanics) at computer Meetups in NYC. For that matter, at many computer Meetups, there aren't so many women either.

</comment><comment><USER70> Some interesting points in the article picking up on the mono culture in a lot of software companies and especially games companies, in my experience outside Silicon Valley, I think it's a programming thing in general wherever you are. After many years I'm quite tired of the endless Star Wars talk, references, and T-shirts that I have to endure from colleagues. I even like the Star Wars movies but there comes a point where I think we could surely shut up about it for one day. However, I have to endure it, I've worked in numerous companies and it's the same thing all over the place, the blah mono culture, I'd love to work with some of the people in this article.

</comment><comment><USER71> One company's "culture" is another company's Old Boy Network.

</comment><comment><USER72> Wonder why this isn't on the front page . . . a simple points/time since posted doesn't add up to me . . . IMHO HN is too opaque.

<comment><USER73> It was heavily flagged and set off the flamewar detector. We reduced those penalties, because the article is substantive. We changed the title to make it less misleading and linkbaity, as the HN guidelines request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I'm a gay black guy who went to SMU via scholarship and majored in finance. Coding is my hobby. The New York Times hired me to write code for them. I worked there 2.5 years. We are in the tech already. Silicone Valley needs to pick those up who are already here. Some of us are more than willing and capable to work with Silicone Valley.

</comment><comment><USER75> I think it's similar to the issue of women in comp sci. It's a recruiting and culture problem in the whole industry. African Americans have more barriers than women imo, because statistically they have issues of poverty and less tech early age tech exposure on TOP of culture mismatch.

</comment><comment><USER76> What a big steaming pile of political correctness. The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their "color" for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies. Are we supposed to be sympathetic?

I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very tough and had to jump through hoops, work my way up from semi- tech to actual development positions. I took night school courses on a credit card and got into debt. I bought whatever gear I could afford and stayed up until 3am writing code, then got up and went to my menial job.

The opportunities didn't just fall in my lap; I had to earn them. No glamorous technology titans came knocking on my door, begging me to come interview. I had to work for everything I got, and God, it was hard. It still is.

This same work ethic applied to everyone; I was on the chatboards in the late 80s, all through the 90s, and the 2000s, and the story is always the same. You have to have the right stuff if you want to build a career in technology -- be smart, creative, have some initiative, humility, humor, etc.

So maybe Black Americans don't get that in their upbringing. Maybe they're not taught to be smart, competitive, hard charging over achievers. Maybe they're not encouraged to be creative, to think outside the box, etc. I don't know. What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.

Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare. If Google reaches out and hires under qualified people from Howard or wherever, just to say it's trying to overcome "barriers" and achieve "diversity", that's all doublespeak that in the end means "We will hire a few token blacks because we have extra money. It will make us feel good, and it will fool them into thinking they made it. Whatever. We have to do it."

<comment><USER73> Please don't post ideological rants and angry invective to HN. They have no place here; we want thoughtful discussion.

Unfortunately, this is still worse:

> _mediocre college students_

You can't possibly know that.

It sounds like you overcame some significant obstacles, and that's admirable. But please don't put other people down.

<comment><USER77> > You can't possibly know that.

It's funny, dang. You don't seem to ask all the haters to justify their opinions regarding the NSA. Even though by definition, no commenter could "possibly know" the extent of a surveillance program that is top secret. And let's not touch on 'ranting'; NSA threads are full of those.

In fact, affirmative action is the only topic where _you_ demand ideologic lock-step. If you disagree with my assessment please shut me up: point to _1_ comment you have made critcizing a pro-AA position. Because I could go through the threads and produce hundreds of tsk tsk's for anyone who voices anti-AA views. If you can provide me with this one example of being a fair to both sides (and thus worthy of being a moderator) I will officially apologize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Stopppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp

</comment><comment><USER79> Silicon Valley is not interested in hiring black programmers because _they simply do not want to_.

The easiest way to prove this is by looking beyond the software engineering field. Why do big SV companies like Facebook, Google or LinkedIn not have black _non-engineering_ staff?

Are capable black accountants, project managers, lawyers, support staff non- existent too?

</comment><comment><USER80> The issue I take with this is that American assimilation is a two way street. Every culture puts in and takes out. Tacos, sausages, pizza, sushi, these are American foods as much as they are Mexican, German, Japanese, or Italian. Some of them more American than their source in ways. It's not about forcing White Angle-Saxon culture. It's about forging American culture and identity.

<comment><USER73> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10947696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10947696) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Silicon Valley would rather hire foreigners than hire black Americans.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/technology/silicon- valley-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/technology/silicon-valley- seeking-diversity-focuses-on-blacks.html) ...

"Google revealed that its tech work force was 1 percent black, compared with 60 percent white. Yahoo disclosed in July that African-Americans made up 1 percent of its tech workers while Hispanics were 3 percent."

Affirmative Action has worked in other industries.

Why does it fail in Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER82> Simply stating a number like that adds absolutely nothing of value. There are a lot of questions you need the answers to in order to make any kind of judgment:

\- What is the racial makeup of the accepted applicant pool?

\- What is the racial makeup of the interviewed applicant pool (including those not extended offers)?

\- What is the racial makeup of the overall applicant pool (including those not invited for interviews)?

\- What is the racial makeup of people otherwise qualified to apply?

The whole way up to the overall population of I think 12-13% African-American. Even without seeing numbers I can guarantee that African-American _applicants_ to Google and Yahoo are much closer to 1% than they are to 13%. It's a systemic problem (I am not referring to systemic racism) and you need to address the root causes of each stage.

But it's much easier to say "Silicon Valley is racist" I guess.

Edit: And assuming that average foreign worker is equivalently skilled and cheaper than average American worker, of course they're going to favor hiring the foreign worker. It's economics.

<comment><USER81> Silicon Valley _can_ recruit and train African Americans.

Why not do it?

<comment><USER82> Probably because it's totally asinine to say to someone "Hey you're black, come work for us!"

If you're suggesting that African American Computer Science majors should all get hired immediately out of school so that Google can increase its count from 1.0% to 1.02%, it doesn't work like that.

Two things in this discussion actually matter if you want to affect meaningful change:

1\. The racial makeup of graduating Computer Science majors compared to the makeup of the US population. If only 2% of graduating CS majors are from a race that makes up 13% of the US population, you will _never_ have anything approaching proportional representation.

2\. The racial makeup of applicants compared to the makeup of those applicants extended offers. This is really the step where, if there are company-level systemic issues around race, they will show up. If 10% of your applicants are a given race but 1% are extended offers there might actually be an issue. This is much harder to determine because not only is it very hard to get the data, but you need a sufficient number of applications to get meaningful results. If you only get 100 resumes a year for a dozen positions, you won't get anything useful here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Computer programming is one of the most cognitively demanding professions in existence. Ability to program correlates pretty highly with cognitive test scores, such as the SAT Math. If you look at the top scorers on such tests in America, only about 1% are black. The ratio of black engineers in Silicon Valley matches what you would expect based on the test scores.

To see it visually, this is the bell curve based on millions of test results: [http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1) There are very simply very few black people in the far-right portion. This is not even a disputed fact (the dispute is mainly over why the curve is skewed and if it can be fixed; the existence of the skew is incontrovertible).

 _This was at least partly because of the way companies recruited: From 2001 to 2009, more than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn't looking for candidates at these institutions._

The average SAT scores at Howard are thoroughly mediocre, on par with second and tier state colleges, and you would not expect an elite school to concentrate on Howard, any more than you would expect it to concentrate on Southern Illinois University or the like. The only reason an elite company would recruit at Howard is for diversity reasons.

 _Foreman is strong-willed, which sometimes gets him in trouble. "I just chalked it up to soft skills, I guess," he says, explaining that he and his interviewer had clashed. Pratt says he'd been "furious" to learn that Foreman had been passed over. Other companies said no, too._

So was he a good programmer or not? How do we the readers know that he good do the job and was passed up unfairly?

 _The phenomenon, "stereotype threat," is getting more attention in the Valley, and companies have begun training employees to be aware of it._

The idea of stereotype threat is extremely dubious - [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual- none...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-nonexistence- of.html)

 _"She doesn't fit the profile of what people think of when they think of engineers. Even though people think of Silicon Valley as a big meritocracy, I don't think that's how it works."_

There are now a number of companies that do automated programming interviews -- Starfighter, Hacker Rank, etc. Do these manage to overcome stereotype threat? Do these blind interviews allow through more African-Americans? Before throwing around slanderous accusations, one should actually show that Silicon Valley is treating people with the same programming ability differently.

The sad thing is that these tech companies cannot just admit, "We don't recruit at Howard because the SAT scores are not there." Rather these companies have to pretend that anyone can be a great programmer if they just put in the work, and a lot of people end up with false hopes that only get crushed.

<comment><USER84> Wow, I'm sorry, but programming is not that demanding. Theoretical CS work can be, but the typical programmer is working on maintaining a crud app, especially as a junior developer.

<comment><USER85> Is it just me? I find it unbelievably demanding. I think writing even relatively simple web apps almost always turns into something mind numbingly difficult. The amount of extremely dense material you have to read and ingest, the number of things you have to stitch together, all of which claim to be easy but in fact require deeper understanding because they never quite do what you need them to, the abstraction of what you have to understand… and then, on top of it, almost nothing is greenfield, so you have to go down a really deep and dark rabbit hole of someone else's highly intricate logic.

What can I say? I consider it to be one of the hardest things I've done. I have no idea how people find it easy, but clearly some do.

A lot of the horrendous complexity in our field comes from churn. But hey whatever the vector, it is (and of course this is just my opinion) hellaciously demanding.

Just a quick note, my post here is intended as a narrow response to the specific claim that programming is not demanding, not the general comment tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> And my question is - why are there so few white players in NBA? This is racist! Protest that!

</comment><comment><USER87> The same reason as there were no Black people nominated for Oscars.

<comment><USER88> You say this, and I hate to point out the obvious, but look there has to be a cut off point for Affirmative Action somewhere... and it turns out to win an Oscar you have to be the best. Just like companies want the best coders. The best isn't a quota.

If you want a quota for black / female / 8-finger coders... have a quota, but the market has yet to make a business case for this being beneficial. (The case could be made in preventing PR gaffes like how Facebook banned all the people with "ethnic" names a few years ago by mistake... but I think these instances are somewhat few and far between.)

I'd guess this has more to do with:

1) black people not having the same access to computers / technology early on (much of what we learn as technologists comes far before college starts),

2) black students often get into college through Affirmative Action, so they may not have been as strong to start with, and

3) black students don't tend to graduate with the same rates / grades others do -- which makes it harder to get interviews / offers.

I don't know what the solution is here, but when you find it we can also use it to get equal white guys in the NBA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Look at every notable tech company ever, do you see many black people involved in the founding? Why is that?

<comment><USER89> Totally unrelated to the issue. There is very likely to be some bias on behalf of people making investment decisions, your level of access has significant impact on likelihood of getting funded. On the other hand there are strong diversity programs at universities that article mentions (MIT etc.) and SE are generally hired based on their abilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Let's assume there is this black guy / girl sitting in the interview room with you. You (white) are asking interview questions and you soon realise that the person you are interviewing is excellent. But something is off, you can't really put your finger on it. What do you do?

<comment><USER91> How does the color of the person affect this situation?

<comment><USER90> Good question, and my point is that most people don't ask themselves this question. There is probably nothing wrong with the candidate at all, the "off" you feel is just the different color.</comment></comment></comment>


An Integration Loop - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/integration-loop/ <comment><USER2> Basinski is famous for his Disintegration Loops. The cover art for them features a photo of smoke coming from Lower Manhattan the night of 9/11.

Basinski was a struggling avant-garde musician who had been working on the Disintegration Loops and similar projects for some period of time before 9/11\. None of the projects were taking off.

Basinski alleges to have performed Disintegration Loops (likely untitled at that point) for the first time on his Brooklyn rooftop with some friends the day of 9/11\. The idea is that they played this somber tape music an wallowed in their collective grief.

The problem with this is that he took his amateur music (he was by no means a celebrated musician at this point) and covered it with the trauma of a national tragedy just to make it seem profound and stirring.

This isn't to say that Disintegration Loops isn't a decent tape project. But it is by no means innovative or even exemplary for the time, except for the extraordinary and painful circumstances surrounding its release. Basinski failed here for trying to take credit for the character of these circumstances as his own.

This is not my original line of thought. All credit here goes to Chris Ott [0], that evergreen of music criticism.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGE7q0oDlEI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGE7q0oDlEI)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is beautiful writing; in fact, I don't think I've ever had an emotional response to a piece of tech(ish) writing. Thanks for posting it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ahh, Robin Sloan's blog is such a treasure! I still deeply enjoy Dancing the Flip Flop ([0], but also linked in this essay) every time I think about it, never mind actually read it. Robin's perceptiveness and storytelling reminds me of Bret Victor's work as well, and they are both so great at it

[0] [https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/flip- flop/](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/flip-flop/)

</comment><comment><USER5> What a strangely gripping piece of text. This project is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic. I absolutely adore Basinski, this is a very cool project.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of Dopamine Neural Tape by Vult for the VCV Rack software synthesizer.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really moving. A fantastic blend of storytelling and technology.</comment>


"I have a copy of a Terrorism Blacklist. Should it be shared?" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/4q840n/terrorism_blacklist_i_have_a_copy_should_it_be/ <comment><USER2> >A few years ago, Thomson Reuters purchased a company for $530 million. Part of this deal included a global database of "heightened-risk individuals" called World-Check that Thomson Reuters maintains to this day. According to Vice.com, World-Check is used by over 300 government and intelligence agencies, 49 of the 50 biggest banks, and 9 of the top 10 global law firms.

sounds like "terrorism score" a-la FICO. Of course in case of FICO there are laws and regulations, and you have the right to see your credit report and can contact the related credit bureau, card issuer, merchant, etc. to rectify/challenge the incorrect records...

</comment><comment><USER3> You've illicitly acquired a copy of a commercial product relating to U.S. national security and you're just throwing your name out there on _reddit_?

Is you lost your marbles?

Contact a journalist so you can figure out how to properly handle this information. Contact a lawyer to try to cover your ass.

And ask Russia if there's a room down the hall from Snowden that you can use.

<comment><USER4> Seems to want to be a Snowden-Lookalike. Cheap.

<comment><USER5> Eh, I don't think we should discourage whistleblowers because it's not "cool" anymore because someone else did it first..

<comment><USER6> This has little to do with whistleblowing.

<comment><USER7> Wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And tomorrows reddit posting:

"Help, I've just been forced into an orange jumpsuit, blindfolded and put on a plane to Gitmo. Should I be worried?"

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone have a ballpark guess as to what Thompson Reuters sells this list for? Here is their product page:

[https://risk.thomsonreuters.com/products/world- check](https://risk.thomsonreuters.com/products/world-check)

<comment><USER10> Really depends on how you integrate it they have varied level of integration from a simply pass/fail check to full details and analysis. The most common way of using is that you buy user access to [https://www.world- check.com/frontend/login/](https://www.world-check.com/frontend/login/) and just upload CSV's of names and they produce you a risk rating for each name (with some confedence score). The pricing starts at couple of 100K's a year and goes up when you add the value added and bespoke services to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The World-Check DB has very little to do with actual terrorism. While it does include a lot of individuals that are also on the US sanctioned lists due to terrorism it's more or less of a risk rating DB for individual and organizations based on many many factors.

It targets, money launderers, people involved in fraud, people who were involved in scandals, people who are the targets of large scale criminal or civil lawsuits and many many other things including political risk of doing business with individuals and organizations.

This isn't the no flight list, this is a DB of potential impacts on your business mainly around direct financial loss if you do business with any of the individuals on that list.

Just to be clear only 20-25% (out of those only 1-2% are due to terrorism, the rest is just normal crime) of the people on that list come from sanctioners like the US government and the European Union, the rest is data they have collected and 75% of their data is about PEP's mainly from media and public records. This is more of a high school gossip list than anything else and the 25% of names which are actually sanctioned are available publically the US and other country do not have secret sanctioned lists.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let's assume that every single entry on the list is accurate.

Why is Thomson Reuters maintaining a list like this?

Why would payment to Thomson Reuters be the only filter to access a list like this?

<comment><USER12> It's not accurate. See [1]. Some of the material is sourced from PR statements from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

It's ironic that an anti-terrorism list is been used by brutal, foreign regimes to co-op British banks and institutions into harassing people whose only "crime" has been becoming members of groups they don't like.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/28/finsbury- par...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/28/finsbury-park-mosque- chairman-mohammed-kozbar-banks-terrorism-world-check-list)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A "check if your name/email is on the list" style site with rate-limiting might be a better option, rather than a full public dump. That way it answers a key question for interested people without exposing some of the people who are rightfully on the list. So it doesn't get indexed on google/public search engines or provide the means to auto-notify people, for example.

Although I'm sure there are plenty of people who think information should all be free and accessible, and could potentially exploit that type of system to get all the names.

</comment><comment><USER14> > my ear will be wide open if you do wish for my copy of the database to > remain private and you have any persuasive reasoning.

Is that code for 'if you pay me enough'?

<comment><USER15> It's actually code for: "I'm willing to be reasonable and seriously consider both legal and ethical arguments you may have."

This isn't about money.

[yeah, I'm the original Reddit poster]

<comment><USER16> I like that you posted this to gather opinions and create a discussion around the ethical implications of it all. Kudos.

I'm wondering why you chose to use your real name though. Seems like there would be little benefit and very high risk in doing so.

<comment><USER15> I've used it before in reporting large data finds (such as US voter databases). It's really more about standing up and saying "I'm not afraid."

<comment><USER7> I'm not afraid too! Let's be friends! (David House)

Edit: Public figure ala Snowden. Please reconsider your removal of my personal information, and consider that I am faithful in my motives, ala the poster I have responded to. Kthx. _judging of HN increases_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The database is already accessible to anyone that is willing to pay Thomson > Reuters for it.

Nothing to see than someone feeling important. Move along folk, let's hope this private list does not get dumped into the hands of random internet zealots.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is not difficult to get hold of lists like this when you work in banking.</comment>


Is it acceptable to profit from the poor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11376809&fsrc=RSS

<comment><USER2> The comments at the economist are pretty scary.

 _Even if the poor get high returns by investing the loan...it is not fair for the lender to capitalise on the good fortune and/or efforts of the borrower._

Answer to the question: Yes, it is acceptable to profit from the poor. If you disagree, please do not allow them to purchase bread or sell their labor.

<comment><USER3> Yes, the comments seldom reach the quality of the articles. Some are downright scary. Perhaps they should restrict comments to people with a subscription? That should swing the ideologic balance in favor of hardline capitalists.

(Disclaimer: I have a dead tree subscription.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see how it's difficult to see the "right" thing to do - it almost never is, really.

"The right thing" (TM) is to treat the poor like you would any other social entity. You (as a businessman) can profit off of them, but not by taking advantage of their desperate situation. You make a fair offer, you get a fair return, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Now if you choose to give them a more-than-fair offer (interest rates that just cover inflation, pretty much no profit involved) out of the goodness of your heart - kudos to you.

Keep in mind the most important thing: the current sub-prime woes were all caused by banks taking advantage of people who couldn't afford to pay them back; "balancing-off" the high risk of investment with even higher interest rates - and look where that's put the global economy. There's a lesson in there - you can't make a quick buck, and ripping people off can never help society as a whole in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe. Here is my opinion.

The poor need goods and services just like the rest of us. More to the point of the article, they also require credit and some faith in their productivity, to even attempt to rise out of their situation.

Theoretically, an efficient market will help provide credit to the poor people most able to use it in a productive manner. In reality, it seems like things get a little non-linear below the poverty line. By definition, those in poverty can't reach up to meet the price of goods (including credit) in the general market. Also by definition, a market exists only when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. So it seems that when those who are not poor are dealing with the poor, they are not acting as rational market participants because they may not reach a mutually beneficial equilibrium. Who would even try? I think this is why micro-finance needs to be a somewhat humanitarian effort.

Coincidentally. the economic crisis engulfing the U.S. right now is an example of why profiting from the poor doesn't work (well...without some productivity requirements). Not lending to _the poor_ , per se, but lending to people who had no chance (and possibly no intention) of using the credit productively and paying it back. This has partly been due to incentives which are/were outside of the market between lender and borrower -- fees, and a secondary market which was hungry for securitized debt. The demand in the secondary market was met by trying to do the impossible (lending on bad bets) and selling it off as a package of good bets.

This last bit should actually make you upset on many levels. The U.S. patent office won't accept inventions which violate the laws of thermodynamics, and I'm still confused why the Federal Reserve does...sorry, on a tangent. Back to the salt mines for me!

</comment><comment><USER6> Short answer: It is always acceptable to provide goods and services to those who are willing to buy it at a price that they are willing to pay for it.

There's been alot of anti-capitalist sentiment lately in the media, from stories about overpaid CEOs to record oil company profits. Simply put, if a person can not get fair market value for their good or service, they have no incentive to provide it. What is better: that which is expensive, or that which is not available?

<comment><USER7> I would agree, for all values of "willing" that don't involve some sort of coercion. For example, if someone is "willing" to pay $100 for a loaf of bread if you have a gun to their head, then I would question the use of the word "willing." Likewise, if a group of people controlled the food market in a region and used that power to force the people to hand over their life savings in order to buy food and avoid death by starvation, I would question the use of the word "willing."

As always the question is -- can those involved opt out of the transaction? If the answer is yes, then there is probably no evil involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand how an interest rate of 70% could be fair, and who in their right mind would agree to such a rate?

<comment><USER9> If the default rate is high enough then 70% could be what it takes for the lender to make a profit. Someone who thought that was the best rate they could get could agree to such a rate.

<comment><USER10> Then they should focus on lowering the default rate, not increasing the interest rate. The Grameen bank gets repayment rates of over 98%.

Assuming a cost of capital of 3%, if they need to charge 70% interest to make a profit then roughly 40% of their loans are defaulting. A 40% default rate means people are using these loans for consumption, not investment. You need better financial education then, not better access to credit.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps it's not the default rate - but the overhead. Those loans are pretty small.

<comment><USER11> Yet it's possible to run a current account on far less? I doubt that's the problem.

<comment><USER3> Or perhaps it is just a sign of an immature market. They charge so much because they can get away with it.

With competition the rate should go down. Even if it is mainly caused by overhead, as companies will figure out how to operate more efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Is it acceptable to profit from the poor?_

Haven't read the article, but ... yes, it's called 1) the labor market, and 2) the goods market

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm still looking for the rest of the article. For an Economist article, this one was pretty short and thin....

</comment><comment><USER13> to me it depends. I don't see anything wrong in trying to be like a Walmart (minus Walmart's abuses), though personally I feel that businesses such as 'payday loans' (as opposed to something good like kiva) and 'rent to own' stores are somewhat sketchy

<comment><USER14> Sure, but they're sketchy because they're sketchy, not because they're targeting the poor. They're sketchy because they're bait-and-switch -- fooling people into signing a pretty onerous contract without reading it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, so long as you don't rig the game to keep them poor.

</comment><comment><USER15> As long as it's win+win _should_ be fine.

Other considerations involve morals and equality of opportunities in education to be able to evaluate how unbalanced is the win+win. And that's a terrible ground for discussions.

</comment><comment><USER16> if people aren't poor after you profit from them, you need a new business model

<comment><USER3> Scrap a negation and you have a fine comment:

If people are poor after you profit from them, you need a new business model.

<comment><USER7> I think it would be acceptable if the people were still poor but significantly less so.

<comment><USER3> Sure. Or in another way better off.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Functors - <AUTHOR> http://catonmat.net/blog/on-functors

<comment><USER2> Uses in Haskell and ML seem to follow its math origin, but why in C++ they have come to call it functor?

<comment><USER3> Because functor is kinda-sorta a portmanteau of _function object_ and people wanted to sound clever, I guess.

<comment><USER4> I always thought it was 'FUNCTion operatOR".

<comment><USER5> In C++ it's customary to call a constructor "ctor"; they probably thought "function constructor, riight, functor".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At least these words aren't used in colloquial English. Physics has the problem that it tries to describe many things in terms of fairly regular words like energy and wave, when they really aren't quite the same as the non- physics use of those words. It has been the source of much undergraduate confusion over the centuries.

A problem with using esoteric terms is that it can be hard to find two people who have the exact same definition of them, and different fields will have different definitions for the same term. They also raise the barrier to entry when there is a full vocabulary to learn in addition to new meanings.

I'm not sure if we should keep overloading terms or try to come up with new silly words for everything. I'm not sure what to think of functors, but in my head they are always homomorphisms.</comment>