Practical Tips for Cheating at Design - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheating-at-design-40c736799886 <comment><USER3> While not everyone is a fan of this, I think it's the best article on web design i've read in a long time, and easily the best thing i've read on HN this year. Kudos.

Not all the advice is going to work in all situations, but they do serve as a great collection of simple but effective tips for improving the design. I've spent a long time tweaking things about in this realm, so these tips are welcome even if i already use many of them. Seeing them together also helps identify new techniques or combinations you can use.

I don't agree with tertiary buttons with no border and no underline, for example. I think that poorly communicates what's clickable/tappable and whats not. But then again, that's an easy tweak.

<comment><USER4> I have some gripes about using text colors close to the background color ([http://contrastrebellion.com](http://contrastrebellion.com)), but at least at the same time they're advocating not using grey.

I agree, this is the best design article I've read in maybe a decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> UI Developer for over 20 years and fine arts and design major in college. From my experience I can't agree more with all of these recommendations.

Fewer font sizes and more font weights in general is always good.

Removing borders is extremely powerful for a lot of great reasons. When trying to maximize data density and readability, when trying to reduce clutter/visual noise and gain whitespace. The use cases for borders can often be resolved in other ways. However this puts more demand on the quality of the typography and layout hence the other techniques mentioned come into play those are design challenges worth addressing.

More on borders: This of course is a tool that can be mis-used but I find it is one of the best tools I have. The emphasis should be on data / information not on arbitrary borders. You can say the same thing many different ways visually. This is under-appreciated. You need not have font size, color, style all colluding to say the same thing, that you can accomplish with only one of these. When dealing with any series of items the human eye will clearly see periodic patterns and implied lines / alignments very quickly thus I find that often borders are unnecessary and even impede a working design.

A key observation is that with every border you have two white space areas to design with and a foreground element competing for attention with your actual information. Every border you eliminate gains you twice as much whitespace as you had and one fewer foreground element. 3 design components to 1. As with lines of unnecessary code, when you can delete elements in a design you are winning.

</comment><comment><USER6> When it's about UI design, you know the advice is good when you see a lot of comments panning it on HN ;)

I just have two nitpicks: different font sizes are not a problem as long as the hierarchy is clear (i.e. sizes not seemingly chosen at random) and the advice on text contrast is accurate (unless you're using a display at very low brightness, pitch black text is jarring on light backgrounds), but the contrast on the example is too low. For body text, the ideal choice is closer to #222 or #333. Here, the advice on colors also applies: you can give the black a slight blue hue if the rest of the interface has blue accents.

The last example ([https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*cuYcwjOO26sKHImHa...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*cuYcwjOO26sKHImHaY6yFA.png)) also moves me to give an unsolicited tip: pay attention to the "color" of the typeface you're using. That example has body text in Avenir (EDIT: looking again, it must be Proxima Nova); it's a thin geometric type, so the gray of the body text should be darker, or a bolder weight should be chosen. As it is, it's not very readable, which is okay for certain sentences but not appropriate for a warning message. Since system and webfonts are often constrained to regular and bold (and rarely, a bolder and a lighter weight) it's easier to control this by tweaking the gray.

An alternative is to give a higher priority to "you will lose all of your saved data".

</comment><comment><USER7> Half of this advice hinders usability.

#2.1: Reducing the opacity of your text makes it harder to read.

#4: Borders help logically separate areas of an interface. Throwing in more white-space is wasteful.

#4.3: Gratuitous white-space is wasteful, especially if you have limited screen real-estate (i.e., mobile).

#7 is a major pet-peeve of mine which I cannot agree with. If it's a button, make it look like a button. Nothing is more confusing than a button that just looks like some text label.

<comment><USER8> I have to disagree. In an absolute sense you are correct, however you're missing the relative benefit of each point.

#2.1: Yes, this would be an issue if overused, especially in paragraph lengths of text. However, inconsistent font sizes are worse.

#4: Why are you worried about white-space? If you have space, you can use it. If you run out, then you have to start rationing and using other visual tools. Borders have their place, but white-space should be preferred as the most neutral and inobtrusive strategy.

#4.3: So create a responsive layout for mobile that uses more borders where necessary.

#7: This is a major (and valid) criticism of flat UX, but slightly adjacent to the point in the article. The article says you don't need a background colour for every button, which is good advice.

<comment><USER9> I actually _just_ got done running an A/B analytics test on a large website (>100k viewers/day). Statistics say you're right, least about the buttons. ;)

The client wanted a "button" without a background color because it looked bad to have two buttons side by side. My company told them that was a bad idea based on data, so we added tracking to their site and A/B tested their home page. Button with a background color had 40% more conversions than the "button" they wanted without the background color.

Several pieces of the advice given on that article are proven to be bad ideas for most websites if you track your users. What "feels" right and what _is_ right are often two different things.

If you're ever making a change because you _think_ it will perform better you better be tracking the statistics. Often times you'll find out you were wrong. Another, similar, example is that a client had a button they wanted to "draw attention to" so wanted to inverse the :hover background color with the normal background color so that it would stand out from other buttons. It looked different - but hurt engagement because it no longer looked like _every other button_ on the site.

E:

This was meant to be a response to cpburns2009, the parent of the comment I responded to. Thanks to metalliqaz for pointing that out.

<comment><USER10> >The client wanted a "button" without a background color because it looked bad to have two buttons side by side. My company told them that was a bad idea based on data, so we added tracking to their site and A/B tested their home page. Button with a background color had 40% more conversions than the "button" they wanted without the background color.

Of course it did, it looked more like a button! But at what cost? It sounds like this button was not the primary action. So how many clicks were lost from the primary action - how much usability was lost from the page?

<comment><USER9> It was a primary button on the hero image in the standard "Header/Subheader/Call to Action" format. It was basically the only thing they wanted users to interact with.

 _> Of course it did, it looked more like a button! _

And buttons without the look of a button are just called links. Links without visual distinction may as well be _invisible_. Like the infamous "black text link with no underline in the body of a paragraph of black text".

[https://codepen.io/anon/pen/GQdeBO](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/GQdeBO)

<comment><USER11> Designing is just like coding. You've got to be pragmatic about knowing when and where to use the tools in your belt.

You might have your little favourite programming trick, but a good programmer will know when and where to use it - you don't want to use a map function _everywhere_.

Note that the article's point about buttons isn't prescriptive and doesn't say "always do buttons like this". Instead, it talks about a common specific use case and talks about how you can improve the situation. It's up to you to take that information inboard and judge where to use it. It sounds like the specific example you cited was a good time to not follow this approach.

<comment><USER9> It's form over function and I'd be shocked if anyone ever shares statistics where making the button more difficult to see increased user interaction with it or made it easier for users to do other tasks by "getting the button out of the way".

The only time I'd use a 'button' without a background color is something I don't actually want the user to use. For example, a 'delete' option on their profile or the 'unsubscribe' link in a newsletter.

But I'm not user hostile so I'd still make those options easy to find for users who wish to use them instead of trying to pad my "user retention rate" or whatever numbers the marketers are trying to make look good.

<comment><USER11> > The only time I'd use a 'button' without a background color is something I > don't actually want the user to use.

Yes! You've got it! That's exactly what the article says!

And that's what I'm saying - good design is learning these tricks and identifying when and where to use them. It's not form over function, but how the form influences the function.

<comment><USER9> As a programmer if I don't want the user to use it I don't expose it to the user at all. If I want the user to be able to use it I'm not going to intentionally make it _difficult_ to do so. That's not good design - that's bad UI and bad UX and is a dark pattern used by manipulative marketers who don't care about providing a good experience to end users. But then we get to argue over what "good design" means. Since manipulative design that is _good_ at being manipulative is obviously good design by definition.

I think good design should benefit the user. Making "opting out" easy is providing a good user experience. If the user is wanting to "opt out" the answer isn't to make it difficult to opt out - it's to fix the reason that is causing your user to want to opt out to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TBH I am starting to hate the subtle box-shadow on card components, including the example they provide as "better" [1]. It's getting to a point where it's hard to see the edges, especially if I have f.lux on or need to clean my glasses.

A regular border is easier to spot and more definite. It's not skeuomorphic but it's more functional.

[1] [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qH-2RAS3rbnql- vpP8...](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qH-2RAS3rbnql-vpP8flmg.png)

<comment><USER13> Another concern is performance issues with box-shadow. A product I worked on displayed hundreds of twitter-like messages, each with its own box-shadow. Scrolling on less powerful devices would noticeably thrash. Disabling box- shadow improved it significantly. This was back in ~2012, so perhaps devices have become more powerful since then for this issue to be negligible.

<comment><USER14> This is still a major design consideration for developing world mobile apps with webviews and sites, removing box shadows tripled time-on-site immensely for a site I designed for a client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The examples are mostly low contrast: a wasteland of white and preferably off- white empty space, also white and preferably off-white and preferably borderless boxes, lightly colored and mostly grey text inside them. When did combining dark text on a light background and light text on a dark background become nontrivial advice?

When web pages had a proper structure and color scheme (compare www.gnu.org now and in 2004: [http://web.archive.org/web/20040113091408/https://www.gnu.or...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040113091408/https://www.gnu.org/) ) they were more readable.

<comment><USER3> More readable, yes. But not as pretty. One can obviously go too pretty and lose all readability, but the socialization of the web has to some degree required we embrace more diversity in design.

I still have trouble not underlining clickable links, for example. But sometimes in a design it's just as obviously clickable without it, and less cluttered too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The color picker site they link to which limits choices is great for me- I will admit to spending hours trying to pick the perfect color scheme.

[https://dribbble.com/colors/eee966](https://dribbble.com/colors/eee966)

<comment><USER17> I have the same issue. Not being a designer I can spend hours tweaking CSS color values, only to come back the next day and think it looks awful again. Two things have helped me: 1) using [https://coolors.co/app](https://coolors.co/app) and just trusting it, 2) creating SASS functions that derive secondary colors from a primary one. I currently don't have it at hand, but it boils down to making a series of lighter and darker versions of a given color, where, very importantly, the lighter ones are also less saturated than the shadows.

<comment><USER18> Would you mind sharing your functions when you do have them on hand?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please don't use "lighter" and "darker" colors to signal importance. The contrast on these is invariably too low for most displays, and people miss that cue completely. What's lighter for you has the exact same color/intensity for most users. It's the same with "material design" where some genius decided that buttons no longer need to look like buttons, and links no longer need to look like links. Sure they don't. And users sure don't need to know what can be done with the interface. But what's the point? /rant

</comment><comment><USER20> I like most of these, especially the different ways of making a hierarchy stand out. But I would say that if you're going to use gray text, pick out the exact shade using a really crappy LCD screen, maybe on an old phone, to make sure it's legible. Sites that use very light gray make me think the designer picked the color on a 5k iMac with the lights off.

Also, make your buttons look like buttons.

<comment><USER21> There's also automated WCAG tools that check for "contrast errors". For example you should ensure you provide background colors as a fallback if the user has background images disabled or the image has not downloaded yet

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pet hate of mine is using more space to replace a border or other distinction between elements.

Most of the time I want to see more playlists, or email subjects, in preference to delighting in your use of whitespace. Information density matters.

Buttons should look like buttons. Always.

</comment><comment><USER23> > "Is this text secondary? Let's use a lighter color."

Please no. Light grey text on not very dark grey background? Can this design trend just die?

See: [http://contrastrebellion.com/](http://contrastrebellion.com/)

<comment><USER24> I don't get why people are picking on this statement when most of the "good" examples given have plenty of contrast and he then goes into many techniques to maintain good contrast.

Ironically the contrast rebellion site uses very similar techniques to create visual hierarchy, see slide 2 in particular.

<comment><USER25> That's the point, they _do not_ have plenty of contrast. In the very first "good example", the phrase "Explore popular tourist destinations..." is needlessly difficult to read for me, and "28 reviews" might as well not be there; it's difficult to notice and I need to strain my eyes to read something with that low contrast. That picture is a clear example of something that's hard to use for many people, doesn't satisfy official accessibility standards, and should not be recommended.

Maybe you're younger or have better vision or a significantly different screen than I do, but then let that be a warning that either you need do usability testing on some settings where that particular picture looks not sufficiently 'contrasty' to you as well, or you need to write down the RGB values that this image has with a note "that's not enough contrast for general usage even if it looks ok to my eye".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would caution anyone from using these tips if you are building some kind of B2B Enterprise app where the focus is on getting as much information on screen as possible and minimizing the possibility of making errors.

Borders and clear destructive actions are a must. Needless spacing is wasted space.

<comment><USER27> On the contrary, well thought of white space guide the eye. It doesn't waste space. It is a part of the design in itself and is usually the hardest component to get right.

<comment><USER26> It can certainly waste space. And a lot of it. I've seen designers redesign tight tabular data layouts into light and airy cells of data and it ends up displaying 60% less information on a screen, requiring more scrolling from a user. This is exactly the kind of thing enterprise apps don't need, but it looks good for a consumer app.

<comment><USER27> That's an example of badly thought-of white space.

<comment><USER25> If it's important for you to fit as many rows in the screen as reasonably possible with maximum readability, then doing the separation with some separator takes less pixels/distance than separating them with whitespace.

There's not much to think about the whitespace in such a scenario - it's a simple yes/no experiment; you can try to simply remove the separating line. If the resulting whitespace ensures good enough readability/separation, then it works; if it'd need increased spacing, then it's worse than having the separator and not worth thinking about how much extra spacing you'd want - <USER2> answer to that is as little as possible, i.e., zero.

<comment><USER27> Not all empty space is "white space". Simply adding random paddings/margins around form fields isn't making good use of "white space". It's simply adding blank empty space. It's a dead weight on your page.

"White space" is negative space. It's something you should think of as an active part of the design.

One of the first rules of web design is "content is king". As a rule of thumb, any use of white space that makes your content harder to reach, read or see is a bad use of white space. It's breaking the "content is king" principle.

No part of your design should break the main web design principles. While there's no agreed upon list, "content in king" (or however you word it) is always present.

In short, yes, I agree.

\---

Edit - A nice description of it:

"White space (negative space) is the area between design elements. It's another tool for designers to design for the user experience (UX). Remember that white space is not necessarily white; it's just the name to indicate spaces where there are neither user interface (UI) elements nor specific content.

As a designer, you can introduce white space based on four main factors:

\- Content,

\- Design,

\- user and

\- brand

Use macro white space to organize content in the layout and direct the user through the blocks of content shown. Use micro white space inside the design element features as seen in the text, images and content blocks.

We can also approach white space as being passive or active. Passive white space does not have a specific role in the design other than facilitating the user experience. It is all about being easier to read. Active white space guides the focus and attention of users. It is more about standing out and making a statement." [https://www.interaction- design.org/literature/article/the-po...](https://www.interaction- design.org/literature/article/the-power-of-white-space)

<comment><USER26> This is consumer app mentality.

Enterprise apps are expert systems, they are not designed for the masses. Your goal is not to surprise and delight, your goal is to help people get shit done and go home. That means data needs to be organized tightly and densely, forms often have a lot of inputs, tables often have a lot of columns and tons of rows. A simple separator line between rows and columns, and perhaps alternating background colors for even and odd rows is all you need. Think something that looks more like an Excel spreadsheet, and not some social network with documents.

If a new feature is needed, it needs to plug straight into the existing design wherever there is space. There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just confuse an employee who got used to the previous one.

<comment><USER27> It seems that everyone here think of white space as actual white colored wide spacing.

Here, take a look at this example and tell me that the left paragraph is something you would use or want in an enterprise application: [https://imgur.com/a/mIBZz](https://imgur.com/a/mIBZz)

> There is no time to think about a redesign, and changing a layout may just > confuse an employee who got used to the previous one.

I very much disagree and have experience with such tasks.

One of my main task right now is to manage an in-house ERP. Before I started to work here, there were no front-end developer, no UX expert and no designer.

Every screen was a pizza. The previous developers simply piled on changes and everything quickly became a mess.

Last year, we changed half of the screens (early 2000 style) to modern user interfaces. Out of the ~150 employees working with the software, only one was resistant to change. It was one of the newest hires and had just been trained with the previous version of the screens.

Two months in, she admited that the newest version was way easier to use and that she would have had an easier time training on it. Everyone else simply adjusted easily from the cramped design of the previous version.

Smart use of white space isn't about making everything like one of Apple's websites. It's about managing your negative space in such a way as to guide the eyes of the end user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The contrast examples in this article are a continuation in a poor trend of monkey see monkey do design that seems to come out of a reliance and reuse of original base bootstrap styles.

Designers seem to love to decide that certain text doesn't look right, is unimportant compared to that stock image they spent 3 hours selecting.

A great tip for cheating on design regarding typography is to completely drop "grey" from options.

What will happen is that during any manner of stress testing, usability or accessibility testing someone will immediately point out the lack of legibility.

More importantly when your site is audited for accessibility issues, you will fail on contrast every time.

I realize this was written as tips to help non designers but most "designers" should be staying away from making decisions about font color that lean towards "grey".

The cost and effort in development of most written copy far exceeds the value of this design trend that leads to low legibility, low impact type.

Web designers need to get back to the basics of typography. The web as a whole and "start up" style sites particularly suffer greatly from design choices by designers who clearly never actually read what they layout.

<comment><USER29> > More importantly when your site is audited for accessibility issues, you > will fail on contrast every time.

I see this problem in the footer almost universally. High contrast footers have somehow become rare. I understand the desire to de-emphasize that section versus the primary content of a page, however if the footer is going to actually do its job I think it makes sense to have it set to a higher contrast design than not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The text in the first example, "bolder not bigger," is quite obviously bigger.

</comment><comment><USER31> "4\. Use fewer borders / 3\. Add extra spacing". I'm not a big fan of this current trend. It seems that everyone is doing that and I found difficult to find the logical separation between elements.

</comment><comment><USER32> Generally very good but mixing button/non-button style is a dark pattern that should be avoided.

If you have 3 alternative actions and one looks like a button, why don't the other two? It is actually very easy to miss at least one option that way, or otherwise make a mistake.

<comment><USER33> a "dark pattern" is a UI tactic that is very purposefully crafted to deceive or manipulate a user. confusing button styles as you describe them are just "bad practice," they aren't dark patterns until designers use them with the specific intent of confusing the user

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is still a great tutorial, but isn't it just the medium version of something I already bookmarked back in 2017?

[https://codepen.io/tyrellrummage/full/ZJPXgy/](https://codepen.io/tyrellrummage/full/ZJPXgy/)

The one technical question I have is about using a lighter font to de- emphasise things: the example de-emphasises "*Prices may vary ..." underneath the bold, emphasised "$17 per person". Isn't that a bit of a "dark pattern"?

</comment><comment><USER35> Using low-contrast elements to create hierarchy looks nice, but bear in mind that it breaks accessibility for many low-vision users.

</comment><comment> yoz-y Overall I like this advice. However some of their examples do not really push the point. In the first example they make the text both bigger _and_ bolder and smaller _and lighter. This is good, however it is contrary to what they say.

In the shadows example, I prefer the bordered version. Shadows do not always look good and borders are "safer" to use.

</comment><comment><USER36> These are great principles, but the execution still lies with you. I studied graphic design and have done it for many years, but I still fiddle for a while with the exact parameters: font size, font weight, text color, background color, border padding, border width, border color, border radius, text shadow. You can call all the "functions" he espouses, but whether it reigns on a throne of beauty, or falls apart in a pile of mush, depends on the "arguments" fed into those functions.

So if it doesn't look right at first, keep tweaking. Try a shade darker, try a shade lighter. Add more spacing, add less spacing. And so on. Expect to spend some time on it. Don't be discouraged if at worst it looks bad. Moving stuff around, and adjusting the different parameters, can eventually bring everything in a state that sings.

</comment><comment><USER37> As a programmer who usually has to do all of the UI work himself, I definitely appreciate this! I've been on exactly one team during my career where we had a dedicated graphic design person. Alas, it's seen as a waste of money by most management types in my industry (govt contracting).

</comment><comment><USER38> > 1\. Use color and weight to create hierarchy instead of size

This article has a lot of great advice for the visuals. Using opacity to better mix colors is super handy.

But my main reaction is there is one bigger, better way to cheat at design in nearly all situations, and that's to avoid hierarchy. All the tips here can be taken as ways to cram more things together.

When I try harder to say one and only one thing in any page or dialog, my design has usually improved. It can be really very difficult to let go of some things I strongly feel the user needs to see, but when I do, it's surprising how often I find that "less is more".

<comment><USER39> > It can be really very difficult to let go of some things I strongly feel the > user needs to see, but when I do, it's surprising how often I find that > "less is more".

I find that when a screen has a lot of options, it usually means that the creator is un-opinionated / didn't make a decision on what's important and surrendered to implement everything that was asked, whereby it feels like a clown fiesta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Please be sensitive to the lightness of greys you use for smaller text, especially if you value any of your users who are aging (all of them) or have vision-related issues (some of them, maybe more than you think)

</comment><comment><USER41> This article strikes me as an indicator that we've reached peak this-kind-of- thing. In particular, I predict that in a year, it will seriously date your design if you're using a lot of CSS shadows and putting a random bright color on the side of anything square-shaped.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is it just me or do the examples in the article look like they were copied from common websites? To me it is just a grab-bag of things I've seen before.

I think that's one problem with the web: so often are designs simply copied that the web looks boring. Well-designed, but boring.

<comment><USER43> Boring is great from the UX perspective. Things doing what's expected is exactly what you want!

<comment><USER42> Then the advice in the article should simply be: copy the designs!

<comment><USER43> That's definitely my secret to UI/UX in startup-sans-designer world :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > _Making the text closer to the background color is what actually helps > create hierarchy, not making it light grey._

Note that "closer to background color" is, more or less, "making it transparent".

<comment><USER45> "Making it more transparent" you mean (or I guess more translucent to be more correct).

A interpolation of 20% from black to the background color will still be plenty readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Thank you for the share. Simple and useful tips to bring UI to a prettier state. Especially for a "pure" programmer, myself, who has no idea how to make nice interfaces without being guided.

</comment><comment><USER47> I bookmarked this. There are a lot of nice tips for someone like me who builds lots of prototypes but isn't a designer at all.

</comment><comment><USER48> Even the "bad" examples provided are beautiful.

I do love the accent borders. I've been using them a lot lately in PowerPoint tables.</comment>


AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/autodesk-releases-an-electronics-simulator-called-123d-circuits/http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/autodesk-releases-an-electronics-simulator-called-123d-circuits/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of an old idea I had a couple years back. I assume it's a silly idea driven primarily by my own ignorance of these tools and EE in general, but it seemed fun.

The idea was to start out with some software similar to this. Something visually impressive to keep it interesting for beginners, but technically sound to make it useful to those who know what they're doing. It would be open source, internet connected, easily accessible and most importantly simple to create and share ideas.

From there, let people make some interesting things for school, work, play, whatever, ideally sharing said creations and try to raise a community around the tools and creations.

The next stage would be to add a 3D rendering component which would allow people to create "machines" that could be run by their virtual electronics. Something like virtual fabrication. The ideal being to grow those interfaces and try to lead the community towards building virtual robots (that are technically feasible).

The eventual goal would be to build a virtual world on top of all of the above tools. Something like MechWarrior, but with engineers and industrial designers building virtual mechs from the smallest components to the large mechanical fabrication and then getting into all out war against one-another, adding to the mix less technical players to partake in the human elements of combat (generals, soldiers, medics, scavengers for destroyed mechs, etc).

Probably ridiculous, and if all went well I assume it would take years of work and planning, but it seemed like a fun idea to ponder.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.circuits.io/](http://www.circuits.io/)

<comment><USER4> [http://upverter.com](http://upverter.com)

Not just for kids anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if it models the terrible parasitics of a real breadboard.

I imagine it would be really annoying for beginners to build an IR receiver (or whatever) with the software, have it working perfectly, then try to build it on a real breadboard only to spend hours frustratingly trying to figure out why the circuit is oscillating.

<comment><USER6> Is there any software out there that includes these real-world models into the design side?

<comment><USER7> mbell is right -- rather than just adding parasitic capacitance and inductance estimates to every node, it's more helpful for the engineer to be able to evaluate and discover which nodes are particularly sensitive and which aren't. Start with some back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude estimates (maybe guess ~1nH/mm inductance for a wire, ~1pF capacitance between adjacent pins), and an experienced engineer will already be able to eyeball likely trouble spots in your circuit. The novice can certainly use the same concepts with simulation to do quite a bit of "debugging" in just a few minutes, for example dragging around a 1pF cap between a bunch of pins, re-running the simulation each time, and seeing where it has the most detrimental effect on an analog circuit.

<comment><USER5> Just to add, if you want to 'fail safe' a breadboard design, your better off assuming ~25pF of stray capacitance per breadboard insertion point. You should also make sure your circuit bandwidth is less than ~8-10Mhz, keeping in mind that if you have an opamp with GBP of 20Mhz and you're using it with a gain of 2, you may have a problem. Stray inductance can also play a part, but it's far less likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think there is a lot of value to blowing up your Arduino for reals. When you blow up a couple of Arduinos, you'll tend to force yourself to learn very quickly why it is happening and how to avoid it.

What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to avoid if you have spent any time in a kitchen.

I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino _is_ the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics. The danger is miniscule, and whatever danger that is there, is part of the learning process. You need this as much as you need a rice-cooker simulator.

<comment><USER9> There are so many people that underestimated the potential success for Arduino, and the rPi. Also, experienced hardware folks tend to forget how unforgiving hardware can be to non-hardware folks, and beginners; a good example of which was posted here the other day. [http://www.jwz.org/curtain/](http://www.jwz.org/curtain/)

<comment><USER10> > _so many people that underestimated the potential success for Arduino, and > the rPi_

I like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi very much, but they are not the pioneers of this idea.

There have been a whole bunch of electronic prototyping systems aimed at hobbyists in the decade before Arduino and Raspberry Pi hit it big.

Just to name a few: Parallax Basic Stamp, the Micromint PicStic and Domino, X-10, MIT Media Lab's Programmable Bricks, Gumstix, Phidgets, Teensy USB Development Board, littleBits, LEGO Mindstorms, Bug Labs.

I was cheering for several of the above, and they met with various degrees of success. It seemed obvious to me that they should become enormously popular, as big as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, but they didn't. There were probably dozens more that folded up and disappeared.

What I'm trying to say is that it took a lot of iterations of design, business model, functionality, and being at the right time before a couple companies found just the right formula to make it really big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > it allows you to learn electronics using a virtual Arduino board and > breadboard without blowing up capacitors or burning yourself with solder on > your work table.

With autodesk prices, i can probably buy enough caps and pay someone to solder for me.

<comment><USER12> All of their current 123D software is free for all: [http://www.123dapp.com/create](http://www.123dapp.com/create)

And I recently was impressed to learn that they offer free licenses for most of their professional software (including Autocad) to school teachers, university faculty, and degree seeking students.

Qualifications: [http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=12311...](http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=20307823&linkID=9240617)

Software: [http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center](http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd kill for an app like this that would help teach you electronics at the same time. I've wanted to start doing some robotics stuff, but haven't found much in terms of useful learning resources outside of just buying a full university textbook and hoping for the best.

<comment><USER14> Funny you should mention that, I've been slowly working on this idea for a circuit-sim that basically teaches you electronics, to be eventually complemented with video-lectures which I keep putting off due to school and a hunger for other projects.

So yeah, the Autodesk news was kinda depressing, but really, that just means I'm going to focus more on the teaching end and in adding my own personal style to it through quirky graphical elements that harken back to the 8-bit era of yore. Autodesk can't sell a product with soul.

You can check it out if you want. Just to warn you though, my html abilities are a work-in-progress, so don't be surprised if you see some awful mistakes in there, or if it renders kinda funny if you have a small screen.

www.bighugebreadboard.com

I actually created it to teach myself electronics, so the biggest hurdle has been learning how various components work, and then adding them to the sim. Also, prior to this, my javascript knowledge was basically acquired through Codecademy.

I'm also putting some of the code on a Github repo, as in I plan to make it open-source. Alas, before I did that I cleaned up some prior amateur's mistakes without thinking of the bugs I would be opening up. I should have them fixed by tomorrow morning.

[https://github.com/Bjorkbat/electricjs](https://github.com/Bjorkbat/electricjs)

<comment><USER13> That looks awesome, I am definitely going to check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess I'm not seeing the advantage over existing software.

Unless there are some tie-ins with their other 123D software to, say, automatically create a hardware enclosure from a schematic.

<comment><USER16> We have that! Just push the "generate enclosure" button in the circuit details page.

<comment><USER15> Cool! I'll have to check this out then. I love 123D in general, it's like Inventor, only free!

That has long been my Achille's heel - I can EAGLE a pcb pretty easily, but woodworking / 3d interlocking Ponoko designs elude me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do I add a voltage other than a 9V battery?

What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).

<comment><USER18> LTspice [0] is an excellent (and might I add free) SPICE simulator. Linear includes proper models of the majority of their chip lineup, including LED drivers. Their power supply IC models are also excellent. You can simulate a full LED driver circuit and a whole lot more with LTspice. TI also has a similar SPICE simulator [1], but it's not nearly as good, and its simulations are much slower and a bit more unreliable.

I design electronics for a living, and I use LTspice all the time for power supply and analog circuit simulations.

[0]: [http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice](http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice)

[1]: [http://www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti](http://www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti)

<comment><USER17> Thanks, that helps a lot! Giving it a shot right now.

How long should it take to make a high-power (3A+ @ 3V, buck-boost IC) LED driver, very approximately?

<comment><USER18> If by "make" you mean create the schematic in LTspice and simulate it, then I would guess about an hour or two (mostly because this might be your first time using LTspice). If Linear has a part that already meets those requirements, it should be a very straight forward affair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this based on Fritzing (fritzing.org)?

<comment><USER20> Nope, just a non-free clone with a marketing budget.

I must say I'm not sure how to feel watching the maker and hacker culture I love so much having its open heart slowly ripped out.

<comment><USER21> You can look at it as a kind of validation of the community - there's commercial interest in it.

Also, just because someone starts on this app, doesn't mean they won't move on to something else later.

<comment><USER20> Well, I agree if you s/validation/co-opting/

No, it doesn't necessarily mean they won't move on to something else later, but they're now living in a universe where it will always be Autodesk's job to make that harder or less obvious to them. By any means available.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure keeping hobbyists locked to a particular platform is that useful to Autodesk, especially considering the prices they charge for higher level software.

If it wasn't Autodesk doing this, would you have the same reaction? What about Makerbot's move away from open-source?

<comment><USER20> I would have exactly the same reaction - I don't have any issues specific to Autodesk, apart from those that I've expressed here related to their 123D suite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It doesn't seem as in-depth as something more pure electronics like this: [http://www.falstad.com/circuit](http://www.falstad.com/circuit) (also as iCircuit for iPhone)

</comment><comment><USER23> They really went out of their way to try and rip of Github, it seems like a lot of sites now would rather copy it because developers are used to the design.

</comment><comment><USER24> For someone who's been looking for an easy point of entry into learning this stuff (me), this looks awesome.

<comment><USER8> Arduino _is already_ the easy point of entry for learning this stuff. Stop talking about it and just do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay now we need a code debugger with breakpoints. Then, real hardware in the loop!

<comment><USER16> Working on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this similar to Upverter?

<comment><USER26> Sure seems like it.</comment></comment>


Who gets invited to the party? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cyril0allen/who-gets-invited-to-the-party-246a1ba6849a <comment><USER4> My BS in CS is from NC A&T.

My MS in CS in from UNC-CH.

Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool.

I was regularly _FLOORED_ by the skills and raw programming chops from peers at NC A&T. Some of the smartest young men and women in the CS field.

I worked in a small research group at NC A&T. Maybe 10 undergrads. Last time I checked, there were something like 6 MS in CS folks from that group and a couple of PhDs.

When I was an undergrad at NC A&T, we had a weekly colloquium for all CS students. We _regularly_ had alumni from NC A&T and other HBCUs on stage who talked openly about navigating the hiring world, which companies you could expect racism in, and what the working world of programming was like for "people who look like us."

If some shitty recruiter event occurred, _we all knew about it._

Want to score some of the best engineers from HBCUs? It's easy. Hire the best ones you can convince to take your mega-FAANG package from. Then send them back every freaking year with a corporate card and tell them to impress people.

I hate these "stupid recruiter" stories. Somebody should get their ass fired.

<comment><USER5> I think that's pretty awesome. I went to Elon, and the only time that we heard about the A&T CS program is the time that I participated in an ACM programming competition. We heard more about the Duke program than anything else. (Research related). I knew a little about the UNC Chapel Hill program because I had a connection with Fred Brooks.

<comment><USER6> In terms of CS, it's NCSU that regularly produces the most accomplishments of the NC higher education universities, but it doesn't have the same national standing because the humanities departments at NCSU are a complete joke. What Duke and UNC-CH do well is that all their departments are generally considered rigorous and that increases their standing in the rankings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case people didn't read this story carefully before commenting (we all do that sometimes), it's worth calling the nut graf of this story out:

The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.

The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.

That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.

<comment><USER8> I have done University recruiting and been at recruiting events, I have never seen leftovers ever re-used, by any company, ever. I'm not even sure of the legality of that or the logistics of it. How were leftovers transported safely from one campus to another? 99% of the time, it's pizza (it's always pizza), and it's given away or thrown out at end of the event.

<comment><USER9> You're catching a lot of flack but in my experience this is true. We always leave the leftovers with the students who attended as (1) all students, regardless of school can always use some good leftovers, (2) the logistics and health concerns make this pretty much impossible. You 'd have to be a sick SOB and put in extra effort to do this; not characteristics of HR drones who just want to check a box.

<comment><USER10> "HR drones" might want to reduce costs, choosing a way that aligns with perceived student importance.

If their idea of a diversity effort is _pretending_ to recruit black students they must be callously insensitive, and to some degree consciously racist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is both a pipeline problem and a bias problem and they are intertwined.

Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...

Discrimination is also still present and different ethnic groups are affected differently.

The negative effects of poverty and discrimination compound over time such that when you get to a tech company's hiring process, the pipeline would have shrunk massively. The students in this pipeline are competing against upper middle class kids who have been groomed their entire lives to compete in the system designed by people like them.

As to the recruiting pipeline, there is class elitism/narrow mindedness in tech companies that does narrow recruiting. Some interviewers don't countenance views or attitudes other than their own just as some recruiters favor certain universities far more than others. This seems to be changing at least at the recruiting level.

As to why some ethnicities still succeed or fail despite discrimination, that is at least partly cultural and partly selection bias and these in turn have also been affected by discrimination past and present.

Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.

I hope that we come up with a just system for everyone.

<comment><USER12> >Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be.

What about immigrants that arrived to the US with a suitcase and $100 in pocket?

<comment><USER13> You really can't compare the two cases. When you're born into that type of system, where your skin color is seen as less desirable, it's easy to develop inferiority complex and a lot of insecurities that will hinder ones will to reach for the top. I'm from a third world country where a lot of emigrants to the US tend to be more successful than the average Black American. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that they are lazy and all, but I have come to realize that we were not born or have parents that have been demoralised by the systemic racism common in the US

<comment><USER12> At least you admit that the root cause is not poverty, but the mindset.

<comment><USER14> "it's just a mindset", takes all responsibility off of the ruling class and places it all on the backs individual. While I'm all for taking responsibility for oneself in a rigged system, I'm not going to pretend the system isn't rigged and shouldn't be fixed. Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture like this.

<comment><USER15> > Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture > like this

We do. All the time. It's why half the shit we work on is covered in a thick layer of technical debt and the other half is written in self contained microservices.

A software stack from a company that's been around long enough is going to be more random, redundant and glued together than the processes in our evolutionary biology.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. That's why I put "promoted approaching" rather than "approached". But you're 100% correct.

<comment><USER16> I use the 'promote better' ideas when dealing with people in poverty. Usually most of what happens is what I call 'bad choice' economics. Usually do one thing or another. One is not 'fun' the other is. The 'fun' one gets you right now but usually hurts you weeks from now. The not fun one helps you long term. Usually the excuse of 'oh I have money coming later' with no idea of what if 'later' does not happen.

One guy I had to talk down from having his car detailed (150 bucks) vs paying the 2 month late car payment. He literally did not think of the idea of they will take the car away from you if he did not make the payment, until I pointed it out to him. He was very fixated on the 'clean the car'. That is but one small example. I have hundreds of examples like that.

That short term thinking is absolutely acidic long term on you, your family, and friends. It can create a spiral that is very hard to get out of. Being poor costs substantially more long term as well. I as a wealthy person can buy things ahead of time when on sale because I know I will use them in the future. Being poor means you buy in the 'now'. You do not buy for the future because you do not have the means to do so. So on average simple things cost you more. But being in the 'now' can hurt you even worse by giving you fun vs not fun choices. But not being able to see you have been give an bit of 'luck' to make your future better.

<comment><USER11> The short term thinking was exacerbated by historical discrimination. There were cases where black businesses became successful but then were forced out by whites who wanted what they had. Such a system doesn't promote long term thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There was an article I came across where a black startup founder was frequently mistaken as a regular employee while his white co-worker was mistaken as the CEO. On multiple occasions the unaware person shook the hand of the white co-worker, ignored the true startup founder, and so on.

"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren't typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. "You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement," says Hayes, 39. "They can't wait for this meeting to get over."

For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren't many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"

Here's the post: [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in- sil...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in-silicon- valley-humiliation-is-a-part-of-doing-business/)

<comment><USER18> "there aren't many Black Mark Zuckerbergs"

How many non-black Zuckerbergs are there?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you've ignored the context of the article. He says that to mean he doesn't look like he's going to start the next Facebook or Twitter to VCs, because he is black. They will not entertain the idea that he COULD BE the next Mark Zuckerberg because he simply can't "look the part".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow. This confirms something I saw SO often as an undergrad.

I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.

Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.

There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes

<comment><USER20> Do you think it could possibly be that the black city college might be a _lower ranked_ school than Georgia Tech? Or did Georgia Tech not have any women or minorities? I went to a lower ranked school that was the most diverse in the state, and I've also taken classes at Stanford and Berkeley. There is no question that the students at Stanford and Berkeley were _way_ more motivated, worked a _lot_ harder and were academically much stronger than the students at my school. So I would _expect_ those schools to get a lot more recruiting attention than my school. That doesn't mean the students at my school can't be successful, but it did mean that you had to put in a lot more work than the median student at the lower-ranked school to be successful.

<comment><USER7> The subtext of the story is that the HBCU was visited to check a checkbox, but the students at that school were treated with such disrespect that the underlying bias was clear.

Nobody has any trouble understanding that Duke is a higher-priority recruiting target than A&T.

<comment><USER21> While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment. Unlike the racist tokenism and just outright disrespectful facade of visiting a school when there is little to no (apparent) interest in hiring from.

<comment><USER22> It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard you're serving leftovers from another school.

I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.

<comment><USER23> > It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard ...

Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I grew up in Greensboro where A&T is located. Many of my high school classmates went to college there. One friend even led the top CS student org on campus.

I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.

So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.

<comment><USER25> I'm not a "just pull up your boot straps" guy because I grew up in poverty and I know the world is just injust.

However, I really like the positive action of this comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've gone on numerous recruiting trips and this story paints a very one sided narrative and it doesn't quite line with my own experiences.

First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.

Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.

My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.

Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.

<comment><USER7> This wasn't pizza (and, if it was, _leftover pizza_ would be even crazier).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Did Hooli recruiters think that they wouldn't pass the hiring bar?"

Most likely, yes. In the US news rankings, Duke is #10 and UNC is #20. NC A&T is #281.

NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.

Duke engineering is ranked #20, NC A&T is #134.

These schools just aren't in the same league.

<comment><USER28> And just how do you think the school ratings are calculated? Graduation rates. Job acceptance rate into industry. Oh, wait, that sounds like a self- reinforcing cycle. Structural racism runs deep.

<comment><USER29> It's safer and easier to blame structural racism than to look at multi factor reasons.

Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.

Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.

I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.

<comment><USER30> It's also safe and easy to say "no racism here no sir" when confronted with difficult problems and decisions about justice.

I've experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn't exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.

But for years people just said "well that's a worse school, what do you expect".

<comment><USER20> It sounds like you're arguing that there _was_ racism, whereas your example suggests there _wasn't_ racism, just differences in application process - <USER2> certainly doesn't sound like there was any _resistance_ to improving the process in a way that resulted in dramatically increased success of minority students. Or am I misinterpreting something?

<comment><USER31> Structural racism often means there is no one person to blame - there's not going to be a person we can hold up and say, "Here's the racist!" This was a racist _outcome_ because the students, staff and parents in the minority school weren't in-the-know. Why weren't they in-the-know? Probably for racist reasons going back decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > I'm sure that the NC A&T event was just so Hooli could check some "diversity > recruitment" box.

Amusingly, that's exactly what the "interactive" ADA process is at my workplace - just a check box. I submitted a request with medical diagnosis and links to several third party expert recommended accommodations for it, an HR rep booked a meeting with me, told me in the first sentence that I'm requesting an accommodation I didn't request, and that she's denying it, then the meeting ends, and she writes up an email lying saying I requested something I did't and that they rejected it. All appeals are just met with the claim that I didn't state what accommodation I want clearly, even though I sent links ahead of time to reputable sites listing them.

Never realized that's what it must feel like as a minority to get brushed off and ignored due to who you are.

<comment><USER33> Stop posting about this online, get a lawyer, and sue. Discrimination against medical conditions is against the FMLA. Otherwise what kind of accommodation did you need?

[https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Two things stick out for me:

\- leftover food. Really? This is really shitty behaviour; I am all for reuse, recycle; but this is neither the time nor the moment

Independent of that: \- I do not know much about US-Universities, so I checked. Duke is US Top 10, and A&T is not in the Times ranking since it is >600\. So to me calling A&T "and a damn good one." is just delusional. Maybe it is a 'not so bad one', but I think things (quality of the University) can only improve if one is willing to see the truth. Please correct me if I am wrong.

<comment><USER35> So they deserve leftovers and lip service as opposed to help inspire the students to do better and raise the school to a higher "rank"?

I don't get the ranking system either; it's education, it should be uniform, everyone should get the same opportunities and education and their diplomas should be "worth" the same, instead of it being a pissing contest where the higher ranked ones are only accessible to the rich and those in the "in" group. The US is lacking social mobility in part because of this.

<comment><USER36> > it's education, it should be uniform, everyone should get the same > opportunities and education and their diplomas should be "worth" the same

But that's delusional, right? Of course diplomas won't be the same because colleges cluster kids of similar intelligence and motivation. As has been pointed out on this page repeatedly, the kids at Duke are smarter and more motivated than at a typical school, so as a result, the diploma is worth more. And to pretend that Duke is only accessible to rich whites and Asians is a fallacy. I had lots of friends from poor families who had lots of aid and minority friends - the Duke campus is far more diverse than the country in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised nobody's commented with the first thing that occurred to me: UNC, Duke, and NC A&T. One of these is not like the others. It's NC A&T. Why? It's not race. It's the fact that UNC and Duke are much, much better schools. The top North Carolina Black developer talent is...already at Duke, of course.

Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.

<comment><USER7> You just restated the author's thesis.

<comment><USER38> No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".

The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.

<comment><AUTHOR> > No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]". > The > author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint > a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was > racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly > elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.

Author here. I wasn't implying that A&T is perceived to be as "prestigious" or highly ranked as Duke. I'm just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you're looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it's reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can't claim a pipeline problem if you're pretty much ignoring the places where you're most likely to find your target demographic.

Let's just drop the words "racism" and other "-isms" since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn't do their job, which was to FIND good talent.

I've worked at "elite" companies with people from "elite" schools. I've also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don't need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn't take out a $75k student loan.

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I absolutely agree that as a society we should stop placing so much emphasis on "prestigious" schools and using that as such a strong filter.

That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.

To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's not a bad idea and it's why I'm such a fanboy of interviewing.io and that whole platform. I don't think it's that hard to come up with new interview questions and screen through an anonymous platform.

I just think there's not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they'd actually get higher quality candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> While school specific recruiting trips maybe drive results for recruiting teams, there is no way to get away from inherit bias. By only recruiting at "top schools" you skip talent that couldn't afford tuition at an elite school and chose scholarships over paying 60k a year. You optimize for who could do well on the SAT in high school, which is inherently a product of privilege and who could pay to study for the test and even knew it was a road block (I didn't realize the SAT was important until friends that went to "good schools told me to study for it. In school I was always told you couldn't study for it). Systemic doesn't necessarily mean any particular individual is biased. The entire way we conduct business is.

<comment><USER8> Then why do minorities such as Indian Americans and other Asian Americans do so well in tech? Is it systemically biased for Asians? Where in the world do they do this correctly, by the way? What country or nation in the world has bias figured out so well that they have perfect proportionality among all races and sexes among all career paths?

<comment><USER40> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country. Those who don't come from rich families, those who didn't go to the top schools in their country, are much more likely to just stay home, instead of get sponsored by their families to go to the other side of the world to search out the best opportunities.

<comment><USER41> >> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self- selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country.

This is absolutely not true for "majority." A significant minority of them, this is probably true about, but a cursory review of how Chinese-Americans arrived to this country will probably dispel this rumor fairly quickly.

<comment> barry-cotter 54% of Chinese Americans have a Bachelor's or higher, 50% for foreign born. Things have changed in the last 30 years. Trust me when I say 50% of Chinese in China do not have a university degree.

[https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian- americans-c...](https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans- chinese-in-the-u-s/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was 100% on board with the "it's just a pipeline problem" idea until I started interviewing. The more I interviewed, the more I saw how sourcing/recruiting works, the more hiring decisions I witnessed being made, the clearer it became that tech hiring is incredibly subjective. That subjectivity gives room for all kinds of bias to creep in at all the different points of the process.

People get upset about the idea of unconscious bias (I suspect they resent the implication that they're secretely racist or sexist) but it's very real. It doesn't have to involve the person's identity. Bias creeps into your decision- making when you're having a bad day, or when the candidate reminds you of a person you don't get along with, or when they just rub you the wrong way for some reason. It's very easy to dress it up as objectivity. You're just grilling them on the technical details, holding them to the company's high standards, being a bar-raiser, something like that. The reverse is also true - you cut people slack because you like them without even realizing what you're doing.

Recruiters devote the most time to candidates they think have the best chance of getting through the interview process. The interview process tends to be bullshit and easily gamed. Industry candidates who have proven an ability to make it through a similar hiring process will be given preference over those who haven't. Student candidates at schools who know the score will be given preference over those at schools that don't play ball.

Referalls cause a slew of problems. The way hiring decisions are made cause a slew of problems.

This may come off as bitter. I am bitter - not about being rejected, but rather about the people I've had a role in rejecting over the years. Industry candidates who were obviously good at their jobs but terrible at the interview dance. Student candidates who were obviously smart and ambitious but only became aware of the types of questions they would be asked a week or two before the interview. Working with and reporting to cruel and selfish people who excelled at an interview process that's so convinced it's objective and meritocratic that evaluating soft skills isn't even considered.

It's so widely understood and accepted that software hiring processes are bullshit, but for some reason the minute people start talking about the impact of that bullshit on diversity... "it's a pipeline problem."

</comment><comment><USER43> It is appalling how poorly NC A&T was treated here and I think we all need to be having this conversation, but at the same time you can't just ignore the fact that Duke and UNC are just in a totally different league in terms of university rankings, so it's not surprising that they're getting the red carpet treatment.

For the record I think university rankings are stupid, and the college application process is certainly no meritocracy (an unremarkable high school classmate of mine got into Duke with a 3.4 GPA despite being rejected at our state's lower ranked state schools - she came from a family of Duke alumni). But it doesn't surprise me that companies engage in this university elitism, as sad as it might be.

</comment><comment><USER44> It is entirely possible for there to be a pipeline problem, and also for behavior like the one described in the post to bias recruiting. Two things can be true.

<comment><USER7> Ok. Sure. And?

<comment><USER44> The post ends with:

> Pipeline problem, my ass.

after spending exactly no words refuting pipeline issues. I'm left to conclude that the author feels the two explanations are mutually exclusive and that by giving an anecdote about one, you can determine the other isn't real.

<comment><USER45> The issue is that people tend to use "pipeline problem" to ignore and excuse real issues with bias.

So it is not about rejecting the existence of a pipeline problem, it is instead to reject this as an excuse to ignore other real problems.

That is likely what the author was trying to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> US College Rankings 2020

Duke University: 10th

North Carolina A&T: >600th

While the author tries to frame the university as "a damn good one", in reality it probably isn't.

<comment> dan-robertson Do you consider the treatment of NC A&T by Hooli to be disrespectful? I certainly do.

The treatment looks to me like people (or the firm) felt obligated to show up but not obligated to put much effort in or to expect to recruit anyone. If they are running a recruiting event with little expectation of recruiting, does that not agree with the article's view that the event was solely paying lip service to diversity.

<comment><USER47> Now the question is what is better for the students?

a) being visited and disrespected

b) not being visited at all

<comment><USER48> Why are those two the only options? How about:

c) being visited and treated with some respect

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> People are too comfortable. Your life exists in a tech bubble where your biggest annoyances are the most trivial things (my Tesla panels don't line up, ios does this annoying thing, someone said something rude on twitter)

Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.

The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

<comment><USER50> Oh, it will happen, no worries. It happened before in 2001, when "tech" became a four-letter curse word. It will most definitely happen again.

<comment><USER33> And then blink and all _tech_ products will be rebranded as _lifestyle_ products overnight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Something like this happened at UW. I remember going to a diversity career fair in 2015 and Uber had a booth there.

Turns out they were there to recruit drivers to drive for Uber.

<comment><USER33> Please try to find some kind of documentation of this. I believe you, this is simply amazing readymade satire.

<comment><USER35> I dunno, the idealized Uber driving career sounds like something a student could do as a side job. That's how IIRC Uber started off as, but it quickly became a more-than-full-time job for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Go browse Blind for a few hours and you'll see how people really feel about these issues. I know some of the comments are in the minority, but even then, some of the comments are straight up vile.

<comment><USER53> Christ, it's worse than many of the default subreddits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> When I was coming out of school, non-prestige schools (and locales) were simply _left out of recruiting altogether_. I graduated literally first in my class year, with a BS in CS and Business Administration minor... and wasn't pursued at all. Meanwhile, I already had a software engineering career going, enjoying the setting and challenge as well, and I wasn't particularly concerned at the time. I had developed a skill set spanning both programming and computing center operations (having started there), and I was pretty invaluable in my group from the outset, and the recognition was really valuable to me.

So, you'd think that management in my group (at least) might consider panning for additional nuggets in the same stream (top performers at lower-prestige schools), right?

No.

The hiring manager did recruiting trips where he wanted to travel. New York. Hawai'i. Etc.

He'd hire one candidate from each locale, apparently to justify the trip. Attractive female candidates didn't even have to meet the official policy constraints (a _Sociology_ degree is not CS, engineering, or even BA, sir).

Eventually, I got recruited elsewhere not by any standard channel but by a personal friend.

Not everyone is born into resources. I had to both support myself and put myself through school. That constrained my choices and forced me to be resilient in ways peers my age didn't need to be. Employers who hire by formula completely omit my kind.

</comment><comment><USER55> What I struggle with when it comes to claims of {whatever group} bias as a cause (the correlation is easy, but I stress "cause") for why any given industry or sector of the economy doesn't represent a desired mix of group attributes is this: There are millions or even tens of millions of actors involved in these economic models and if group attribute bias is driving these hiring or promotion or pay decisions then that means, by definition, that the motivation of bias is overriding the motivation to optimize for value (whether it be NOI for a mature business or speed of market capture for a new one).

So what I don't get is, if everything else is equal between two candidates except for a) their contribution to value and b) their group attribute, how is it that so many actors choose b and leave a on the table thus knowingly performing poorer for shareholders and risking failure at the hands of competition purely because of a group attribute bias?

I get that there would be some actors that would choose bias over value. But how is that no one break ranks. Wouldn't there have to be a massive amount of collusion and coordination to make sure that every founder and manager from every entity all agrees to do this? Because anyone that breaks from the mold would end up benefiting financially.

I get that this perspective undermines the popular narrative, so go ahead and down vote if you think my intention is to do that. But that's not my intention. What I'm looking for is a rational description of how the economic mechanics work with a popular narrative about bias against what is also a popular narrative that humans are greedy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the Dan Luu blog linked in the first paragraph of the article [1]. He tackles exactly this and does a really good job at explaining it and citing sources.

I might butcher this, but there's an excellent part in there where he takes a look at the papers that showed discrimination in sports and how teams that discriminated less, actually had an advantage and performed better. For decades, teams were hiring less qualified white players and actually were leaving money on the table. Looking at sports data is nice because there's tons of it and it's easier to evaluate "employee performance".

The issue with ignoring those NC A&T students was that those recruiters didn't even bother evaluating them to see if there were a few rockstar developers in the group. Had they given them a fair shot and evaluation, we might have made better hires overall.

[1] [https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/](https://danluu.com/tech- discrimination/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wonder if there's some self-fulfilling prophesy with the recruiters.

If they put forth a half-assed effort at a "lesser" school I have a feeling the best and brightest at that school would feel that and be less than receptive about working there. Meaning they only get serious inquiries from less-than-stellar recruits leading hiring managers to feel that school isn't worth more effort.

If I show up to dates in pajamas it seems odd to come to the conclusion that my dating pool doesn't meet my standards

</comment><comment><USER57> I went to a large state school, Rutgers, and have worked both with people from Ivy League schools and other state schools.

You could swap out UNC and NC A&T with "Ivy League" and "State School" and you would effectively get the same story. And yes, 100% there are tech companies who put a premium on Ivy League vs non-Ivy League based on my own personal experience with recruiting.

Dan Luu (mentioned in the original article) has previously talked about this along the lines of (paraphrasing): "I went to #25 of the top 25 schools. Friends of mine, who were better potential hires, went to #26 and got substantially fewer offers and the offers were lower quality".

If there are biases in how companies treat you based on solely the university you went to, I find it easy to believe that there could be other biases as well.

</comment><comment><USER58> NC A&T has an average SAT score on par with any random flyover college. Yet I don't see any tech recruiters making the trip out to Bemidji State. The fact is that students at HBCUs are significantly advantaged in recruiting compared to any comparable college.

<comment><USER59> I don't see how SAT scores would indicate the level of engineering talent at a school in any way. There in plenty of racial bias in standardized testing.

This statement is exactly the sort of attitude that needs to be thrown out the window if we want to make real progress addressing the racial gap in tech.

<comment><USER58> "I don't see how SAT scores would indicate the level of engineering talent at a school in any way"

Inability to figure out why IQ might be correlative with engineering ability (as it is with practically any performance measure you can name, reified by over 100 years of exhaustive data) is indicative of a failing of reasoning on your part, not a problem with the argument.

I do agree with you that in order to address the "racial gap" in tech we would have to ignore most metrics that would predict tech aptitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There are a lot of people here reinventing Sabermetrics.

Go on, read Moneyball, and consider that the selection criteria from top- ranked universities may be low-quality indicators of success at actually getting things done.

</comment><comment><USER61> In India I've seen bias against different groups, regions, religions, languages etc. in hiring, promotions. The only difference is that everyone has bias against everyone to a level that one can't point out which group is more biased. It evens out I guess

</comment><comment><USER62> Maybe it's the style of the article but I'm not sure I get the point. Is the complaint that tech is "too white"? If so, that doesn't seem true. Look for example at Google's own internal reporting: Whites are only something like 55-60% of the workforce, with Asians at 35-40%. Once you account for population totals overall, Whites are underrepresented. And I'm sure the same is true at Microsoft.

Is the point then that there just aren't many Blacks? Are Asians in the tech industry not part of the "minority" in the context of this conversation? Sorry but I'm losing track too quickly of what is even being discussed.

</comment><comment><USER63> when 36% of google can be asian, majority coming from a different country and most probably a much poorer per capita income then anyone in USA. I don't really think anyone was discriminating, go to any top tech school and see the percentage of people by race and you'll pretty much see the same in companies. if anything there's a supply shortage of tech talent I'm pretty sure they don't need to discriminate if someone is good enough

</comment><comment><USER64> As someone just starting to grow a development team (currently four people) in Denver CO, I'm already thinking about how to build a diverse group. Does anyone have any resources, books, or maybe just some plain common sense advice to recommend?

<comment><USER33> I'm not really one to ask about this, as I don't hire people and am white so can't really give any context to this recommendation, but you could ask the people involved in Juneteenth Conference for help? It was founded by a Black Microsoft engineer, so I'm sure their network has some people with the _right stuff_ for your needs, and I'm sure they also know some good people of other backgrounds too. We all can help diversity _directly_ by recommending our friends to each other, when appropriate.

Also, diversity isn't only about race, although it is also about that. It's also about equal access. @AccessForAll on Twitter can probably help you much better than I can in that area.

[https://juneteenthconf.com](https://juneteenthconf.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Practically companies outsource the recruitment process to schools. To get in a top school you need to have passed certain filters so it is more likely that talent can be found there. It's applicable is any country not just USA and in sports as well.

It's a hierarchy building system that works but of course it's not perfect.

If you are presuming that untapped talent exists in lower ranking schools on a large scale, companies would shift their recruiting strategies because people from top schools require much higher starting salaries. Leading companies recruit from top schools to remain in the front.

The hypothesis that some groups (black, women, lgbt, etc) are systematically marginalised is not compatible with capitalism. While it has an element of truth due to the in-group preference (which a very natural phenomenon - <USER3> trees do it) in a ruthless market companies which discriminate are at a loss - they loose star employees and eventually their leading position. If huge untapped potential exists in the marginalised groups this would create a market opportunity: companies could only hire from these groups and outperform the others. I don't see this happening.

</comment><comment><USER66> Rooney Rule, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER67> This absolutely enraging, but I'd like to also point out that the author's own alma mater is about equidistant from UNC and Duke and was not visited. Why was that? Its absolutely disgusting that they treated A&T's stop this way but what's the excuse for excluding NC State?

<comment><USER7> NC A&T is an HBCU. The subtext isn't that recruiting teams prioritize top-tier schools --- of course every firm does this. Rather, it's that HBCUs get included in these trips, so that HR departments can report metrics about outreach to URMs ("trips made to HBCUs" are an especially straightforward metric), but when those visits actually occur, they're performed with such disrespect that they lay bare the underlying biases.

<comment><USER68> I had to look up what HBCU stands for:

"Historically black colleges and universities"

<comment><USER69> As a non American that term sounds outrageous and bizarre

<comment><USER41> The term isn't, but the history of why HBCUs exist sure is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> So this is based on one anecdote with one company and this ends up with a blanket statement about society at large?

<comment><USER71> Since this is written by a Black person in tech, my guess is that his beliefs are based on a lifetime of being treated as a second-class citizen, and this anecdote was merely a particularly obvious case.

However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.

[1] [https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873](https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873)

<comment><USER37> This is BS. The study is from 2003 and isn't about elite tech jobs. There is evidence that, nowadays, there is a large bias in favor of women and under- represented minorities in, for example, academia and top-tier tech when controlling for resume.

<comment><USER7> Present that evidence, please. The comment you're trying to rebut did you that courtesy; repay it.

<comment><USER37> This is a good point and a reasonable request! Here's one [https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360)

Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.

<comment><USER72> _> Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide._

The Occam's Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.

<comment><USER73> > The Occam's Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are > popular because most available evidence supports them.

That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.

Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?

Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).

<comment><USER74> Steve Hsu wasn't fired. He resigned from his position overseeing other people's research. He kept his position as a professor with tenure.

Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7Ier...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7IerP_VBDridmQ- rI9M2TAE/edit)

<comment><USER73> Twas a forced resignation.

I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:

Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.

> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing > and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the > protests were about more than fatal shootings.

It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.

<comment><USER74> Someone could argue Hsu was effectively demoted but he wasn't even effectively fired. Someone can disagree with the case against him but that isn't a good reason to misrepresent it.

Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?

The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Wow, that's really fucking terrible. That should have brought up so many red flags. At this point I'm of the opinion that sensitivity training shouldn't be something done post facto as an apology. Give sensitivity training to everybody preemptively. First, sensitivity training is not and should not be a punishment. We should all be at best excited and at worst neutral about expanding our worldview and learning from others. Second, we shouldn't have this weird system where Alice calls Bob out, HR makes Bob do sensitivity training, Bob has some resentment for being embarrassed and Alice still doesn't feel comfortable around Bob.

Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.

We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.

<comment><USER76> It's called diversity training and is already "preemptively " required at various fortune 500 companies. I've personally experienced it.

<comment><USER77> I've often found diversity training is itself reductionist and racist, by teaching stereotypes.

<comment><USER35> What do you propose as an alternative?

<comment><USER77> No diversity training. Minorities already receive positive discrimination in tech companies and hiring in general. Studies around blind hiring have revealed that when names are concealed even less minorities get selected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty weird that the story doesn't involve him bringing up the problem with HR or other engineering managers. The people who do the main revenue- generating work of a company (e.g. engineers in a tech company, the finance people in an investment bank) usually have a lot more power in an organization than HR / recruiting. So if he didn't do that, does that make him complicit in the racism? Or if he did try and got stonewalled, he should share that, along with the name of the company.

And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it _could_ happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' \- in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.

<comment><USER19> I've spoken out against HR for dissimilar reasons and found myself out of the job not too long later. I don't blame him for not raising his head at his workplace...

<comment><USER25> I think that still makes him morally complicit.

<comment><USER45> I think you need to spend less time attacking people who bring issues to light, and more time recognizing and agreeing that there is a problem in the industry that needs to be solved.

Attacking the person who is bringing the issue to light makes it seem like one is trying to distract from the issue being brought up, and put blame on the individual for talking about the problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ajax based streaming without polling - <AUTHOR> http://www.codekites.com/ajax-based-streaming-without-polling/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but seems to depend on browser quirks. It would seem that websockets is still a more general solution.</comment>