I might be wrong, but regarding the anecdote about the physicists at Michigan’s Albion College attempts to model the spread of COVID-19, I think the author misfired. From what I understand, many non-epidemiologists have been surprisingly insightful during the pandemic.
When the axe finally fell, My boss walked my resume over to a sister company in the same private equity group. Had an offer within a few weeks. He gets maximum internet good guy points.
However, in the meantime, I wound up speaking with a diverse assortment of scum, villainy, and ineptitude.
"Lichess is for professionals. Plenty of GMs ims and masters play on it. Even Magnus plays the tournaments. This is like saying Linux is not enough for computer professionals."
This is a misunderstanding. Lichess is used by chess professionals for playing online chess against each other (which is mostly recreation and not serious chess preparation). Software like ChessBase is used for game preparation.
When I first looked at the website, I thought that it looked like a nice student assignment or a weekend project. But seeing that you are already attempting to monetize this website and that you are treating this somewhat seriously, I have to tell you that your software is lightyears behind the chess opening modules of professional chess software such as ChessBase 15 or Chess Assistant 12.
I can't speak to Chess Assistant, but as a longtime Chessbase owner/user, it lets you:
* Search any database (proprietary or freely downloaded) for games matching positions (partial position matches too)
* Quiz yourself on openings; e.g. the actual memorization of the move orders, which I don't believe ChessRoots is showing
* Generate endless tactics problems to drill on
* Generate annotations for games; e.g. branching moves, variations, text comments etc.
* Graphical markup of positions, to show tactics like pins, skewers, forks, etc.
* ChessBase gives you a perpetual license. You can upgrade if you think new versions are worth it (they usually aren't). I happily used ChessBase 9 for several years before upgrading to 14.
It's really not a fair comparison. If ChessBase is Photoshop, ChessRoots as it is now is just a simple painting tool. This isn't to say that ChessRoots can't be something worth the price down the road, but for now this is not a great comparison.
Chess.com is also something that I've happily paid for for many years. For $99 a year, you get unlimited tactics training, engine analysis (with Stockfish), and a full license to what used to be called Chess Mentor, in addition to opening specific training.
That is not a favourable comparison for this website.
For those who are looking for chess opening preparation software for free, I recommend just using lichess.org. Considering that lichess is ad-free and run by volunteers only, it is amazing how much it offers (although it's not enough for chess professionals).
Lichess is for professionals. Plenty of GMs ims and masters play on it. Even Magnus plays the tournaments. This is like saying Linux is not enough for computer professionals.
"It seems highly likely that these preferences are socially constructed."
People love to think this way, but study after study suggests that those preferences are at least partly biological. It's one of those cases where there is a disconnect between the scientific understanding and the beliefs of the general public (including policymakers).
"Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face. The results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin."
Sounds like my experience is more unusual then. I would love to hear from other people. Java has been front and center on my CV since I graduated from college and for the ~10 mid-size and small companies that I've interviewed at, not a single one has put me on the spot regarding my knowledge. Not that I would mind. My partner was a little thrown off, though.
Psychology sits in a really weird (and interesting!) place between the social sciences and "hard" sciences. I thus find either classification reasonable, as unhelpful as that may be.
It was a myth much longer ago than 2013 yet the article is no less valid today. In fact with the rise of bootcamps and so on it has gotten even worse in software particularly. There should be laws against bootcamps ripping off hopefuls with false promises.
What false promises? Many of them graduate and are getting real jobs. One of the fastest growing new boot camps even lets people attend for free and makes back their money as a percentage of future salaries earned. Nothing could be further from ripping students off with false promises of jobs.
You must have seen the ads... “average salary in data science/cyber security/whatever is $$$” with the clear implication that taking their $$$ 8-week course will let you sail into one of these jobs.
What’s wrong with bootcamps? I know a few success stories, and I firmly believe that if somebody wants to learn programming, it is doable almost for everyone. It is hard, like learning a foreign language, but as nearly everybody can learn e.g. Spanish, so nearly everybody can learn how to program.
"Another reason for the current problems with bootcamp job placement is that employer expectations, and their attitudes towards bootcamp grads, have changed since the early days. A lot of employers who did hire from bootcamps found that although many of these bootcamp grads did well at interview, they had trouble being immediately productive once in post. The underlying issue was that these new hires lacked the fundamental programming knowledge and other skills (such as problem-solving and technical communication) that they needed to work effectively without lots of additional support or guidance."
"“Our experience has found that most graduates from these programs are not quite prepared for software engineering roles at Google without additional training or previous programming roles in the industry,” said Maggie Johnson, Google’s director of education and university relations, in a statement. “We generally don’t hire from coding schools,” said Robyn Blum, a spokeswoman for Cisco. “Coding schools haven’t been much of a focus for Autodesk,” said Raymond Deplazes, a spokesman."
I find that many 4-year CS grads have a problem with problem-solving and technical communication. Bootcamp grads average worse, but it's not something that I'd use to exclude all of them.
I've worked at two companies that have hired both experienced developers and people fresh out of a bootcamp.
Bootcampers tend to have roughly the same level of programming skill as someone fresh out of a CS degree course who has brushed up on the tech we use. Additionally, many have backgrounds in other fields (everything from working in a small business to line cook to psychology to sales).
If your company isn't prepared for the mentoring and training needed to deal with junior developers, hiring someone fresh out of a boot camp is a bad idea, especially for someone like Google or Cisco that does a ton of programming at much lower levels than web development and doesn't treat it as a primary focus (where more resources are likely to be spent in mentoring).
Well, it is somewhat unrealistic to hope to secure a software engineer position in FAANG immediately after a bootcamp. A well-paid position of a (junior to mid) software engineer in a smaller company is quite achievable, though. After 2-3 years of real-world experience there one could try their hand at FAANG interviews.
It seems like you are just repeating the same specious point that OP was refuting.
Right now, it feels like companies like Google are mostly silencing hate speech, violent extremists, and pornography, but there is no guarantee that their censorship will remain that way in the future. In a not-so-hypothetical future where a single private company has taken almost whole control over online media and starts imposing heavy censorship over non-offensive speech, are we going to continue saying "it's a private company, and if you don't like it, you can just share your opinions on this platform that nobody reads"?
Presumably if they blocked speech that most people actually wanted to see, they'd leave to one of the billion other messaging tools. You can still say anything you want over email.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Your opinion has no right to exist on any platform. Don't like it? You can move off of it. Bring other people to a platform that goes by rules you like. I don't use Gab, I am not interested in it, but it exists and has rules you may prefer if this hypothetical situation were to occur.
I like diverse viewpoints being allowed. It is unacceptable, however, to be so entitled as to try to force companies not to censor whatever they feel like.
Would you be similarly comfortable with your cell provider censoring your calls and/or texts? After all, it's unacceptable to force them not to censor whatever they feel like.
We're talking about protected classes here, and I don't think it's equally unacceptable. On a fundamental level, inherent characteristics (race) are very different from ideas (speech). So I think you can be in favor of anti-discrimination on basis of who you are, while also being against beliefs becoming a protected class.
Though, just so you know where I'm coming from, in my ideal world it would be strong social and business pressures that enforced the idea of protected classes, not regulation. I'd support any competitor which was more ethical, but complex issue.
I used to think like you do, but what changed my mind was that I tried to consider whether a hands-off approach will maximize total freedom.
If, by regulating the way people do business, we can increase total freedom in the world, I think that it's a worthwhile exchange. The way we do business is already regulated, and is one of the powers that we explicitly grant the government in the constitution.
The way I see it, forcing social platforms to accept free speech is really just a commercial regulation, and not a speech regulation. After all, we all understand that this post doesn't reflect the opinions of YC, and thus forcing YC to accept this post doesn't restrict anyone's freedom of speech.
