is there really any reason to expect the students who didn't take free points in exchange for privacy to outperform the observed group?

Sure, the results pertain more to excluding the internet from the classroom, but really that's just splitting hairs imo

That could depend on a two part hypothesis that I just came up with off the top of my head:

1) people who are more informed care more about privacy

2) you become more informed by being the type of person who seeks out and successfully obtains information and not being distracted

If 2) and 1) hold, your methodology will be biased to those liable to undertake distracting activities or be distracted. Furthermore, perhaps some would not even partake in the study because it's a distraction relative to why they're in the class in the first place.

Not saying that is demonstrable or true. Don't downvote the hypothetical messenger and all :p

Is there any reason we should be guessing at this when the experimenters could've chosen some other incentive (or none at all)?

And yes, I'd expect weaker students to be the more likely to spend their time / privacy on extra points.

Good designers and programmers do care about people of all ages, colors, orientations, genders, and ability. If tech is to make the biggest positive impact possible everyone must be on board.

I did not say that I do not care about people. I said I do not care about what type of people have written the language. Do you see the difference?

When I use Rust, I don't even know what was the colour and sexual orientation of every person that has written every part of it. Why do you think I should know that and care about that? What makes you think it is relevant?

Agreed. If we care about diverse perspectives, we can't imply that there's only one way to care about people.

That's a pretty harsh way to respond to someone expressing another diverse perspective. Different cultures have different concepts of propriety and politeness. One person's "tone deaf" is another's "respectfully forward". We can't ask for diversity while demanding people adopt our particular cultural norms.

> Why would you want a job you are not qualified to do.

money.

Also, credentialling. Even if you can't do the work and only stay a few months, Google or Goldman or another big name on your CV will still open many doors.

In Germany there is a culture of not changing jobs very often (at most every few years, but even this should not happen too often). So if you have a "well-known" name such as Google or Goldman Sachs on your CV, but worked there only for few months, it is a clear sign that you were fired and about every future employer will be very cautious.

Outside the Valley and startup culture most companies looking for software developers in the US view a tenure of less than two years as being short, and a series of them indicates "job hopping."

I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing, because good or bad it's simply the way it is.

What if you joined Goldman Sacchs and was poached by JP Morgan after 6 months?

What if you joined Google and was poached by Facebook after 1 year?

1. What is most important in your CV is the last employer. If it seems that you were fired, this can cause problems with getting a (decent) job afterwards. If you were poached, it is because the other employer wants you badly. So in your example your new "last" employer becomes JP Morgan or Facebook. So this kind of problem does not occur here.

This does not contradict the fact that it still leaves/can leave a bad impression on impression if your were willing to be poached without a very good reason, since can be considered as a strong sign that your are not loyal to your employer and only hunting for money.

2. Poaching is rather uncommon in Germany. As I outlined in 1 being willing to be poached multiple times is a sign that you are not very loyal to your employer. Thus there is a strongly reduced incentive for employees to be poached.

Also for poaching to work, you have to offer lots of money - I'd be really surprised if there are lots of employers that are willing to start such an "arms race with money". Why not simply offer decent money in your regular job advertisements and get good people without any arms race?

Poaching might make sense if there you want to get "rockstars" that are not available on the "free job market", but can only be poached. But I'm also not aware of any industry sector in Germany where there exist employees that are treated as rockstars. :-(

Your vision is clearly limited to Germany, where poaching doesn't exist because there is no jobs and no strong companies competing.

Just imagine a random company in a tech hub. They host a meetup once... the days after the meetup, most of their employees have been contacted by recruiters and other companies who attended.

If they want anyone in particular and/or if any employee's salary is not on-par with their value, here they go! :D

For medium to large companies, this is true in the U.S. as well. Six months at Facebook, Google, or Bank of America would be a huge red flag.

That person will always be the "Goldman alumni" or the "ex-Googler". Couple that with a semi-prestigious degree and they'll be set.

A terminal mux. Mux is short for multiplexer, which chooses between different inputs. It is a tool for running keeping multiple terminal sessions open at the same time. These sessions can be attached and detached from, which is often helpful when working on a remote machine you may want to access from different work stations.

Screen is a similar program.

> you can actually read and understand the code without even any formal training in the language.

Forgive my youth, which languages are these?

Some examples might be COBOL, Java, BASIC, and Logo.

Of course reading any program still requires a mind accustomed to logical thought. A subsistence farmer has a different sort of "no formal training" than an 18 year old taking Chemisty courses.

In any case there is no need to worry...the important thing is the ideas not the syntax. And the useful ideas tend to be conveyed through time in multiple languages.

I can't speak for COBOL and Logo... but Java, really? When you're looking at a hello world program in it, 80% of it doesn't make sense to someone not familiar with the concept - import? class? static? void?

BASIC is even worse in many respects. It starts being deceptively simple, but do you think that someone looking at these two lines:

   PRINT a, b;
   PRINT a; b

would be able to tell the difference? Or, say, what does this do?

   LINE (0, 0) - (100, 100),, BF 

(no, it doesn't draw a line)

And then if we're talking about classic BASIC, you have to remember that A% is integer while A$ is string etc. None of that is at all obvious.

Or, say, you see this:

   NAME x AS y

A reasonable guess would be that it renames a variable, or maybe creates an alias, right? But no - it actually renames a file with a name corresponding to a value in variable x, to a new name corresponding to a value in variable y. And many BASIC dialects will even helpfully stringize it for you, if the variables were, say, integers.

I taught myself HyperTalk with no formal programming training by reading the source code embedded in scripts.

I don't understand how race, gender, and class in particular can possibly be separated out from tech any more so than software patents. A community that has been so obsessed with disrupting any and all aspects of life can't ethically refuse to discuss the consequences of doing so.

I would assume that discussion about software patents would fall under the ban, too. You can conceivably draw a line between discussions about implementation and discussions about the laws affecting different implementation. Wouldn't all discussions of the law fall under politics? Maybe just all discussion of potential changes in laws?

GP suggested otherwise. Either way the bit about ethics was the point I'd prefer to discuss

Looks like you just communicated it in 16 bytes though.

Just like we pronounce 9¢ "9 cent sign" right?

You know that it works for at least two values of w, but you don't know that it holds for any value of w.

The Pythagorean Theorem doesn't work for any arbitrary value of x, but there are an infinite set of x,y,z triplets that do work.

But that's exactly the point.

All growing up we were told, "Be a generalist, not a specialist" There was no other acceptable route, so all the "good" kids identified patterns to get ahead.

That leaves many of us barking up when we notice a pattern. Of course, a generalization is a big bundle of things: abstractions, ceteris paribus, the act of generalizing, a general statement, pattern naming