Reginald Braithwaite

to @asanagi who's shadowbanned: [this comment of yours](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9428765) was flagged, I suppose by users, and you've been out ever since.

You may want to appeal to hn@ycombinator.com, your comment wasn't egregious IMO, but the snark made it look trollish.

Looking at your comment history, I see other comments that would probably have gotten you (shadow)banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9850480

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766989

You may want to tone down the aggressiveness in some of your posts.

Edit: addressing your concern about gender, since I feel to some extent sympathetic to what you feel, but not to your reactions.

People who systematically graft a men (agressors) vs women (victims) on topics like domestic violence or prostitution do grind my gears, since it's only part of the narrative and they tend to be blind to the rest of it.

That being said we've been through a heavily misogynistic period (see the women's right movement in the 20th century or this story about raganwald's mother: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.html), and, due to networks effects, it requires sustained action to correct (see http://ncase.me/polygons/), removing the old biases is not enough.

Still, invoking imaginary hard core feminists in that thread about positive discrimination towards women in academia was a bad idea. Without more context, I would have flagged it if I had seen it back then.

This article is needlessly sensationalistic and the claim that there is a "shortage" of ultra-elite engineers illustrates a basic misunderstanding of math. But it does show us what a red herring the phrase "STEM" is.

Let's not get bogged-down in STEM, or the differences between Engineering and Computer Science. There are massive differences both in the curriculum and quality of instruction even inside the field of CS.

I believe there is a massive shortage of people who are capable of programming in mainstream languages and platforms. The tool chains that have been developed to solve problems for online retail, advertising, travel, media, entertainment, etc are now in the process of being applied to virtually every other industry.

I think the failure of our industry (post-2000) to attract more people to this field is sad. I think the emphasis on ultra-elite SV talent ignores the broader application of programming to the world at large, and perpetuates an attitude that people who program are special, as opposed to simply being passionate practitioners of an increasingly creative trade.

Below are some interesting links I've picked up on this subject:

http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/29/calling-all-hackers.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=2

http://readwrite.com/2012/05/17/computer-programming-for-all-a-new-standard-of-literacy

Theory (almost) always precedes evidence, and coming up with a novel, biologically-plausible explanation for a common ailment is absolutely a valid, useful scientific contribution.

This is the case in physics and astronomy. People make predictions that are not only untested, but we have to invent equipment to test them.

One of the great early accomplishments in science was when astronomers, observing our Sun, noted an unknown yellow spectral line signature. In 1868, Norman Lockyer predicted that it must be created by a hitherto unknown element, which he named “Helium” after the Greek Titan of the Sun, Helios.

In 1895, two Swedish chemists detected helium in ore samples here on Earth, and in the great tradition of the scientific method, we had a theory, a prediction, and a confirmation of the theory by test.

http://braythwayt.com/2017/12/29/crown.html

Sometimes the good stuff isn't even on the first page. For example, see [0] (scroll down to the follow up) and the HN discussion [1] referenced there. Also, collapsible threads doesn't have to mean pre-collapsed threads.

To me it seems like collapsible threads would help, not harm, in this case because more people would have collapsed the OT first thread and participated in the discussion about the actual topic. I realize there are two assumptions built in to the above that may not always be true: 1) OT threads are bad or less desirable and 2) more people in a discussion is better.

0 http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.html
1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292

This is spot on. And if you think about it neurologically, changing patterns of thinking that have grown into your brain make it even harder, like breaking a facebook habit.

It's a process of learned helplessness: http://braythwayt.com/2015/01/20/learned-helplessness.html

The cognitive portion is only half the picture though, and I think wealthy people(especially moderately wealthy people) suffer from something similar(e.g. doctor just trying to get through the day rather than save lives and cure diseases.)

The other half is the social mechanisms that make poverty endemic. Going right to the root: it's the monetary system itself.

When I became an engineering leader, I wanted my turn designing recruiting to be simple, effective, and not do any unnecessary hazing of candidates. That led me to this essay: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people.html

What I realized is that large tech companies invented modern technical recruiting as a way of choosing between multiple qualified candidates. Many other companies that don't have this problem then started a recruiting cargo cult of similar practices thinking this is how you found the best people.