Name: Twelve years a slave
ISBN: 9781539032854

Twelve years a slave

Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

What Hacker News says

red-indianJul 2017

Jefferson did in fact give Madison and Eston their freedom in his will, but attached them as indentured apprentices to John Hemings until they reached their 21st birthday.

(William) Beverly and Harriet both ran away from Monticello after their 21st birthday. Jefferson's policy was one of "non-pursuit" for slaves who had reached adulthood and chose to leave. They were not explicitly freed and were not given letters of manumission. They only remained free the rest of their lives because they passed as white and did not disclose details of their origin in their new homes. In the case of Harriet, Jefferson arranged for her to be given $50 and passage.

This solution for slaves that could pass to do so arguably was better than one of manumission. As white people, they faced fewer threats in their live to their freedom than freed slaves did. Freed slaves and blacks born free both, even in the north were periodically captured and re-sold into slavery, as is documented in Solomon Northup's autobiography "Twelve Years a Slave".

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RapzidApr 2015

- Twelve Years a Slave

- Writing High-Performance .Net

- The Joy of Cojure

- Systems Performance

- The Linux Programming Interface

- The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

- Building Microservices

Wow, I'm glad this topic came up; the pile-up is bigger than I realised. It's apparent that I finish novels faster than technical books :| I really need to buckle down and finish these off..

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firstOrderApr 2014

> We learned that unnamed employees felt pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit. We racked our brains trying to understand this new allegation...I am so very sorry if anyone felt that I was pressuring him or her for advice, labor, or to sign up. I truly never had that intention...my idealistic belief in the status-free community of GitHub, I failed to recognize that power structures cannot ever be obscured entirely.

> employees view them as disconnected and only trying to build empires of gold. Tom saw himself not as CEO, but as the architect of a unique business structure...He wanted to invest heavily in employees and to create a space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things. In our home every night, he spoke passionately about how to build a company that gave employees freedom.

Other than being a Github user and customer, I know nothing of the details of this case other than what I've read. She admits she was obtuse about "power structures" in the company, but this also is not a unique thing in Silicon Valley - she's not blind to these things in a unique way.

That said - it's like someone believing their own press releases. "A space that gave each employee the autonomy, tools, and support to build great things". To me that sounds like saying Platt from "Twelve Years a Slave" got an excellent bag to pick cotton from, and build up the glorious plantation he was working on. Preston-Warner can snap his fingers, and someone who was getting a check to put food on the table and a roof over their head is suddenly not going to have the rent check by the end of the month. Especially when the next employer is asking for references, why you left the last job, are there any gaps in employment etc. People on an H1-B visa are dependent upon the company so they can't be thrown out of the country, so their green card application can not be restarted etc.

This is in the default structure of a corporation, and the laws, and all the default papers that super-angels and VC's put forward. Ownership and control of a corporation is 80-90% in the hands of the angels, VC's and founders. Of the scraps left over, executives and top-level experienced techs get the lion's share. This is the reality, and everyone knows it. People believing their own press releases about people building great things are delusional. It's like the Tuskeegee or Dr. Mengele subjects happy about how they are helping contribute to science. No one is fooled by this other than naive, new to the workplace, socially maladjusted programmers in their early 20's. This is why there is such a feeding frenzy over this small pool of naive young men.

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