I wish we responded to situations more proportionally.
In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not.
Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
Then, folks take the discussion to github and twitter (and, eventually reddit and hn). Presenting only their verdict: "A newer member made a sexist joke, and was called out on it as being inappropriate." No links to the joke. No evidence that the joke is sexist. This makes it so much easier to imagine something really bad. No, we just get a verdict and we should all rise up against this sexism (which absolutely is bad, of course). Let's get our pitchforks. This amplifies one side of the argument and shuts down any useful conversation. Worse, it's used to rush through a CoC change without allowing any thoughtful discussion.
Is this reaction proportional to the original joke? Is the reaction itself exemplar of how we would like to conduct ourselves?
> Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
In my experience this kind of stuff is extremely counter-productive. It puts people in the defensive, and remember, you haven't actually said anything: you only gave them a (somewhat rudely phrased) command, which is just not helpful. If I object to some behaviour I typically contact them in private (not in public) whenever possible, and explain how a particular joke or comment made me feel. >95% of the time, you'll get an apology without drama and all is fine.
"Assume good faith" doesn't mean "anything goes" or "give people a free pass", but rather a recognition that most of the time, people really aren't such bad folk, even when they're behaving as less-than-perfect.
It all seems a bit much for a single new user making a joke phrased in such poor English it's barely comprehensible and the very short discussion that followed on that shrug. And there is no real mention that this is somehow indicative of a wider structural problem.
So in the name of being inclusive they're bullying someone who is not a native English speaker for not knowing the nuances of political correctness in a foreign culture? Cool cool.
Yes. That's what happens when a group of hyper-politicized people that see/read about inclusiveness and things like that every day encounters people that aren't like them. It's nice that some Americans are currently noticing the issues happening in their country, I'm happy that people are committing time and energy to this. But many of these people have to grow up and realize that the whole world isn't the USA, that different countries have different problems and not everyone is aware of what's happening in the USA. Going around imposing your values is the exact opposite of what you should actually do.
> That's what happens when a group of hyper-politicized people
Well, maybe you work on undisciplined repositories or technical mailing lists, but most of us do not want to read people's jokes, funny, offensive, or not, when we are on a technical forum.
It's really patronizing to say, "Oh, those primitive foreigners, we have to excuse them for posting offensive jokes on a technical forum."
> It's really patronizing to say, "Oh, those primitive foreigners, we have to excuse them for posting offensive jokes on a technical forum."
That's patronizing because you're thinking of them as "primitive foreigners that posts offensive jokes", while you could think of them as "different people in a different culture that may not share every values with you". I don't understand why Americans are so afraid of swear words and jokes, but I don't think they are primitive or stupid or too uptight for it, they are just different.
Just look at how judging you are: "undisciplind repositories or technical mailing lists". Repositories are undisciplined because there are offensive jokes? Aren't repositories about code? "most of us do not want to read people's jokes, funny, offensive, or not, when we are on a technical forum": who is "us" here? People from the USA? You and an imaginary group of people? The whole world? I certainly don't mind a good joke, and I like some humor that can be considered too much in US culture.
Don't just assume that you're in the right and in the position to judge people.
Anecdotal, but all of the North Americans I've ever worked with, and am related to, swear far more than any Brit I've ever met. Perhaps it is a generational thing?
I can say that as a teen, the amount I swore ruffled feathers daily in the UK. In that same breath, I suppose foul-mouthed kids do tend to shock.
I wouldn't call it "bullying" myself, but it does seem a bit like making a mountain out of a molehill.
A big problem with these kind of discussions is that they tend to escalate quite fast. The battle lines are pre-drawn and anything that looks vaguely "sexist" or vaguely "cancel culture-y" will be shot at, no matter what the actual topic is. So this this (minor) incident becomes yet another front on the Great Culture Wars.
It's unfortunate because it's very hard to have good-faith conversations like this.
I think about this blog post from the creator of redis whenever some thing like this comes up: http://antirez.com/news/122.
> I believe that political correctness has a puritan root. As such it focuses on formalities, but actually it has a real root of prejudice against others.
I'd argue this isn't exactly a Trojan horse, it's a group of poor looking pilgrims who tell sob stories to the guard and convince them to open the gates.
It seems like there does need to be some sort of method for RESOLVING these situations.
I'd hate to make more of a process for parsing a one sentence joke but ... how else do you do it?
So you throw it to a committee who comes back with "We told the user their statement could be seen as sexist and not to make that joke anymore."
There you go. Done. Issue is no longer relevant, time to move on with life. If it comes up again with the same user, then you can worry about bigger things.
I'm sure there would be some bickering after that but at some point you can't have the argument going on forever on every rando social media site and ... version control site...
What you said is exactly right in a world of ephemeral speech, but difficult to employ in a world of permanent records. Anybody can simply link to the joke and stir outrage, over and over, out of the context of the larger learning process.
The Internet never forgets. It is genuinely unclear how to adapt pre-Internet norms. I would prefer presumption of innocence and of a learning process, that is summary dismissal of one-off out of context situations. But viral content (such a fitting expression!) begs to differ.
,if you look at the updated to the code of conduct it is clear what solution they are putting forward. the removed the sentence to honor the principle of charity(removed assume good intent), and gave permission to be public scolds ( added speak with good intent). it's a facisnating attribute of American politics that insist generally upbeat people become public scolds, as if them making a fuss is a convincing learning moment.
Even if its uncool, I agree that that response is uncalled for. I feel like the "dunking" style of social media activism has really become mainstream in wildly inappropriate situations.
You are asking all the right questions... And you will never get an acceptable answer beyond "Some times you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette."
Sadly, the CoC wars were lost several years ago. The victors had the simplest tactic: projection.
"We are just against all the bad things. We are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-prejudice. Why aren't you on our side?"
Well, I have two things to say. First, I eagerly await your omelette. Judging by how tolerant society has become, it should be any day! And second, why be against the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea? Democracy is in the name!
Exactly, and the "nice" approach is talking to people gently about why what they said is "harmful" or bad. But you still have to come to the same agreement or you're bad. It's not actually tolerance its "we'll give you a pass if you come to our side".
There's a saying "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs." It's a justification used by those who think they're bringing about some great positive change to justify the all the damage they caused.
For example, "In order to bring about our communist utopia, we're going to have to murder a few million people."
I don't think the CoC wars are lost, I'm hopefully we're on the cusp of the backlash.
The first project that succeeds with a CoC of "sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never harm you." is going to be a watershed moment that can recruit the growing population who are sick and tired of the leftist mob and their thought policing.
Over-sensitive, politically-correct people are going to end up in a hermetically sealed bubble of their own making, hooked up to virtual reality and drugs while the rest of us enjoy the real world. I have no problem with that. It's natural selection. Some people are too fragile. I'd rather let them lock themselves away in some virtual universe driving up virtual asset prices than have them in the real world drive up real world asset prices.
I can't believe that so many people are so suggestible. Part of me feels like they can't be serious; they're just acting out, conspiring in an attempt to incite (fool) others to adopt this strange vulnerable mindset.
It's easier for me to believe that it's a conspiracy than to believe that so many people are so gullible. Why am I not richer if the world is so full of gullible people? Where are all these suckers? Maybe I've been overestimating my neighbors and competitors.
What kind of world have these people been living in all these years?
The problem with political-correctness isn't that it's trying to be sensitive to people who have been harmed, it's that it's yet another form of centralized decision making, and thus bound to be wrong about many things.
As an employer, I would never hire someone who goes berserk and attacks others for perceived slights. Work is hard and it is much more fun when you can get along and joke with people you work with. If you feel like you are walking on eggshells all the time, no one has any fun.
It's quoted in the GitHub link, and presumably it'd be trivial to find in the list archives.
This isn't as benign as you characterize it, since it's basically "this date handling bug must have been created by a woman since women lie about their age". Lazy misogyny is still misogyny.
> Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list?
I understand what you're doing here (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions) and so aren't looking for a real answer, but the actual answer is: Of course it's unprofessional. Make "women jokes" while working at any modern company and see what happens.
> Is this reaction proportional to the original joke?
Again, this is a mischaracterization. This comment wasn't the cause of the change, but a final straw.
"Misogyny" means "hatred or mistrust of women". I don't see how this expressed either a hatred or mistrust for women. You are calling this person a horrible thing over a very small issue. I do not find this especially empathic.
I wish people were a bit more careful before slinging these words around, not just because it's overly harsh but also because I consider these to be serious issues, but when used as a cudgel carelessly thrown around it devalues the term, and thus devalues the actual real problems it describes (or rather, once described, as this ship, unfortunately, seems to have already sailed).
There really is some nuance to be had in these things.
A joke about performative third parties is not the same as joking about the class itself. That is why Tropic Thunder is still largely seen as acceptable blackface - because it was only used for the purpose of satirizing the act of blackface, not black people. Likewise, jokes about performative over-reactive wokeness by corporations are not insulting any tangentially mentioned race/sex/gender class.
rationalwiki? FYI, citing rationalwiki in a debate is a big red flag in terms of taking the argument seriously.
And in this instance, it's also completely unnecessary to your point. So please don't cite these types of radical sources when making innocuous points. It would be like if I was having a debate about average rainfall, and said something like, "Well, according to the UnabomberFanSite, the average rainfall is 3 inches". It's just so needlessly inflammatory and provocative that your best bet is to cut that out and replace it with a more mainstream source.
As an aside, I do not trust Rational Wiki to be a reliable source of information.
Just one example: Their information about Alcoholics Anonymous’s effectiveness can charitably be described as a dumpster fire: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous (For example, they cite Brandsma 1980, which is a very outdated chestnut anti-AA polemics always bring out; the study is really old and its methodology was pretty bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandsma_1980 )
Rational Wiki is one of the most unintentionally funny and ridiculous sites, given the name. It's probably one of the least reliable and credible sources of information on the internet due to the juxtaposition, a la DPRK's name. It's Pathos Wiki. [Something something Conservapedia, stare into abyss, etc.]
For some reason, it seems there are basically no nominally-neutral websites, forums, or news outlets that exist. (That I'm aware of.) I don't mean neutral; of course nothing is or can be perfectly neutral. I mean it seems no one is even attempting to be neutral or even attempting to portray themselves as neutral. There is no concept of an anti-agenda agenda.
Indeed. The one thing RationalWiki is good at is, when there’s some quack theory or junk science out there that’s not notable enough to grace the Wikipedia, RW often times has a page on it.
> I mean it seems no one is even attempting to be neutral or even attempting to portray themselves as neutral. There is no concept of an anti-agenda agenda.
> Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation.
It's not ironic. Forceful language (and rather tame still) is not just as bad as a 'joke'. The offence was not at the unprofessionalism of the joke, but at the contents of the joke. That is what fuelled a discussion.
Removing the line from the CoC also was not a response to the joke. It was a response to the ensuing discussion about the joke.
Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The 'verdict' as you call it, does not go into detail about the contents of the joke, because it was irrelevant to the reason of why they made a change. It could have easily been a different joke.
> Removing the line from the CoC also was not a response to the joke. It was a response to the ensuing discussion about the joke.
> Talking about proportionality as if the change was brought because of the joke is as questioning the proportionality of WW I to the death of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
I first thought your response was a joke, but maybe you actually mean that, put some emojis next time to show if you are joking
Humor has a fundamental role in bounds probing in a social setting. Make a joke, observe the (nonverbal) feedback, preserve social bonds through shared laughter. In a world driven by CoCs, there is no room for laughter.
> One of the most amazing things about suicide is that over the past 80 years or so in the United States, suicide rates have been extremely flat. The fact that suicide rates have not changed in response to changes in medical technology and other ways of life is astounding.
This may be true in the US, but in Greenland it seems like suicide rates have changed in response to changing ways of life:
An obvious question is whether suicide rates are unchanged, or simply flat because we have opposed changes obscuring the data.
There's a bit of variance in the US numbers, and I wonder how means reduction, a decline in chronic pain/terminal illness, and various way of life changes compare. I'd be surprised if none of those things were relevant, but less surprised if they didn't add up to a clear trend.
Went through several interviews with them, including their technical interview and had a blast. Met some nice folks and was having a lot of fun interviewing with them.
Was told, "I am confident that you would be a great addition to the team."
Then I hit a wall when Sid (sytse here on HN) was unavailable to perform the next interview for an indeterminate amount of time. Ended up waiting 2 weeks between interviews.
During that time I received an offer from another company and, asked if they could move things along or, perhaps, provide some timeline. At that time they made an informal offer via email.
Then, there were two problems as I see it:
1. The offer was significantly less than the floor I had given during the screening interview when asked about salary expectations. During that interview, the interviewer gave no indication that my expectations were out of line with Gitlab's salaries. [1]
2. When I finally interviewed with Sid, there was no mention or acknowledgement that an offer had been made.
My interview with Sid was tough, and definitely not what I was expecting after my earlier success interviewing with the company. Ultimately, he decided not to continue with my candidacy. I don't want to get into a "he said, she said" thing here, so I'll leave it at that.
I hope this post does not come off as "sour grapes". My objective is not to trash anyone at Gitlab, there are a lot of great folks over there. I think there were some surprises in their process and I would have liked to have known these things upfront before I contacted them.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry it took so long to schedule the interview with me. This was because of our company summit in Austin, but we should have made this clear to you up front.
1. Currently we ask for compensation information early in the process (during the screening call https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/#screening-call ) and the person asking will note the information in our applicant tracking system. We don't give feedback at that time. We're working towards a global compensation structure where we can tell candidates the compensation earlier in the process. Due to having people in 26 countries this will take quite some time.
2. I'm very sorry for this. I was not aware that an offer was made to you when I talked with you. The cause of the offer being made prematurely was that we wanted to inform you that we couldn't match your floor. Due to a misunderstanding between me and the person that made you the offer this was communicated to you as an offer instead of a heads up about the maximum compensation.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience being interviewed by me. Your private feedback about this was great and I'll follow up with you about the changes we made to made future interviews better.
I hope you're OK with me responding to your post. I assume it is OK since you're also posting in public.
Thanks for the follow-up. I appreciate it and I'm glad that my feedback might help improve your hiring process.
I don't mind your comment, and I hope you understand that there are no hard feelings at all. I hope you understand that my goal is not to damage Gitlab or yourself in any way.
I would like to say, I've been impressed by the openness and transparency at Gitlab, and I think this goes hand-in-hand with a desire to do the "right thing" in every way.
It is with that in mind that I posted my experience, because I think there are problems with the way our industry approaches hiring (as seen in our poor diversity numbers, age discrimination, etc) and more openness can only help. I wish more people shared their experiences, and I wish more companies were open to refining their hiring processes.
Nostalgia warning: I also grew frustrated with Rails / ActiveRecord and jumped to Merb / DataMapper with excitement. Perhaps it will sound like a small thing, but I remember feeling especially frustrated that every ActiveRecord model became such via inheritance. This drove me crazy:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
Why should my `User` extend from `ActiveRecord::Base`? Is a User of my app also an ActiveRecord::Base? What is an ActiveRecord::Base anyway?
So, when DataMapper came along and favored composition over inheritance I was sold.
However, my experience with DataMapper was that it didn't have the stability of ActiveRecord, nor did it reach feature parity.
And, then Rails killed Merb. At the time I thought it was a tragedy. The competition Merb provided did improve Rails, it would have been nice if that competition had been longer term, though. On the flipside, I wonder if there would have been enough community to support two large Ruby web frameworks.
In the end I made peace with Rails and ActiveRecord (and, believe it or not, even ActiveSupport!). I don't have great love for Rails, but it is a powerful tool, so I accept it for what it is.
That said, I think the author's criticisms are well stated and hopefully there will be some influence on the future direction of Rails, etc, and the way devs approach Rails.
Having used many different ORMs that let you think that your business models could just gain persistence with a little sprinking of automagic, I far prefer the non-object-orientation of ActiveRecord.
Databases aren't object-oriented. Thinking of them with an is-a, LSP etc. mindset is a recipe for pain down the road. Databases are containers for facts: a means of storing, finding, synthesizing and manipulating facts. Your User class isn't a user of your application; IMO it's wrong to think of it as an object, because it could just be a slice of the User's facts (e.g. a subset of the columns).
I'm not a big fan of object orientation any more, and I like my databases to be stores of facts. The data in the database is primary; code in the application is secondary. Persistence isn't something I add to my benighted objects to let them be reanimated by query; persistence is what lets me briefly get a handy representation of a tuple locally.
To my mind, ActiveRecord models are little more than hashes with a nicer syntax. I don't need them to be much more; I don't want them to be much more. You can try and add methods and make them smaller, but coordinating the manipulation of facts is problematic in a transactional world, and the responsibilities aren't clear either. Object orientation is predicated on the idea of message sends and hidden state; tables have explicit state and no behaviour. Not a good match.
Have you tried Sequel? Sequel has, for me, filled the void left by DataMapper. Most folks I know that have used both ActiveRecord and Sequel vastly prefer Sequel.
Something to consider for people interested in Sequel. Sequel is great and all, but it still follows the Active Record pattern (Sequel::Model), not Data Mapper. Also expect to run into some problems with gems that interact with ActiveModel (Devise, CarrierWave, etc.). It's all solvable of course but it might require some hacking. Most popular gems have sequel versions or ship with sequel support, but it's not as well tested and maintained, we had to contribute several patches. Also, if you plan on using Sequel with Rails, don't use any of it's plugins that make it behave closer to ActiveRecord. Stuff like nested_attributes, delay_add_association, association_proxies, instance_hooks. They seem really nice at first, but I guarantee they will cause all sorts of unpredictable problems down the road. I would recommend looking into something like Reform which decouples form logic from your models because working with complex forms is going to be harder without all of the AR magic.
Sequel::Model's quite optional - it doesn't force you to use the AR pattern. It's built on top of Sequel::Dataset, which is entirely usable all on its own.
It doesn't force you, but you lose all of it's ORM features. Sequel::Dataset is basically just a query builder so ROM would probably be a better choice then yeah.
As a thought exercise, suppose I have my User class and now I would like to write it as json. Do you think it would be strange if the established solution were this?
class User < JSON::Base
Where by extending JSON::Base, I now have access to helpful methods like to_json?
Instead we have JSON.dump(user). And, if I need to customize the way the User json is written, I can opt in by defining a method. Thanks to Ruby's open classes, I can make the definition of such methods optional, suppose a separate file includes something like:
class User
def as_json
end
end
Requiring this file will bring in the extra json behavior without littering my actual user.rb with the details of how a User is written to json. Whether this is worthwhile or a bad idea is debatable, but I like that it is possible.
Now imagine if persisting a model to the database were similarly flexible? What if we could do this?
ActiveRecord.save(user)
Maybe it would be a good thing, maybe not.
As it is, I've come to accept the ActiveRecord approach, but when I create a model that extends ActiveRecord::Base, I think of it, not as a User, but an ActiveRecordPersistedUser. Where it makes sense, I separate my BusinessModel's from my ActiveRecordPersistedBusinessModel's for clarity.
The inheritance approach, used in both ActiveRecord and ActionController is sort of like the original sin of Rails. It affects everything from semantics, to performance, to testability. It is often the reason things eventually seem hard, but also the reason many things initially seem easy.
Which seems a bit unusual to us outsiders, seeing as a lot of other major currencies with value roughly comparable to USD do just fine with coins for 1 and 2 denominations (EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, NZD).
There's a difference between the workability of a currency system using dollar coins and the desirability of dollar coins over paper money by individuals. For the monetary systems you describe there is no alternative to coins. That the systems "do just fine" is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people who use those systems would prefer to use paper "dollars" (or Euros, etc.) if they were available. I'm sure if the US got rid of paper dollars by fiat it would also "do just fine", but whether or not that's a change the public would appreciate is an entirely different matter.
I don't think you're going to find a lot of Europeans pining for smaller denomination bills to replace the highest denomination coins. Especially if you show them how disgusting a random 1 dollar bill looks like. I say this having lived through one full currency redesign and one instance of a dozen countries switching to another currency entirely. People had complaints, but replacing notes with coins was not one that I heard.
Apparently there's a difference in priorities. Some people prefer an illusion of no inflation with a greenback as strong as ever. Others might prefer making the high velocity currency units durable and easy to handle.
Indeed. However, I have not heard of any widespread dissent or disapproval of the changes either. The closest thing was the introduction of the 10 HKD coin (in parallel with the bill) which was not popular and is no longer made. Anecdotally, very few in Canada seem to mind, and I'm glad I don't need 10 quarters to do a load of laundry.
Nobody else spends dollar coins, so young cashiers sometimes don't even recognize it as currency they have to accept. The government would have to stop printing dollar bills for dollar coins to really see use.
I hate to be unhelpful, but I think this problem is intractable.
The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution. In fact, it seems like many of these discussions devolve into:
1. I have an idea!
2. Yeah, but that won't work because...
3. Oh, in that case we could just...
4. But, then...
The "quality" of HN and it's community is a function of many variables. It's hard, maybe impossible, to tweak the site and expect predictable results (and, there are always unintended consequences).
It doesn't help that the feedback cycle is so long.
Let's have a hypothetical. Suppose, we decided the problem was that HN had become to design-centric. We want fewer designers and more programmers. So, let's make HN ugly. Really ugly. Then all the designers will leave and we'll be left with programmers. How long after making the site ugly will we have to wait to see the results? What if the designers retaliate by making a client-side css hack to make HN look even better? Do we end up with more or fewer designers? Did we do damage to the population of programmers who also happen to be designers? And, how do we account for outside influences? What if a prominent designer linked to HN the week of our changes and our tweak is overwhelmed by the flood of incoming designers?
I hope I'm wrong. I've been here 1467 (!) days, I'd like to stay a long while longer.
The fact that these meta discussions predictably offer a wide array of solutions -- many of which are at odds with one another -- leads me to believe there isn't a solution.
I don't agree at all. Just because many people disagree does not mean there is no answer. I think the problem is that this is a hacker site, hackers like to put together technical solutions for moderating a forum, and forum moderation is primarily a people-problem. Thus the best answers here seem to get largely overlooked while people debate endlessly how to tweak the voting system (or some variation thereof). I don't know what the solution to that issue is but that doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Earnings are important, I'm sure -- but don't mistake them for wealth. I've known people with ludicrous earnings who still lived pay check to pay check. In fact, I suspect it's all too common.
Here's an eye opener: You're a mid-level employee at a medium-sized company and you realize you're as wealthy as your spend-thrift CEO who is making >10x as much as you are.
My last two tax filings showed I [edit: grossed] less than $15,000 for the past 2 years, yet I generally have more discretionary income now than the years when I was making ~$50,000/yr. I also have a wife and two kids.
I have no debt of any kind (house and car owned outright), am quite frugal, have two monthly bills (phone/internet and power), and three yearly bills (property tax, car registration, and auto insurance). Telecommuting from a rural area helps, as does raising some of our own food.
Sure, we don't live like kings, but my kids always have both parents around and we live a good, simple life. I'm not rich, but I feel quite wealthy in terms of quality of life.
I don't want to give the impression than I'm down on anyone earning (or aspiring to earn) large amounts of money. At one time I aspired to break the $100k/yr mark by age 30 (certainly not too ambitious, but it seemed doable at the time).
Obviously I had a change of heart in the intervening years, and so far I'm quite pleased with things. To each their own.
Then your case is special (maybe you are just, well, more mature in years than many of us, or maybe you had family help). Most people just starting out don't own their houses outright.
What we did was buy progressively cheaper and smaller homes, as opposed to the general trend of buying up. That, combined with a couple of modest (no more than $20k profit) real estate sales of raw land we purchased, we were able to pay everything off a couple of years ago.
I decided a long time ago that working outside the home, and working full-time at all, was detrimental to our quality of life. As such, being financially "secure" meant not owing anything to anybody and having minimal living expenses. It took almost 15 years, but we eventually achieved our very humble goal.
Yeah, this distinction is important. Recently in Germany this report made the news how nearly a quarter of professional football players are broke at the end of their careers. Considering that these are all people who make a lot of money I was pretty shocked about this.
This is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. Chances are you will fall in love and it will disrupt your life whether you're starting up or doing something else entirely. If you're fortunate, you're new significant other will be a disruptive, yet motivating force. Moving you towards new heights that you had not imagined. But, it's more likely to be a struggle to balance your life's goals with your desire for this new person. Ultimately, you're startup hopes might be replaced by new goals: a family and all that entails.
These things are not mutually exclusive. If you take an all or nothing view, you're being naive. You can have some percentage of a solid relationship and career (whether a startup or something else).
Life is messy. You'll have to decide if your relationship allows you enough time to meet your personal goals and if that even matters. Only you can make this determination.
As for me, I've been with my wife for over 10 years (most of it dating), and... honestly? I think this relationship has had an adverse effect on my goals. I, kind of, think I'd be much more rich and successful had I never met my wife. On the other hand, when she's gone for a weekend, I always think, "I'll get so much done when she's gone"... but, I often end up mired in the "blahs" until she returns. And, honestly...
I think I've slowed down a lot as I've gotten older. I think back on things I accomplished in 3 week coding marathons when I was in college and, while I think I'm a better programmer now... well, I don't repeat those accomplishments. I get more done in less time, but I'm not able to sustain a marathon for multiple weeks. You may be different, or that might be part of getting older.
Ultimately, I've been moderately successful (my business represents the bulk of our income), but not wildly successful. I've come to think less is more... and, I'm happy with that. I doubt I'd be happier single with a larger business and more money.
There's a significant risk of burnout/major depression for those who stay single to work like hell through their 20s/30s. Significant others are risk reduction: they may impede a major positive outcome, but they can also prevent a very negative outcome.
One day you'll realize that those opportunities with the opposite sex that you've been blowing off because you had "better" things to do... Well, those opportunities only exist in the past.
Regrets are almost always about things you didn't do. Almost never about the things you did do.
I'm trading money at my 30s with love in my 20s. So I don't think I'll miss much. I'm afraid I'll be obliged to take a job in my 30s since odds are I don't have many options to start a startup. However, now, I can take more risks for that, since I don't have any obligations.
> As for me, I've been with my wife for over 10 years (most of it dating), and... honestly? I think this relationship has had an adverse effect on my goals. I, kind of, think I'd be much more rich and successful had I never met my wife.
I think everyone has his own definition of the word. It'll depend on what happiness to him is. If he's happy with his family, so happiness is having a family.
I don't think this article is making a claim about whether or not these phrases indicate that someone is about to lie to you.
The phrases themselves are often untrue.
For example, if I say "It’s not about the money, but...", what follows is not necessarily a lie. What the article claims is that I'm about to make an argument based on money and that I'm trying to preemptively deflect any counter-argument. Therefore, the phrase "It’s not about the money, but..." may, strictly speaking, become untrue. But that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what follows.
In this case, someone made a joke about women not liking to reveal their true age as they get older. It's a boring cliched joke. Something I've heard too many times in my life (and, most often from women). Is it sexist? I can see the argument. Is it professional to make such a joke on a ruby mailing list? I don't know, perhaps not.
Does it warrant responses like "Knock that bullshit off." or "you made an ass of yourself"... I don't know. Seems a little ironic to use unprofessional language in this situation. Maybe even worse than the joke itself? I don't know.
Then, folks take the discussion to github and twitter (and, eventually reddit and hn). Presenting only their verdict: "A newer member made a sexist joke, and was called out on it as being inappropriate." No links to the joke. No evidence that the joke is sexist. This makes it so much easier to imagine something really bad. No, we just get a verdict and we should all rise up against this sexism (which absolutely is bad, of course). Let's get our pitchforks. This amplifies one side of the argument and shuts down any useful conversation. Worse, it's used to rush through a CoC change without allowing any thoughtful discussion.
Is this reaction proportional to the original joke? Is the reaction itself exemplar of how we would like to conduct ourselves?