If you have video chat with 10 people, then you have peer connections with 10 people. Each person will have connections with 10 other people, resulting in 10x10=100 connections.

With a streaming server, you would just need 1 connection to a server that would give you 10 media streams.

With a streaming server, you can also do recording and stuff.

Then I realized how my other teammates also have bad loans. Planning to sell my RSUs when I get them and give out interest free loans to my coworkers.

I don’t see any other way to make an impact at work because we are building privacy invading products and I think my best efforts at work actually brings negative impact to society. Hopefully if my coworkers are no longer held down by financial woes they’ll be able to stand up for what is right and I won’t feel so alone.

To achieve true freedom of speech, we must be empathetic to those who are angry and listen to their stories and help wherever we can so they can accept their situation.

Which is something the professor didn’t do. Why did he post that article? He grouped a together people who may be marginalized by society and gave them a label. That’s not how you help people.

I hope the professor learns to be truly empathetic and people takes away the right lesson from this so that one day we may have true freedom of speech.

Throughout my childhood, I always thought Black people seemed so cool and funny. They exude confidence and it intimidated my to make friends with them.

Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.

Later, as I became friends with them, I realized they are very self conscious about their intelligence. (I know I'm generalizing here, but 100% of the black students I mentored felt this way). I realized my asian background and hyper-competitiveness and high expectations made the situation worse. This realization completely changed me as a person.

This eventually let to me starting a coding bootcamp at our public library and I try to create an environment to make students feel safe and not judged. I don't have this down to a process yet, if anyone knows please let me know. How does one create a safe environment so students showing up will feel emotionally safe enough to start asking questions without fear of being judged?

Say we measure the time from when a student walks in to the time when he/she starts asking questions whenever they have a question. Are there any activities to do that can reduce the comfort time to the minimum?

One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions.

When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented.

It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions.

I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.

Wow. Asking that instead of “do you have any questions” is so powerful.

You sound like a teacher who genuinely cares, thank you.

I wish I could hug you.

There must be a zillion useful "language hacks", if we only knew.

I learned "All negatives can be stated a positive" in the early 90s. Been trying to use it ever since.

For example, instead of "Don't run!", maybe say "Please walk." Completely changed my relationship to my kid.

One helpful bit in that particular "life skills" seminar was the practice and role playing.

I would never know to use your "Does anyone have any questions?" technique unless someone showed me.

And I still struggle to imagine how to apply these kind of life lessons in my every day.

It'd be fun, helpful to having a recording of all my interactions, and have professionals review the tape with me. I took some public speaking training where we actually did this. Illuminating.

FWIW, one of the best programmers I know strongly advocates acting lessons.

Had the same experience when I figured out to make offerings as A/B choices (and non-choices).

Instead of "Do you want broccoli?" It's: "Would you rather broccoli or cauliflower?"

Or the non-choice: "Do you want to eat your broccoli at the kitchen table or on the porch?"

Step 2: Pick a curriculum to follow. Many other bootcamps have their curriculum online. I have my own that I built over the past 10 years of teaching and making sure every single student I taught got a job. You can use it too if you want: c0d3.com/book

Step 3: Pick a time. I picked 8am - 12pm to make it hard on students. Students who are willing to get up and show up at 8am are the students who is really committed. Around 10am I go off to my full time job, my students take over.

Step 4: (Best Practice) DO NOT put your students into cohorts. I made that mistake before and I had to spend months fixing it. Students have a tendency to compare themselves with others so they will start memorizing and pretend to understand to keep up. From day one, tell them that everybody will learn at a different pace and take as much time as they need to understand the material. Take time to be creative with what they learned and explore. You award their creativity (when they twist your teaching to do something strange) with your complete attention and they will keep pushing the limits of what they learn.

After students learn, you get free engineers to make your ideas come true! For my students, I simply have them build apps (open-sourced) that I wished existed and have them work together to build them.

I help them write their resume as they build features so the features count as work experience. My students list me as professional reference.

This is what I do, before work and after work.

If you need an example, here's our meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3/

Here's the core product our students built: https://c0d3.com/

Here's an example of a recent product launch: https://www.notion.so/garagescript/Learnings-from-our-open-s...

The greatest gift I get back from doing this, is while I'm sleeping or busy at my full time job, I have 3-5 student engineers thinking about my side projects and building them.

“Stupidest” or “first question” gamification haven’t given me much success, I suspect is because it comes off a little insincere.

https://psyarxiv.com/md2qa

On a 4-point grade metric (“A” = 4.0, “B” = 3.0, etc.), the average treatment effect was 0.03 grade points

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/gr...

> Now I teach people coding before and after my work as a full time software engineer. A few of my students are black. I had a hard time working with them.

Speaking as black person this is an astute observation which I have observed. In Africa sometimes this is due to English not being someone's first language. In a meeting with people from different races I have noticed my black colleagues are way less vocal than when we are talking in Zulu on our own. They have a different demeanor and come out as more forceful and confident in Zulu. In English meeting they are less forceful.

I'm not an educator, but I think the goal is to normalize asking questions. This can be achieved by initially forcing everyone to ask a question (no matter how silly/not related to the topic of the day). You could give them time to write down the questions first, then everyone gets their turn to read it. Later, you can relax it so that questions become voluntary.

However coming back to the bay area a decade later and making a lot of friends with local asians who grew up in San Francisco I am seeing huge racial inferiority complexes among asian males and females.

It's disgustingly huge. Among asian males racism manifests itself as hatred against white people for their white privilege and they talk openly about being scared of black people because they're all criminals. It's nuts. Note that this attitude mostly manifests itself among the native asian SF crowd who grew up here, not the tech migrants from outside of the city.

The other thing is racism manifests itself differently among asian females in the most pathetic display of inferiority I have ever seen in my life. The majority of single asian females in SF prefer dating white people over their own race. It's not even a superficial taste fetish either, literally a huge amount of asian females view their own race as too inferior and too weak to date. I don't know whether to blame the asian males or asian females for this level of patheticism.

I read posts from asians above and I'm astonished... I'm literally thinking what planet is this guy from? Then I realize that I'm from cupertino, I'm the guy who grew up on a different planet.

Many asian kids are abused, it is disgusting what happens behind closed doors. If you had a better childhood or if you overcame your hardships, it would be really nice of you to show them some love and help them recover!

At the heart of it is the hierarchical and competitive nature of race in America, which does not have to be a zero-sum game but is cast as one anyway. As in learning to fight and be aggressive when threatened with violence, reclamation is reasonable, given the circumstances, but altogether unfortunate. We would be better off without the ego-protective behavior AND the racist circumstances that necessitate it.

I also definitely see a difference in self esteem between Asian Americans that grew up in California compared to the rest of the US.

Strangely, or maybe it makes sense, the Asian Americans that I saw with the highest self esteem were Mormons!

This is one of the reasons my wife and I moved back to Asia after we had kids. Despite other issues here, we felt it would be better for them.

In general there may be less pressure to conform and perform, from their partner, and more importantly from the family, when dating a white person.

1. Having a spouse who does not have the cultural knowledge, similar interests, empathy or language skills to communicate with your family is an issue. Her choice to date a white man is in a sense a rejection of her own family.

2. She herself may not have the same experiences, mindsets and interests to be able to really connect with her spouse if the relationship is driven by her attempt to run away from the expectations of her family.

3. A white man and his family/friends have a higher chance of being racist and insensitive to race issues. Weirdly enough, it does not seem like racist beliefs and white supremacy preclude white men from dating Asian women or Asian women from reciprocating interest: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-...

Second of all, the pressures you describe are a bit exaggerated. The whole mother-in-law, make money and make baby deal is not very common at all. It exists and is more common among asians than westerners but it is still very very rare.

The stereotype on asians that does have credibility in modern times is the academic pressure. The pressures on a kid academically are enormous but after college the parents are just as human as the kid and it largely dies down later in life.

Third. No asian woman will ever admit this stuff to your face. Especially, if you're white. It's such a pathetic trait that they'd have trouble admitting it to themselves. Likely they'd make up some garbage excuse like "culture."

Before jumping to conclusions, there’s another question to ask: do Asian men not want white women, do white women not want Asian men, or is there another reason entirely?

I thought I understood that's because Aussie girls generally would seem loud, opinionated, immodest, over-assertive, disrespectful, compared with the Japanese feminine ideal, or even the masculine ideal. And Japanese males are often..more sensitive, artistic, considerate, reflective etc - not traditional Australian male virtues!

[0] i.e. Born in Japan, here since fairly young.

Look you grew up in america, I grew up in america. We're not that different in what we want, and it's the same with asian women and white women.

> First of all if this were true you'd see tons of asian men dating white women to escape the cultural pressure. You don't see this at all, the phenomenon is largely among women.

argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.

Your conclusion imo should just be that women of all races find asian men too weak to date. Men either don't find asian women weak, don't care, or care but in a positive way.

Who says this wasn't my conclusion? All women want to date up in terms of class. They also don't want to date black people. Black men and Asian men currently occupy the bottom of the dating ladder.

Guess who sits on top? White people. The problem is none of this is real. White people aren't the best, it's only this pathetic view point of racial inferiority that causes women to see the world like this.

Also I'm only emphasizing on asians because it's disproportionally pathetic. The inferiority complex is off the charts, I can't think of any other race that literally avoids dating their own race to the scale of asian women.

>If the difference is mostly white women not wanting Asian men, then your whole argument is invalid. What's more there's no reason for you to be distinguishing between wants of asian men and women.

Wrong. Not invalid at all. And I never ever made your claim above.

My claim in this context is that asian women dating white men is not the result of asian women trying to run away from strict asian culture. The whole point was to counter an argument made by another poster.

Asian Men wanting to date white women does not mean they don't want to date asian women. They do want to date white women but the ratio isn't as disproportionate as asian women women worshiping white males.

Also why can't I distinguish something? It's not me distinguishing anything. It's reality that is making a distinction.

Who's getting harmed when Asian women have a preference for white men when dating? Who cares? To each their own, no? Are you implying there's some maximum percentage of women that can prefer another ethnic group when dating, and anything above that is problematic?

Edit: I should've specified that I'm talking explicitly about their commentary on asian women's dating patterns, not anything else in their comment.

Asian women suffer from 3 main problems.

1. If other Asian women are desperate to white men because of racial inferiority, many white men will develop the idea that Asian women are desperate, think that they are superior for being white and treat Asian women poorly. Asian women would also have lower boundaries and would tolerate more misbehavior from white men that other women would not due to the inferiority.

2. People in general seek commonality in relationships. Some Asian women who are severely affected by an inferiority complex may sub-optimally choose unwoke partners that they have little in common with. The lower commonality and inferiority also bias Asian women's partners and the partners' friends and family toward being less accepting of diversity than the average interacial relationship. e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJAVHzBsAg

3. If she does have an racial inferiority complex, then chasing white men would confirm and strengthen her racial inferiority complex and cause additional suffering.

Having established that some forms of that type of relationship can be harmful, the question to answer then is: how prevalent are racial inferiority and status/acceptance seeking from the Asian women and fetishism and white superiority complex from the white men in these relationships?

You don't think there isn't anything racist about that? You have a strange definition of racism.

Women generally prefer taller men. Asian men tend to be short.

The explanation works the other way too, with men typically preferring shorter women. There are other attributes as well, such as muscle mass and the amount of body hair.

Also the explanation does not work the other way. Men do not typically prefer shorter women. It is the women making a selection preference here.

I pay poor people, teach them coding and help them move into middle class. I spent Most of my money doing that. 10 years of Bay Area swe pay, I only have $2k in my bank account. (Currently negative because of cc debts and holiday shopping).

Don’t be like me. I originally thought if I helped others become as wealthy as me (relatively) they’ll be able to lend me money whenever I end up in hard times. Turns out, most people don’t save up and instead just end up spending more. Their relatives suddenly appear with “investment opportunities” etc.

So now I’m just as broke as the other guy. The only bright side is I got to meet and marry another swe through doing this and our combined TC is over 600k. We plan to put everything we earned into a savings account, by a house next year and retire a few years after that.

Don't beat yourself up over not having a lot of money in the bank, it seems like you've still got your financial life mostly in order.

I often have to remind myself of this, as I send a significant amount of money to another country to help my spouse's family -- It's a significant amount for me, but it's generationally life changing for them to be able to get advanced education. Doesn't really make me feel happier when I look at my bank balance, but there are other things that are more important than a bank balance.

They have a negative net worth. They could not afford to do it.

You could look at my bank balance and make the claim that I’m “negative net worth” too, but it wouldn’t be accurate because that bank balance doesn’t tell the whole story.

Why not add some strings to make it fair and potentially sustainable?

Part of learning to manage your finances is honoring debts. There's less incentive to save and budget if you're always receiving handouts without any expectation of reparation. You'd be helping them learn valuable lessons beyond IT.

In case someone else feels the same way, what worked for me is to talk to my coworkers. I usually go out for coffee or long walks and let my mind wander. I'd talk about work, politics, our families, and usually the conversation wanders back to work and what we are doing.

Many scenarios usually come up from those talks. Sometimes I'll find what my coworkers working on pretty interesting and get involved (which sometimes makes coming back to my work easier). Sometimes I ended up talking about my work (explaining my problems to others helps me clarify and solidify what I needed to do). Sometimes I realize that another team has already done the work and all I have to do is ask them for a library. Once I realize that my work was meaningless and purely a political play and I left the company soon after.

So going out for long walks and just talking with different people in my company has worked out really well for me.

- Like you said, going for a walk (activates beneficial genes, helps circadian rhythm)

- Stop caffeine as soon and often as you can. Sometimes situations force me to use a pick-me-up, but I try and stop the day after.

- Go to bed early (10PM ideally)

- Vitamin D, Magnesium, etc. also check out near infrared therapy to improve mitochondrial function

- Moderate exercise (overtraining has a bad net effect on nearly everything, so stop if working out makes you feel worse; if you have a heart rate variability monitor, you can use that as a metric for overtraining)

- Small talk (works for me to „wake the brain up“)

But really, 90% of the time I just have to sleep more. The others are just hacks to keep me going if I can’t get enough sleep (sometimes not easy with 2 kids).

I don't know about a lot of the rest of your post, but this bit is key. If you aren't getting enough sleep, nothing will help. The legends of politicians and executives who sleep 3 hours a day are either outliers for whom 3 hours genuinely is enough, or speed-freaks, or often enough both.

Actual creative workers and engineers require a different set of brain functionality, which requires deeper concentration, and hence need more sleep.

Another tip that worked for me is not eating any fast sugars at all.

I agree to this but I think the bigger problem is - How much more is actually "more"? Do you any literature about how to actually find your sleep length time?

Among other things, the book talks about how much sleep people need. Almost everyone needs around 8 hours—it varies with age, but it pretty consistent among people at the same with very rare exceptions. For most people, being short even by just one hour (ie a night with seven hours of sleep) has a number of measurable negative effects.

https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/15...

What I know affects how much sleep I need or how long I should give myself to sleep varies. I'm female and follow a cycle closely linked to hormones as a baseline. If I wake up at night (for toilet, etc), I need a bit more time. If I increase physical activity, I have an adjustment period that requires more sleep.

I'll also note that time of sleep impacts me. I'm better off waking after 9am (naturally this is 11am or so). I cannot always get enough quality sleep waking at 6am and 7am leaves me slightly deprived. I tried keeping a schedule even on the weekends, but I felt horrible and found it better to sleep a bit more to catch up.

Here is one example paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28545315 and while it isn't a direct example of how to find your own ideal sleep patterns, it does highlight the relationship between sleep and body weight in the study population and it again mentions the 6-8 hour recommended minimum sleep period. This source might be better https://www.sleepfoundation.org/excessivesleepiness/content/...

AFAIK the only way to be sure is to either go to a sleep lab, or get an accurate tracker like the Oura ring, which reportedly has a 80-90% accuracy compared to sleep lab data. With that data you can see the distribution of your various sleep phases, and the people in the lab or the app will tell you how much of each phase you'd ideally have.

But, why not just experiment a bit? Sleep 7/8/8.5h for a couple of days in a row, and keep track of how you feel and how much you procrastinate. E.g. for Mac, the Timing app is great at tracking how much time you spend in each app - one could use the amount of "productive" apps (text editor, IDE, graphical editor...) as a measure of productivity.

I followed this advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHnpdtQKUA

Why?

I suffer from caffeine addiction: a cup of coffee in the morning just to make myself feel normal. I got terrible mental melt-down once I stopped coffee for a few days.

Plus some people just need more sleep than the 8hr average and need to wake and work later than most in society. I for example, have just slept 11hrs and woken at 11am, but I will get more done than if I had woken at 7-8am.

AFAIK almost everybody procrastinates (more or less), but not so many people are suffering from depression.

I don’t think that shitty tasks themselves can cause depression; it’s all about the social context of the work you are doing. Is your boss bullying you, or telling you that you are not important to the organization, or does she try to punish your mistakes? Are you working just to support a study you are not really into, because you think you owe it to your parents? Is there another job you would like better, but you dare not change jobs because you are afraid you won’t earn enough to support yourself? That’s the way to get depressed about the tasks you are doing. Sort out the social context, and you might even realize afterwards that the tasks were not so mundane after all.

These days I have a simpler trick: stop thinking, do <it>, don't stop until it's done (avoid multitasking, unless you're already into flow or you sense high motivation).

welcome to adulthood.

I think sometimes peoples intelligence works against them. A deep analysis of procrastination is itself procrastination. The fact that someone recognizes they are procrastinating is 90% of the way there to stopping. Next, they just need to step. Eventually, taking a step becomes habit.

This is great. Focus on the after feeling, and then work to get there as quickly as possible. What I found is that feeling of procrastination caused way more stress than just doing. Of course it's hard to see this in the moment, and requires discipline to get going. But after, it's a great feeling to crush through all these things that would otherwise drag on for a long period, and now enjoy my free time.

- As the other reply here says, getting enough sleep seems to make a massive difference. It's easy to say "I haven't got enough done on this today, I'll stay up late and just do a bit more..." and ending up in a cycle of being tired and not working enough where you really just needed a good rest.

- The article mentions the 10 minute timer thing. I've done a different timer thing, where I start a timer and tell myself I have to stop the timer any time I stop working. If I starting reading Hacker News or something, I have to pause the timer, and the pain of having my work minutes conspicuously not counting up as real time marches on is significant. The fact that you have to go and manually stop the timer when you stop working is also a mental barrier that gives you a chance to think rationally about whether you should be stopping. Unfortunately it's also easy to just forget to stop or restart it.

- The article and many like it talk about all these ways to "trick" your brain. Do x and y to "get that dopamine hit." Another comment here starts "You can't do a thing you don't feel like doing." But you're capable of thinking rationally. Sure it's easy to get into these habits of procrastination where you just naturally start getting away from work. But it's also possible to take a mental step back and just say NO, I'm in control of my own actions, and I'm going to work on this thing. And then just do it. Feels really bad when you're doing the work and you really want to be doing something else. Feels really good when you get the work done.

This is a great trick... also informing yourself honestly how many 'productive' hours you had at the end of a day. With all kinds of interruptions (many of those self-inflicted) some days the timer registered less than 3 hours when I was studying in university.

That realization prompted me to stop studying at home, and travel to the university library daily. There my pattern was similar to 50 minute periods of work (before Pomodoros were a thing) followed by 10 minute breaks. After that, I easily clocked 6 hours of real work daily.

I try to create collaboration setting so that I don't work alone on a task I don't like. For example, I tell my work mate "I need to finish this document, do you have time tomorrow afternoon to read it and give me feedback?". That creates a social obligation to get the task done.

Other than sending our parents reports like these, any suggestions on how we can convince our parents that having kids and subjecting them to a lifetime of dealing with global warming might not be such a great idea?

If you are rich enough to give a good education to your children, the only thing you achieve by not having children is reducing the number of people who care about climate change and can do something about it.

Maybe your child will be the one who finds a way to terraform sahara, or build sea-steading cities, or create some other amazing thing.

As someone who have watched too much Cousteau documentaries as a child, was convinced that humanity is a pure evil as an adult, and is too old to marry and have children anymore, i would argue that not having children is a mistake.

This comment is full of rationalization. I hear this all the time: Maybe my little darling will be the genius who cures cancer and solves climate change.

Yeah, and maybe you'll win the lottery. But no, your kid will not fix climate change.

The post you replied to took the other extreme.

Considering the situation of people that went that way, one can doubt it.

If my wife and I decide too late that we want to have children, I think we will be happy with adopting and providing someone with shelter and love they otherwise wouldn't have had.

Despite the headlines the report is exceptionally positive. Our fate is in our own hands; the political will seems to be there with the majority of the world economy (EU/China) and the things we need to do to hit 1.5c offer some massive benefits. Simply the air quality benefits are worth the investment costs.

I was expecting the costs to be in the order of the western world reverting to the quality of life from the 1800s but that isn't the case. Climate change is looking like a problem in the order of a space-race or nuclear-arms-race only this time with enormous benefits for humankind and nature.

In addition to global warming, there is also the problem of over fishing / farming, loss of biodiversity, waste disposal, all of which are getting worse every year. https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/15-current-environmen...

With that said, I'm still trying to do my part to live responsibly: I monitor my electrical and water usage and keep them low, stopped eating meat, and donate most of my earnings to charitable causes to help as much as I can.

If governments were serious about fighting climate change, the entire world economy would need to be on a war footing bent toward this goal, similar to WWII. You're correct it doesn't mean 1800s-level subsistence, but it would mean sacrifice from everyone: hefty carbon taxes, rationing, bans on holiday flights, etc.

There's no realistic possibility any of that will happen, so we are dooming the next generation to a world of famine, drought and war.

There are better, more balanced sources for insight and argument on this subject out there, in my experience.

I like the idea of a child free community being CF myself, but that's not a pleasant or positive place.