It's true that drug war articles are fairly off-topic for HN. I'd rather see more mathematics and CS content.
However, I think it's pretty apparent that ending the drug war would benefit more people in much more profound ways than all of the software everyone on HN has ever written. In fact, I'd say only the computer revolution as a whole has benefited humanity more than ending the drug war would.
If you can't think of a list of 10 things in short order that matter a lot more to the world than software and web startups, you're not trying very hard.
But that doesn't mean HN should be dedicated to those things.
Yes. Always steer clear of any environment where one is expected to form close social bonds with others in a party situation. The best coworker is the one you communicate with via text, right?
It's generally important that your coworkers know how to communicate via text...
There are words that work in person, at a party, after several drinks, among friends that just do not work in text. Good writers know that. Sometimes bad writers learn that.
The thing is, it's a professional relationship, not a friendship. If they need to fire you, they will. Sure, a friendship can form, but... I would say that true friendships are ones that have already weathered various changes of employer.
I'd honestly go ahead and bite the bullet and say these students are lacking in an important intellectual capacity if they can't handle that extremely modest amount of abstraction. If they are successful it is probably due to a solid work ethic.
You know, that's what I thought for the longest time, but I eventually saw enough otherwise-perfectly-normal adults get hung up on the same problem--- and talked to enough other teachers who reported the same thing--- that I came to believe that there was something fundamentally different going on, and that it wasn't just a few tough students.
As somebody who's been programming for most of my life, it was really hard for me to learn to think about this stuff from the perspective of somebody who'd never seen it before. Many thought patterns and cognitive skills that are second nature to us programmers are, for a lot of people, very difficult to learn.
