skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of the question is that, unless you can answer it (generally, or in particular cases), then it implies that once culture existed, culture met all selection pressures.

Men and women do have genetic differences, which they had before culture existed. But the thing at issue is whether modern-day, high-level personality features are a genetic difference, or not.
However, all you provide is your belief, which frankly to me seems to be driven by your wishful thinking. I personally don't know if men and women are wired differently or not, but I can't understand your concept of belief. Give us some scientific evidence, and I will mentally assign your claim a probability. But I won't believe it.
In the US at least, I don't think there is any overt activity preventing women from succeeding in CS-related business and in the past 15 years at least I've seen plenty of women succeed. I think if there are fewer women founders the reason is that fewer women simply choose to go that route.

Now outside the US things may be quite different.

I am 100% certain that if my 10 year old daughter ever decides to start a CS-related business I'm sure there will be plenty of good role models for her. However her current inclination is to become a school teacher.
Traditions are complex and it's hard to trace reasons for them. Which they don't always have, in the sense we normally look for -- they don't always have good reasons for why they were designed/intended to help people.

So I don't know specifically why it is that parents, and others, discourage girls from business and technical areas in particular. And I don't know exactly what kind of discouragement is effective -- probably it is not the straightforward kind that does most of the work. As well, it may be some kind of encouragement that matters more than discouragement. Or the process may be much more complex than English is good at capturing in a word.

One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.
Why do fewer women choose to go that route? As you say, it is not because they will be less rewarded if they do. Once they are doing a startup, they can get the same rewards men can. So there is still something to explain here.
The library linked to at the bottom of the Hacker News main page. Are you kidding me!?
I have provided some arguments (for example, about universality). I have also provided some (as yet unanswered) criticism of the other view. If you don't understand my comments, and wish to, you could ask questions, and I will be happy to explain further.

Evidence would not be the right thing to provide, because I am not predicting different human behavior than the mainstream theory, I am simply explaining the same evidence in a different way. So evidence can't resolve this dispute. (Setting aside evidence from analysis of brains which is beyond our present technology.)
PG is right that having an 'advisory board' is a bad sign. However, I think that sometimes giving someone smart and powerful a little bit of stock early in the life of your company can be very helpful. We did it, and it got us two very important deals.
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It beats me, but my best guess is that founders get that way first by a) identifying with other founders and b) realizing that nothing is stopping them from succeeding the way they did.

I think girls just need more exposure to successful women who can act as role models.

It's my belief that time will eventually solve this problem.
Roughly correct, but the point about lack of financial expertise seems wrong. I suspect plenty of the most successful founders can't read a balance sheet. It's far more important to know how to build things people will love.
To recap this entire thread:

This just in: boys and girls are different.

Also -- the human brain naturally forms generic pattern responses based on little information. Almost every time these prejudices are counterproductive in modern social context, but evolution has wired humans this way.

Later, we'll have breaking news that people actually have different abilities in different areas, and those abilities can be statistically related to random factors such as toenail size, skin color, or number of nose hairs. Expect massive protests to follow.
when they don't get it will force the company to close

That's one theory for what happened to FilmLoop (one of Slide's early competitors).

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/12/filmloop-betrayed-by-in...

Actually it looks like FilmLoop is still around here: http://filmloop.myfabrik.com
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I think there is a fairly small set of things a $400 laptop has to do to be succesful - handle digital cameras, surf the web, play mp3s and run a good office package. Mpeg's and dvd's might be in there as well.
The Mozilla pictures stand out from the others as more corporate.
Here is a kind of evidence you might like: the amount of raw data available for genetic differences is on the order of 15 megabytes. A bit small, isn't it? That's maybe 25 ASCII novels, or fewer if they are long. And we have to fit all differences between humans and apes into those bits, too.

Consider how much more information our culture has in it.
I think it would be good if pg or some of the others at YC selected a few of the most appropriate submissions from the people at YC Hacker news and added them to the library (perhaps encouraging the authors to clean them up a bit too).
The whole reason I started my own "startup" because I was just incredulous at the companies that would fail when they really could have ran forver with a nice server setup and 2 or 3 people.

Going to the twiistup event not too long ago, I realized that there is some benefit to having a lot of "hands" in a company in that the more people who have a stake in it, the more they want it to survive. Which is probably how Slide even raised 55 million. There has to be a way to do that without taking so much money that it just hangs you.
This was showing at the Roxie in San Francisco for a couple weeks. When I went, the place was totally packed. For a few minutes after the movie ended, all you could see in the world was typefaces.
Duh....
1. You most likeley were checking out toursity areas. The starbucks will have mostly toursit (I imagine, union sq. metreon area).
2. True hackers don't like starbucks. They prefer local shops, that have better coffee, and free wi-fi.

The closest starbucks near my home, is open 24hrs, and at midnight is hard to find open seating (lots of students with their laptops, and books). It is so refreshing when at the midle of the night there are so many people around doing stuff.
I moved in here from the Boston area (Cambridge), where at midnight everything was closed, and everybody was home.

And I see quite often people doing coding in their laptops. Actually, I am going to my favorite coffe place (cafe Cubano), and do some coding there (they have free wi-fi also).

You just have to go away form the touristy areas.
I just bought a laptop from Dell for $427 after tax (free shipping).

A Dell Vostro 1000 with 1 gigabyte of ram, 15.4inch screen, 120 gigabyte hard drive, and Amd Semptron 3600+ processor.
Anyone who thinks they have RSI should read Dr. Sarno's theories about RSI:
http://podolsky.everybody.org/rsi/

All is not as it seems with RSI, and you should trust what the scientific research shows, not what your physical therapist with a PTA degree tells you.
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I am not arguing against culture, but you can't deny that your paltry amount of genetic data actually IS sufficient to make the difference between human and apes. Or are you saying the difference is merely cultural, too? I think you defeated your own argument here...
Culture responds to the genetic preconditions. Of course monogamy, marriage etc are memes, but they exist because of the biological necessity. Culture can't change the biological needs - no matter what culture, babies need to eat.
You have argued against culture's influence, by saying that, today, there are genetic differences which cause high level personality traits in adults, such as being feminine.

I know 15megs is enough to implement intelligence, but how much do you imagine is left over to throw in quirks and differences? Certainly many orders of magnitude less information than our culture has it it. Less than our personality has in it.

Also bear in mind that to write intelligence in 15 megs, you need a very good programming language. Concise, powerful, lots of libraries, very good abstraction, high level of generality. And it will be targeted towards writing powerful, general, reliable things. On the other hand, these features will be inconvenient when you want to code weird special cases and hacks, so that kind of code will take more lines to write.
Well the universality thing is really a very weak argument. The brain is quite universal, but it still is specialized, for example for image processing. It is a finite resource, you only have so many neurons in a brain, and only can train them on so many tasks. So it probably makes sense to devote more neurons to some tasks than to another.

Of course you may ask, when is it decided what specialization is chosen, genetically or by nurturing. Clearly we can learn and specialize on things through nurturing, but some things we are also born with, for example a language instinct. So I don't think your argument is an argument at all.

I don't know if you are a woman or a man, but one thing I notice is that women can always tell me what everybody else is talking about in a cafe. I can only concentrate on the woman I am talking to, and blank out all the other people in the room. Maybe it is a personal deficit of mine (bad hearing or whatever), but I could imagine it is a women thing (broader attention). Just an example.
Investors have no ability to force Slide to close.
A possible new approach to the Four Color Problem?
That's the same kind of argumentation the creationists use "see how complex life is, surely it could not just have developed by chance". Well duh, but it has. What do you know about how many genes are required for a behavioral difference? I am really asking you! Don't just throw around numbers like "surely xyz genes can not be enough to make a difference". I think just one gene can be enough in some cases. Maybe some hormone has a higher concentration in the blood of person A than in person B, and zing, totally different personality. Or whatever - I am not a biologist, but I suspect that neither are you.
I was explaining why falsephrophet was downmodded. Up until right now, I was confused and thought your original question was asking why he was being downmodded, but apparently you were referring to your own first post in this thread. Oh well. :)
It's a problem if they have no willingness to learn. If something is important to the business, the founders should make an effort to understand it.
No one ever said anything like this about IBM or Microsoft. This time I'm sure the empire will stay _forever_.
Thanks for the down mod... I wasn't saying I thought I and other entrepreneurs are too smart to be susceptible to it. I was getting at the idea that it shouldn't be used as a crutch.
Advisers can be amazing. At a friend's startup, they have a few advisers that meet with them weekly and also do weekly intros to prospective clients. They end up selling successfully to about 80% of those clients. How else could you have that kind of success rate?

The wrong adviser is useless, the right adviser is priceless.

An actual board of advisers is a different situation, I don't know many startups that have something like that.
What do you think of the difference in life expectancy between women and men (7 years in the US, I just googled) - that is women live on average 7 years longer than men.

If I had to choose between higher wages and a longer life, I would choose the longer life....

The page I found could not give a definite answer, but I'll throw in theory: men are more expendable than women, and it shows. And for the same reason, men have to try harder. On wikipedia they say "men take more risks" - yes, because they have no choice. Either they impress a woman, or all was futile anyway.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure it is a LOT easier for women to have sex, whenever they want. Check this experiment: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/experiments/P10/ (#18)

Men and women were walking across a campus asking strangers flat out if they would like to have sex with them. Men were almost always rejected. Women almost never. I claim that the reason for that is not solely cultural.
>So I don't know specifically why it is that parents, and others, discourage girls from business and technical areas in particular.

Not only technical areas, but also particular technical areas. What makes experimental physics less technical than theoretical, and chemistry less technical than physics?

Also, if you look at the percentage of women in technical fields, it does look like cultural barriers dropped. I.e., over the same timeframe that cultural barriers dropped in medicine, they dropped similarly in physics/engineering, causing women to increase from about 1970-1990. After 1990, the % women was roughly flat in all fields: in medicine at 50%, in physics at 20%.

Basically, womens liberation had the same qualtitative effect on physics that it had on medicine; only the magnitudes differ.

This strongly suggests that some other factor is keeping women out of technical fields. It could be cultural, but it's a completely different type of cultural barrier than the one that kept women out of medicine and physics up until the 1990's. It could also be biological, I don't see much evidence for or against that.

>One thing I can tell you is that women working in a field does not imply the problem is solved. First, they might be less skillful, on average. But second, they might have had to put in more effort to achieve the same level of skill, and that could be very hard to detect.

Lots of difficult to measure things are possible. I'll wait for evidence of them.

(*) By the way, I'm using physics/EE as a proxy for all technical fields, since I've been forced to sit through lots of meetings on that topic. Speaking openly in those meetings was frowned upon...
Apes do image processing too; that is from a time before intelligence.

The meaning of one's mind being born specialized is that either it's incapable of some functions (not universal), or it's pre-loaded with enough complexity to make some functions easier and others harder. And further, the claim has to go on to say that we don't put layers of abstraction over this and do whatever we want anyway, low level complexity be damned. Do you have an argument this is the case?

You give language instinct as an example. So, do you have any argument that our DNA contains knowledge to facilitate language in particular? But perhaps more importantly, an argument that this is done differently for different people, in such a way as to cause differences in adult personalities?
Are you saying you think all reasonable cultures would deal with (respond to) our biology by treating women in such a way that they don't like to do startups as much as men? What is it about female biology which is so adverse to startups that many layers of culture interpretation can't possibly do anything about it?
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The question posed in the original thread is much different than the one you pose now. No matter what ethnic background you come from you have to ignore the stats and act as if.

Now that you clarified the intention of your initial question, it seems you want to know if the percentage of founders of startups correlates with each ethnicities percentage of population.

While I don't know the ethnic breakdown of tech startups founders, I know that disparities do exist and they vary by culture, social economic strata and in this case by geographic location.

Until recently, the stats for U.S. broadband adoption showed that income and ethnicity were strong indicators.

After I finished up my economics degree at UCLA I took a few sociology courses. I recall that in the first half of the 20th century Asian immigrants had a higher percentage of entrepreneurship relatively because of the lack of employment opportunities and discrimination. In the second half of the 20th century that percentage declined.

While it's interesting to study the plight of some ethnic groups, it's much more interesting to study how public policy can improve the situation.

The wonderful thing for everyone is that the access to information is a great equalizer, and that our parents socio-economic level is less of a predictor of our future than it was when our parents were kids.
As far as I know it has always been the case that people developed a language. For example there are cases where children had been raised in total isolation from society, and they developed their own language (I think even single children). So it seems to me it is fairly certain that something in the brain makes it develop a language.

Your "image processing is not intelligence" again refutes itself: so you admit that there are some things in which brains might differ. Surely, even if some parts of the brain are universal, the ultimate development must depend on the inputs available. For example, no humans have ultrasonic "vision" like bats, because they lack the respective organs. It follows that it is possible for brains to be different, depending on the body that provides the sensory inputs.

Also, it is not clear in my opinion that apes are not intelligent.

Btw. I am still not claiming that women can not be good at maths - of course they can be, there are many examples.

I guess I am not even claiming that the difference between men and women with respect to founding startups is not cultural. But I am claiming that the culture is not arbitrary, but has evolved because of the biological preconditions. Not arbitrary means it can not simply be explained by "repression through men".
It's easy to make up and describe a cultural factor that would explain the data. For example, the previous shift was about how adult women were treated in public -- open discrimination. The second shift will come when parents (and others) treat young children more equally in subtle ways. That's one possible cultural explanation, of many.

But for biology, there does not exist a single reasonable explanation that can account for the data. In particular, in must detail by what mechanism the genes effect the personality of adult women. That is, "there is a gene for business" wouldn't suffice, without saying specifically how that gene works.
There will always be a high end, but the truth is that, especially when it comes to electronics, the average person can't tell the difference. Of those that can, only a given percentage will pay for that difference. And as a technology matures, you will always have increasingly diminishing returns as price increases. Just a couple days ago, I overheard someone comment that they can't really tell the difference between an HD and SD broadcast. While most people aren't that bad, try getting the average person off the street to be able to tell the difference between a Pioneer or Hitachi TV and a Vizio, or the resulting pictures taken from any halfway decent digital camera. Every niche has its own set of hackers, but they're almost always vastly in the minority.
That's actually a very good idea. If there are enough people who are interested in moving here, it makes sense to 'tour' the bay area and get a feel for it.
They may be admitted, but they won't actually go :) They'll get a package with a punishing amount of loans.
I don't think students need great art programs, excellent music programs, or anything else. Smart kids need a way to live together and away from their parents, without having to stress about how they will feed themselves, dress themselves, or stay employed at a crappy job trying to get some sort of decent clothing and food (or support their parents--not just with money, by the way, but maybe translating things all the time or other tasks). And not be around students who aren't quite there yet... otherwise, these students, the educators, and the students still trying to get to a balance on life all start wasting their own time.
What exactly "kind of thing" do you mean?
If it were just Asian countries, I might agree; but the U.S. lags those wild and free Northern European countries in matters like math skills and foreign language training.
There's really nothing new here at all. Just a Javascript library to make calls to the API.
I'm inclined to say "private office", but I've never had one, so it might not be all that great. I guess it depends how open is open. At my job, there are 6 people in a "team room" that is partially open to the hallway. Communication within the team is improved, but it seems that anyone coming to interrupt anyone else also interrupts me. For a lot of stuff it doesn't really matter. For some things it is really hard to make any headway unless I know I'm not going to be interrupted for several hours.
There exists no explanation, ever invented, by anyone, which details how a gene could code for complex parts of adult personalities, like femininity.

You can make things up like how a hormone might umm somehow affect stuff. But that isn't an actual mechanism that goes from start to finish.

You don't have to prove that a particular mechanism is in fact the one used by our bodies. You don't need any scientific evidence. Just make one up that actually could work and makes sense.

No one has ever done that. End of story.

Meanwhile, there do exist possible explanations of how culture could account for the same phenomena (like femininity). They have no rival theories. Thus, all reasonable people should tentatively believe that kind of explanation is correct.
The reason we have public education...

...is to allow the economy to function more efficiently, through pervasive literacy, use of numbers, &c. It's in the interest of the wealthy if they can off load some of the organizational details to a large class of literate servants, but that's not the same as giving everyone a shot at wealth and power.
There is a very, very strong emphasis on rote memorization throughout Asian schools, over things like working in groups.
the essential issue is obedience. obedient children devote their creativity and effort into doing as their parents and teachers want, such as getting good test scores.

one way to try to observe obedience is to look at how harsh conditions people will accept when told to, without complaining and trying to do something about it. everything i know about japanese schools points to a lot more pressure on students to be studious and that kind of thing, and a lot less complaining about any decisions by authorities.
No, I am not saying that. The biological conditions are changing - there is the pill, there was a guy recently who cloned himself from his own skin, there is genetic testing for fatherhood etc. Things like that might change the scales in the gender war.

Even without the technology there are different ways society reacts. Polygamy should in theory raise the value of women (even fewer women available per men if some men have several women). But some societies reacted by putting women behind veils and removing them from the market by force.

I can imagine a culture, for example, where men do nothing and just force women to do startups. So it definitely is possible.

What I claim, though, is that the current situation in western societies might not be due to repression of women, but due to other factors. And those stem from biological differences, which give men and women different sorts of weapons in the gender war.

As the example of life-expectancy shows, it is not clear to me that women are currently getting the worse deal.