skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While autism spectrum traits are correlated with STEM (http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd-ster...), I don't think it explains shortage of women in programming (there isn't in biology or medicine; these departments are places with many nerdy girls).

1. Not all engineers or scientists are even remotely autistic (think: Richard Feynman).

2. There are some big suggestions that women are underdiagnosed with Asperger Syndrome / High-Functioning Autism (due causing less problems for others, and their socialization giving them at least "passable" social skills).
The Radium Girls
I've tried many UI sketching/prototyping apps over the years and keep coming back to pen and paper. It's not just the speed but the ephemeral nature of paper that invites to exploration and mistakes. Using Balsamiq or any other app seems much heavier in some way...
> Apparently this concept is not even believed by the majority of people on this thread if you read the whole thing.

> I originally stated that for loops and HO functions are equivalent and this entire thread consists of people disputing that statement.

My read of the thread is that your posts seem to be going beyond saying they're functionally equivalent, and saying that there's no value in using reduce and friends because they're functionally equivalent.

Most of your posts aren't addressing that tail recursion is a form of iteration (yes, or alternately that recursion can be done without a lexically recursive function) and that map/reduce/etc can be implemented in terms of recursion or for loops; you're contrasting the HOF's with for loops like they're competitors. The HOF's are an abstraction over iteration, whatever syntax was used to write that iteration.

Most of the responses aren't disputing that they accomplish the same thing, they're just saying that there is value in using the HOF's. You would be getting the same kinds of replies if you were insisting there's no difference between HOF's and direct recursion.

> You're the one dude

I'm not a dude.
I see that it's an extended attack on the nurture side from the nature side based on the fact that, despite years of concerted government effort, significant gender divisions remain at the professional level in Norway. I'm not disputing these facts.

I'm not seeing that it asserts that the influx of women into the medical or legal professions has substantially changed how those professions are practiced. If women think differently than men, wouldn't a significant increase in the number of women in a profession show up as a change in the general model of the profession?

The author of the manifesto actually suggests changing the practice of software development at Google (e.g., more pair programming) to make it more friendly to women's natural inclinations, as a way of achieving better gender balance instead of affirmative action programs.
No, it's organized by municipality. So the whole of greater Stockholm is under one organization (~2m people). But it's a national health service, and patient outcomes are better given its costs than any privatized health system in the world.
Maybe the original post was a little racist. But it was to a far less degree of intensity than the messages she received. If a white person tweeted "I cant walk through this black hood I'm gonna get shot!" and a black person responded "kill yourself you inferior genetic third world white" that would be over the top too. The other commenters should stop making false equivalence.
> What is the opposite of autism?

Some would say Williams Syndrome. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1262248...
Awesome. Sounds as if the system is working like it should. Thanks for all the ext file system work over the years.
I would argue that there's a lot of friction you're not feeling by holding the mainstream position. For me, it's baffling that every disparity is assumed to be caused by discrimination despite so few actual cases of confirmed systemic bias, or that every conversation about inequality only examines the particular facets of life that are harder for women. It feels sooooo obvious to me that there is no significant anti-female bias, and it's almost certainly the case that men and women are bimodal in our preferences, and society is organized to accommodate the centers for each mode such that life is harder the further your preferences are from your gender's average.
I ain't a swindler for sure but I had to do this several times during my life, in order to provide for my family, to kill debts, to fix health problems and a load of other things life loves to hit you under the belt with.

That perfect storm you described indeed happened several times and I was indeed lying about it but you know what? I was willing to own up to every single promise and engagement I made -- and I did, even though it took a toll on my mental health and work motivation.

And no, I wasn't living large at all at the time.
I think it's more a cultural problem where certain jobs and studies are very polarized and tied to a specific gender. This is not just software engineering/it, but a lot more common than you would think, also the other way around.

When talking about masters, where consistently over the last 10 years or so, 56% of the students is female here in Belgium, law, medical and chemistry studies are currently 60%+ female and some studies, like language, biology, crime, pharmaceutical are 70%+ female, arts and psychology 80%+ and pedagogy and logopedic/audiologic over 90%. That are pretty huge gaps, and yet that's not something you hear about that often.

These stats are taken from multiple reports (in Dutch) from a few universities here in Belgium in years ranging from 2010 to 2013 [1] [2], and one report I only have on paper (all with pretty similar results)

Yes there are also many areas where it's more equally divided (surprisingly, mathematics and economics), but I don't think it's necessarily the 'software engineering' field, it's for a large part society. My gf for example studied chemistry, and even if she's a bit of a geek sometimes, she never even considered software engineering/it as a study. And when I asked her why, she said it just doesn't have any appeal to her, although when I taught her to write small scripts in python and some basic HTML she thought that was awesome.

And I know quite a few geeky girls just like her, doing stuff ranging from having studied sexology, veterinary, economics, law, chemistry, ... Only 3 of the ones I knew started in software engineering and 2 never finished. One became a cop, the other switched to medical, and the one that finished her degree now teaches mostly math since she didn't see herself writing software her entire career.

The only way I see to get more women interested in engineering in general, is to get girls interested from a young age. You can't just wave your magic wand around and wish there's a even a 70/30 male/female ratio when only 10% of the software engineering students in the first year is female, and many of them drop out over the years.

[1] https://www.kuleuven.be/diversiteit/pdf/20130927%20Gender%20...

[2] http://www.ugent.be/nl/univgent/waarvoor-staat-ugent/diversi...
I do agree with your summation of the current state of things. I would say that if we agree that there are behavioral and cognitive differences between men and women (I personally think the evidence is pretty clear that there are) that these differences are not inherently better or worse but Historically men have been the ones that have largely developed, defined and been in control of our social, political and economical institutions so have self selected for traits that benefit those systems. I think this is the bigger issue.
> What is the opposite of autism?

Donald Trump
The hackernews re-titling of the article is pretty horrendous too. The title is "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?" is considerably more controversial than "autism and gender imbalance in tech"
Same here. Unfortunate...
The Prince is easy once you've read Discourses on Livy.
For some context, you might be interested to know that the author "left" his PhD program in part due to fallout from a department-wide presentation where he discussed masturbating to his female colleagues.
Sorry, that's the rare case where we actually want +. Fixed above.
Give them a bunch of tools - hammer, saw, screwdriver, ruler, pencil, hand-powered drill, pair of pliers - and some scrap material (left-over planks, some thin sheet material, some small nails and screws, etc) to work on. Add a bottle of wood glue and some paint, preferably left-overs from other paint jobs to make them feel more at ease at wasting some and appreciate the fact that things don't have to be brand-spanking new to be useful. Help them along a bit but don't get in the way. They might make swords, bows, arrows, cars, horse stables, houses, whatever fits their fancy. The results might not be perfect but they're the work of their own hands and minds.

Yes, a 6yo can learn to use a saw, just make sure it is sized accordingly and has small teeth - both because they are easier to use as well as less likely to cause injury.
Yes; I mean the machines on which the original interpreter ran, not that CHIP-8 itself was originally released in a hardware implementation.
The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?
I think you could step back from some of these hardline conceptions of property. If you'll study the economics of externalities, you might come to a different conclusion about the limits of what one can do with their land,
Did you learn how to self-host your own email? If so, I'm very interested in learning how and which resources did you use.
>we need to tackle the pipeline and convince women STEM is great

"Great" is necessarily a function with (at least) 2 inputs, the thing being considered, and the person considering it (or their goals).

Who is more likely to have a better job security, a STEM graduate or a med school graduate? What are the failure modes of each? Is a QA career better, or worse than that of a nurse (just spit-balling here, it might very well be the other way around)?

--

I'd argue that men are more likely to be the risk takers, for evolutionary reasons. It makes perfect sense that they go for a career with lower chance at a bigger win. Less to lose -> take more risks.

Now, if you are a woman, you are extremely likely to have a quality of life higher than the average man. Why would you take risks when you don't need to?
I have seen a few individuals work longer hours and succeed. But more often it's the kind of project they would sneak away to do, instead of sneak from. Software is one of those industries that runs so efficiently on passion, although passion is a limited resource.

I do think progress is proportional to time spent on it. The only question is how much time you can get in and at what cost. You can always push harder, but it can lead to burnout and deplete passion.
> Amazons market cap is $475B. Assuming 10% ROI and 3% profit margin, Amazon must make $16 trillion in revenue some time in the future to justify the current price.

3% of $16 trillion is $480 billion dollars. At a price-earnings multiple of say 10 the market cap would be $4.8 trillion. If $475 billion grows at 10% per year then it will take 24 years to grow to $4.8 trillion.

In 24 years total global retail sales might grow from $22 trillion to say $160 trillion. Is it so unreasonable to think that Amazon might have a 10% share of total retail sales in 24 years?
The world has moved on to a different form of social interaction. This happened over time, but it passed critical mass nearly a decade ago.
The majority as in 12%? It's not his company.
Edit: The comment I replied to has been substantially edited, as has the follow-up reply to me. Thus, for people reading this, it may look like what I have said is "crazy" or reactionary or otherwise bad behavior on my part. I assert this is an additional means to be dismissive and disrespectful of me and I see no reason to try to further engage this individual. No good will come of it. But I am leaving this comment here anyway.

---

I was one of the top three graduating students of my high school class. I fully expected to be part of a two career couple. That never happened. Instead, I was a homemaker and full time mom for a lot of years.

So I have spent a LOT of time trying to parse how and why my life got so completely flushed down the toilet and did not turn into what I and so many other people expected of it. (One family friend bluntly told me "We all expected you to be a self made millionaire. What the hell happened?") This involved reading quite a lot of research about how and why the lives of men and women turn out differently.

We may well see it differently, but that sounds to me like a polite way to trivialize my conclusions. My conclusions have not been drawn in a trivial manner. There has been quite a lot of study involved in drawing them.
I am not saying any of that, no.

I'm simply explaining why nannies don't earn much. Still, they earn more than monks, who in some societies are seen as pillars of existence in a very literal sense.

My point is again that income is set by supply and demand, not value in some deeper sense. The market "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"
When I worked at Microsoft, people joking called the Red West campus "Red Vest" because it was home to fun projects (like internet and Xbox) that attracted people who had vested enough MSFT options that they didn't need to work.
This page is anonymous | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638988 (4 years ago)

http://voidnull.sdf.org/

"there is one place where you can still host your content anonymously. That place is the Super Dimension Fortress or SDF. SDF lets you register an anonymous user over ssh (which is accessible via the Tor network) and takes cash over mail in order to validate the user."

"I challenge you to send me a postcard to my mailing address with the content that says "I see you voidnull" and a self-addressed postage-paid envelope. I will then send you a $10 bill back as a prize."

--

SDF – Public Access Unix System | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798 (4 months ago)
Decades ago Synopsys chose it for Design Compiler. Mostly Hobson's choice (what good alternative did they have?)

But it was an awful language because it was so limited. Many commands in DC naturally want to return objects. But those don't exist in Tcl (maybe they do now?).

So DC had to invent "collections" to make up for the limitations. Which confused the heck out of engineers. Resulting in Stack Overflow questions such as this one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17864980/collections-to-...

So, yeah, EDA uses Tcl but its for historical reasons rather than because its a good tool for that purpose.
Sorry you two are still having issues. I had to do a new incognito window to get to it
Filecoin Important Update: averaging first investments, and more
Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day, and that's assuming a regular schedule, adequate sleep, good nutrition, no major emotional upsets going on... Now, that is work. No checking Facebook. No checking email. Process optimized so there are no long periods of waiting around.

I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work. That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.
The more powerful the government is, the more regulations there are, the more opportunities for rent-seeking behavior there are.
>You're saying that differences in extrinsic incentives (tennant vs. resident) should be treated the same as biological differences when discriminating between good and bad neighbors. Are you kidding?

Legal discrimination based on inborn traits, like race, gender or place of birth, is probably worse, because the targeted group can't change those traits, but both are bad because they discriminate against people based on generalisations about the group they belong to rather than a harmful action they engage in.

>The equivalent of your statement is saying that a licensed doctor and a stranger who claims to know what he's doing should both be able to perform surgery on you - because we wouldn't want to discriminate.

Well, first of all, it shouldn't be illegal for an unlicensed person to perform surgery. It's none of anyone else's business what two consenting adults agree to do together. But that aside, it's not the equivalent at all. The licensed doctor has qualifications that attest their medical knowledge.
1. Buying random art at garage sales and hoping they were painted by the famous deceased

2. Lottery tickets

3. Slipping at Wal-Mart and suing them for millions
It's also arguably faster since you aren't lifting the pen from the paper. I don't write in "formal" cursive, but there's definitely cursive elements in my (cruddy) penmanship, and I know a lot of people who write similarly.
My experience - also anecdotal - supports this. Only a small minority of people who 'joke' about their home life are actually joking. See also:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
Server Monitoring and APM tools
Hobbyist-only coder here who hacks together high-level crap, not memory management and such. Question -

If this program needed to operate from memory instead of a disk, why didn't the coder just... code it that way? Are they saying to use a RAM disk to ensure you don't encounter automatic paging out to disk by the OS?
Did SlateStarCodex on Gender Imbalances Inspire Google Anti-Diversity Manifesto?
Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children, which makes things harder.

They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company enjoyable.
star lisp and to a lesser extent c star was pretty convenient if you had a problem that looked like that. i wonder if there is a useful gpu analog.
You can thank the welfare state for this. Thomas Sowell, a black economist attributes the problems of the black community today to the breakdown of the black family which is a direct result of welfare subsidizing the breakup of families and birth out of wedlock.

60% of people in prison grew up without a father. you want to help the black community get out of prison? Support strong families. But if your a family hating feminist, you are in large part responsible for the imprisonment of blacks today, because you support policies that take away from young black men the thing any boy needs most - a father.
For e-commerce, logistics.
To me handwriting and sketching feels more responsive. Yes with a software tool you might be able to construct a perfect triangle in a few clicks and then it instantly appears, but my brain interprets all those clicks as lag. The goal is to use my hands to make something appear. All those clicks are moving my hands but nothing is appearing! When I sketch it, the instant my hand moves the pen a line appears. It takes longer to construct the whole triangle, but the process itself is zero latency.

I admit it is not rational but it's just how I feel.
Thing is, even within STEM area's, there are huge differences in m/f ratios. Computer science and engineering? Here in Belgium that sits at 10% female. Maths and other sciences make up for that when you only look at the big "STEM" picture.
If you appreciate Airbnb when out of your own city but oppose it when it's in your city, then your opposition is not grounded in an objective analysis of what is in the general public's interest, and should therefore be dismissed in my opinion.
Insufficient infrastructure - water, electricity, transport, increase in (already problematic) traffic, preserving the character of the city / neighborhoods, kicking people out of their homes, gentrification, zoning plans.
I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?"

People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out there.
Much like manufacturing did this with outsourcing, this short sided policy will also ultimately hurt these same companies long term.

I’m no trump administration fan, but I do hope they find some way to stop this.
> If a company gives you a copy of the program under the GPL, then they must obey by that license because they made an implicit agreement with you to obey that license.

The GPL is a set of conditions that others have to obey if they want to use your code. How can you going to sue someone for violating the copyright on code that's not yours? If you see someone selling copied Tom Clancy novels on the street, you can't sue them. Only Tom Clancy and anyone else to whom he grants the copyright.

> because they made an implicit agreement with you to obey that license

So Microsoft is bound by the license on MS Word?
Aye, it didn't appear instantly for me, but I broke the problem down like this: I decomposed the bottom figure into it's shapes, and the square stood out the most to me (it's composed of a square and 2 quadrilaterals). Then I looked for a square in the top figure, which happens to be in the middle.
It's not an attempt to trivialize; I'm pointing out that other people have equally strong contrarian feelings, and that they can make the same arguments for their position (and then some).

I don't doubt that you've been compulsive about researching the subject (as have I).
We've banned this account for trolling. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs.

It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long that you have no idea what is going on and where.
I'm very much against the federal ban on marijuana, but it doesn't even begin to make it onto the list of things that I think are worth taking up arms for, much less expecting someone else to take up arms on my behalf. (Even though, yes, I'd like them to stop taking up arms against pot heads). There's also still a lot of opposition to the current, permissive marijuana regulation in Colorado, so it's hardly the kind of thing the state is in a position to take that hard a stance on.
Yes but I feel that changes when you have something like a diagram. For example, drawing Organic Chemistry mechanisms. Yes you can do them on the computer with ChemDraw and if you need to change something you can, but in practice it feels so slow it's just quicker to cross out your mistake on paper and try again.
I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.