skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like realistic posts like this. She presents her experience and the problems associated with trying to diversify a tech team. She's sincere in her efforts, yet still finds she can't achieve her goals. Also, she brings up two points I've long believed about the troubling lack of women in tech.

She's 100% correct about the fact that it's too late to make a difference in industry when you're only dealing with women who just graduated from college. You have to start earlier and teach young girls that technical skills are necessary. Even if they don't like technical subject matter, they should be made to learn it. It's no longer an option.

Aiding men in industry who want to help is crucial. I see a lot of rhetoric online about how all men in tech are a problem and that they should be excluded from this whole process. "Men can't speak for women." If you believe that, you're contributing to the problem. Perhaps men can't speak for women, but they can at least speak with them.

Patience will be required because this situation isn't going to be solved overnight, or even in 10 years. It'll take a generation of concerted effort to really make a difference.
Ubuntu and Debian are, believe it or not, rather selective. .NET Core isn't "stable" enough for them.
I actually work on the Let's Encrypt project (though I'm speaking for myself here), and I have often said when forms of this issue have come up that I'm not sure what the right forms of security indication in browser UI should be. Obviously the Chrome people have been putting a lot of thought and research into this question. It seems like they would probably agree that there are significant challenges here and some fairly bad trade-offs. A simple form of that trade-off is that we don't want people to enter personal information or passwords on non-HTTPS sites, but we don't want them to think that a site being HTTPS means they don't have to care what site it is.

We had someone on the Let's Encrypt forums complain that her site got hacked even though she used a Let's Encrypt certificate, which was supposed to make her site "secure". But I'm pretty confident that millions of site visitors experience exactly the same kinds of confusion about the meaning of the certificate, and don't regularly think about all the different dimensions of security here (including the confidentiality of your communications on the wire, the forward secrecy of your communications, the protection of your communications against tampering and content injection, the identity of the site operator, the intentions of the site operator, the data retention practices of the site operator, the data protection practices of the site operator, the jurisdictional exposures of the site operator, whether the site's infrastructure has been compromised, whether it will be compromised in the future, whether third parties can send you data through the site that harms you personally or that harms your devices...).
TV is still extremely relevant, many families leave their TV on all evening as background audio they tune in and out of. Rural/older demographics also heavily skew towards TV/radio.
> Since papers are not submitted directly to the peer reviewers, there is at least some work happening.

I am a reviewer and all papers are submitted directly to me. Even if not, the editor is a university professor who does this work.
Accessibility improvements in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3
I'm the CEO of Dropleaf, a Y Combinator Startup. AMA
Adobe scored record profits as they switched to subscriptions so it might not be the best example.

For businesses subscriptions are better; for individual users worse. Why not cover both bases instead of force one way or the other?
Visual Studio for Mac Version 7.2 Alpha Preview
I've had an idea in the back of my head for a while, that micropayments (and maybe blockchains by extension) might have an answer to this. What if installing software was free, but you paid a fraction of a penny for every minute/hour that you run it? Right now this isn't practical, but what if the friction around payments was able to drop to near zero?
Didn't Alan Kay and team get a bunch of elementary school-aged children - who had probably never even seen a computer before, since this was in the 70s - programming in Smalltalk?
Personal Theory: The boom of tech in the "knowledge work" era has pretty much stagnated, but we're deep in the very promising world of merging digital and physical world via sensors, drones, self driving/autonomous vehicles, and AR/VR. A lot of the business that gets most effected by the physical world stuff has been the least touched by the knowledge worker focused stuff (Cloud, apps, etc.)
>Feminist outbursts are driving even the most genuine of men away from us.

I think this depends on what "genuine" refers to in this sentence. Many issues have loud and/or shrill advocates on any or all sides, but that has nothing to do with the actual merits of any side. Anyone who is seriously interested in arriving at the best estimates of truth or utility available should disregard whether or not advocates are shrill and simply focus on facts.
Google sensuring millions of accounts. Shame on you google and your political views, they suck!
That's a fair point. Her recommendations also look a lot like current corporate diversity best practices as far as I can tell.

Likely it's interesting because she's a coder, a founder, a hiring manager, and a woman. That gives her a lot of credibility in one person that is fairly unique. I suppose, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an argument from authority. But people do make decisions that way.
We need better patent clerks like we did at the turn of last century.
North Korea-Linked #Lazarus #APT Targets U.S. Defense Contractors
EVERYONE I know who is over 40 still uses OTA broadcasting. You might be in a bubble.
All of your complaints about how hard it is to make it as a developer are probably legitimate, but understand that there are 2 sides to every market.

It's highly unlikely your app provides enough value to be worth paying for every single month for most people.

Be honest, you've seen that the best way to monetize someone is to get them to pay you every month without thinking about it. This is we're bombarded with "first month's free, write to us via registered mail to cancel or you'll automatically be paying $100/month" offers. A subscription model is equivalent to a "I know a good number of people don't read their credit card statement every month and will forget to cancel" model.

And that's fine. Attempting to get more money from people who are rich enough to not need to read their credit card statement is probably a more honest way to live than monetizing customers via ads or in app purchases like the rest of the "unicorns".

[edit]

I would like to tone down one sentence. When I say "your" I'm actually not referring to the author of this article, instead I'm referring to "A developer who currently sells his/her app for a one time fee of 0.99-3.99".
I’m not sure it really affects the result. Wind speeds on Saturn top out at around 1,000 miles per hour. Using some back of the napkin math, the rotation “speed” at the equator should be well over 20,000 miles per hour. Is that not enough to get an accurate assessment?
A bunch of online games have tried this, some of the most popular ones include World of Warcraft, Runescape and EVE Online. It works with these MMORPGs, but for other styles of games it doesn't work.
As mentioned on another part of the thread, baseball gloves can be somewhat like Japanese schoolchildren's randoseru. You buy it once and maintain it well. It lasts forever and it's part of your identity.
PPA is specifically designed for packages that are potentially not stable. And you can find dozens of garbage packages in Debian repo without even trying all that hard.
it's might not be news to anyone but you said kernel of the article is an anecdote which is just wrong.
How do you feel about this ancient Persian torture method?

"The intended victim was stripped naked and then firmly fastened within the interior space of two narrow rowing boats (or hollowed-out tree trunks) joined together one on top of the other with the head, hands and feet protruding. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey, and more honey would be poured on the victim to attract insects, with special attention devoted to the eyes, ears, mouth, face, genitals, and anus. In some cases, the executioner would mix milk and honey and pour that mixture all over the victim. The victim would then be left to float on a stagnant pond or be exposed to the sun. The defenseless individual's feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects which would eat and breed within the victim's exposed flesh, which—pursuant to interruption of the blood supply by burrowing insects—became increasingly gangrenous. The individual would lie naked, covered from head to toe in milk, honey, and his own feces. The feeding would be repeated each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that fatal dehydration or starvation did not occur. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation, and septic shock. Delirium would typically set in after a few days.[1]."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism
John Oliver did a great piece on this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
I don't see where the author's reasoning is weak. A female tech lead / founder tried the standard way to get better representation of women at Google: try to hire more women, and found out there weren't enough highly qualified candidates to significantly move the numbers in the desired direction. Then as a founder herself, she tried to hire a higher percentage of women, and found there weren't enough candidates. She compared two approaches to fixing that: lowering standards (with negative effects she outlined), and generating more candidates from colleges. She recommends the later approach. The argument isn't novel, but it's also not made in a vacuum or from an ivory tower as she tried the "try harder" approach down in the trenches more than once, and so suggests "try different" instead.
Well, spotify isn't offering unique product. They are just offering convenience to what is already in the world.
C extensions will still run under the GIL
>, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop.

Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo, the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.

To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
> But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.

Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.

If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.
That just means he was an idiot. The problems of the design were well known. The potential failure points were well known and are part of the design. This is nothing new and has been understood for a long time.

A good initial design eliminates many of the complicated failure mechanism.

A molted salted liquid fueled Thorium reactor simply does not have these problems. Coming up with a scenario where it would fail at such a high level is hard to even imagine.
> the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

Please do not mislabel opinion as fact. You do both yourself and the world a disservice.
When incompatible changes are applied, the namespace used for feature negotiation is usually version-bumped, so implementations can choose to support and negotiate different versions of a given extension whenever that seems sensible.

Not sure this works as well elsewhere (e.g. the Matrix spec just states that it's "still evolving: the APIs are not yet frozen and this document is in places a work in progress or stale").
I get the impression that some people have no empathy for new users.
Absolutely agree. Almost all tasks will perform very well when using multiprocessing. It also has a nice side-effect of steering you towards explicitly coding data flows without fine-grained sharing.

If you need to close that gap between the performance of multiprocessing, and multithreading, then you probably shouldn't be using Python, or any language of the same shape, in the first place.

There is one other option I'd like to see: multiprocessing style, but with multiple Python interpreter instances in the same process — one per thread. There would still be the hard delineation of data boundaries between instances, but less overhead for pushing data between them.
>>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

I wished more of these conversations around diversity were focused on these types of points, I call these "the small things". Talking about "college pipe lines" and "biological differences" are "the big things" and they make perfect red herrings for arguments.

Indeed if we want to talk about fitness for a job I would expect a major part of that conversation to be getting a fairly good sense of what is it exactly the job entails skills wise...I have a computer science degree (with a minor in math) and an MBA but I spend most of my days working on things that absolutely don't require that level of education. Education and level of skills is definitely important and should not be underestimated but we also need to be honest and realistic about what it takes to do most jobs.
>Nearly all video games.

except all MMOs ever.
Silicon Valley’s gender inequality is even worse than Wall Street’s
Can someone ELI5 what this problem is, how likely the proof is to hold up to scrutiny, and whether P != NP follows?
This book about typography has helped me a lot. When designing a new site I always begin with the text (but I mostly make pages where the text is the interesting thing) and having the text nailed down makes it so much easier to "see" how the rest of the page should look.

http://practicaltypography.com/
AWS Announces Amazon Macie
My town in years past, as part of a tradition, planted fruit trees throughout the parkways. Cherry, plum, apple, etc. They are left mostly unpicked today. I believe they were planted to be picked, by visitors to the parkways, to be able to grab down a plum for your daughter on her tricycle. And I do. Especially the cherries.
"Copying games out of old magazines to play them" - a big yes here. I learned SO much from tracking down typos. It forced you to look at the code, understand how pieces of it worked, so you could fix it. Your reward? A fun little game. That was enough incentive.
Then just use the version of PyPy with a GIL?
[video] Shooting Down a Lost Drone and Why Dogs Tilt Their Heads
As more and more software has moved to app stores & web apps, I think piracy rates for software have plummeted, simply because it's so much harder.

I don't think subscriptions are always negative for consumers; Adobe is probably the poster child here because $800 is a huge price to pay to just try things out, but $20/month is something you can try out, and people keep paying for it because they can't go without it.

I think honest subscription pricing like that can work great if your software is something you expect the user to use and gain value from repeatedly.

While some people would say Spotify is a content business, which is why it can charge a subscription, I think the fact that users keep getting value from it is the more important fact.
I can see both sides of that coin.

Yes, the thought of adding another recurring subscription can be a barrier. But I think people are becoming increasingly more comfortable with that (Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc, etc, have all opened that door).

And when you get into the more expensive software, I would imagine that the subscription model makes it a lot more accessible and increases the number of people actually paying.

Previously, I'd have had to pay $230 for Microsoft Office and $1300 for the Adobe "Design Standard" collection. $1,530 to get up and running is something no non-business user is ever going to swallow. Even if I plan to make money off of the software, $1530 is just a lot of money to come up with at one time.

Under the subscription model, you're just agreeing to have $60 charged to your credit card every month. Anyone who actually needs the software probably won't think twice about that.
Could you explain what you mean by this?
JetBrains used to have a better model where you paid and got 1 year of updates; then they tried to switch to subscription-only model and upset their individual users (though businesses loved it). After backslash they decided to do a hybrid - you pay yearly/monthly fee, have updates but once you stop you have to go back to the version you used a year ago. I am sure they'll try to phase this out at some point as well.
I have never read clean code and bringing it up as an argument against me and my points is a straw man. I don't think you meant for that though. Most of my knowledge was hard earned from a couple of decades of cleaning up disgusting long functions.

As for testing it is trivial to create examples of larger functions that cannot be tested each line of code introduces another possible thing that gets in the way of testing. I provided a contrived example (which is better than no example). The summary of it was that if a function creates connection to an external resource, uses it, the disconnects there is no way to test that function. Simply breaking it into three functions allows testing of the logic that uses the resource. Adding parameters that allows the resource or resource creator to be passed in allow testing of all three functions.

By skipping examples because someone will complain about how contrived it seems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As it stands your point is not falsifiable because it is possible for people on your side to just say "that's not a good long function" just as if it weren't a true scotsman. With examples you can at least ignore people who complain about the contrivance of them just as most successful technical speakers at conventions do.

> The main argument is that making functions smaller doesn't always make it easier to test

Only a Sith argues in absolutes... Sorry, I had to.

Seriously though know one seriously argues that it "always" makes it better. It just makes it better such a preponderance of the time that arguing against is foolish. It is like arguing for reasonable uses of goto, they might exist, but we as an industry have moved onto better designs.
YouTube and Facebook sooo yesterday, im over it.
(As an option. so yes, they use subscription models, but don't force them)
This is compounded by the fact that brand names don't get tracked but this post, ostensibly by someone in the VC business, doesn't even mention: who is Benchmark? Starting a new firm with a new name might have zero reputation, but it's better than a negative reputation, and who's going to do extensive research on the founders of a new VC fund, as long as they're interested in your new app, and you weren't personally aggrieved by them in a previous round.
Problem is lots of the DLC is not up to scratch! Fallout 4, I'm looking at you :(
It has been kind of strange to watch the diversity programs and the conversations around it, because it all seems partially designed to sorta try to fix the problems, but also not be confrontational or force any hard questions to be asked/answered.

It seems more important to do something, and to be seen doing something, than to get real about what will work, and what won't, and why.
What do experienced guitar players think about apps like Youcisian (which are basically interactive tabs with timing assistance and learning feedback)? Do they actually help in understanding the instrument and music composition?
I think you're making it harder for yourself, not easier. Now you're assuming the following:

1) The person has no knowledge of LaTeX
2) They've never seen a markup language before
3) Yet somehow they've received this file, devoid of context, instead of the PDF, and they've opened it up in a text editor. And somehow this is relevant to something they're doing.

Who is this person? What are they doing? How is their experience worse than the guy with no experience of Word, no knowledge of Word who opens up the equivalent Word document in vi?
No, the core of the article was pointing out that setting arbitrary quotas for female hires and then sacrificing your standards in order to meet those quotas does more harm than good. Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs. Secondly there's the issue of how to address sexism and bias in the industry which results in wage gaps (they're a lot smaller than most of the media makes it out to be, but they do exist), and more importantly in passing women up for promotions or skipping qualified candidates. The later happens rarely thankfully, but it does happen and needs to be addressed, but setting quotas does not fix that problem!

One thing that could potentially help I can think of is encouraging hiring of women in more junior roles (and I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position). If we're not seeing qualified female senior level candidates it could be because they're not getting opportunities to learn those skills in lower level positions. I know from experience it can be hard to make room in a team for a junior employee, but it's something that the industry needs to get better at doing if we want people to eventually have the skills to fill those senior levels roles.
This sounds ad hominem to me. While it's certainly worthwhile to consider Certsimple's motivations when reading the article, I actually found their case pretty compelling.
When part of your pitch relies on trust and goodwill (open dialogues, open corporate culture, leaders worth voting for, etc.), there is a component you cannot neglect: trust.

If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.
This was a lot truer circa 2004.
Webshit weekly (HN summaries)