skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There may be a rock unturned here.

Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged.

So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable.

Extraverted women and men have shied away from computers and related fields for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our field. Perhaps we just have bad press.
The Next American Frontier
A friend also told me taht he had no time working on his 20% project, because he was so busy doing the other stuff. And I suspect the bonus depends on the regular work, and not on your pet project ;-).

Hell, not even the inventor of python can work on python full time. (only 50%). I expected at least him to work 50% on it, as it's so widely used inside google. The same for people working on php.
"My ex-wife left me for her WoW guild leader."

Ewww.
Are any of these discussions actually that interesting? They all seem to turn into "market-will-fix-everything libertarians vs OMG evil corporations!!! types". Ok, that's a little bit of a caricature, but not too far off the mark, and in any case the whole thing is a slippery slope into territory that's not really about hacking or hackers or startups.
Queueing is a well-known side-effect of mispricing. Think bread lines in Soviet Russia---or 'car lines' at rush hour.
Provide some more information as to your current (as well as past) work experience, education, interests, etc. and I am sure the community can be more concrete with suggestions.

That's a good idea. I'll probably post another Ask YC with more specifics.
seems like the u.s. is headed that way as well.
Where does one find Hewlett-Packard fanfiction?

:)
Women are more sensible than men. Unless you start a successful startup, or are in the top 1% of engineers, having a typical engineering job is pretty lame. Statistically you will make more money with less effort by choosing a medical or legal related field. Greenspun said it best here:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

This article is about science careers. Just switch a few things in his career path and it is the same argument for engineering careers.
The True Story of a Script, Big Dreams and Vanishing Private Equity
As mentioned, for tailored and considered answers, you need to provide more details about your background and constraints. We will also nned to look at your motivations as doing a startup may not be what you are looking for as for simple excitement you can do many other things to achieve this e.g. travel, extreme sports/experiences, new job in new area

Erstwhile, as a generalisitic answer from someone having been in a similar situation I would say try and implement a few ideas in your spare time. See which ones you enjoy and which ones take off. Often the elements of business you least consider are the most fun and vice versa. Perhaps try and do so consulting work at other places, if possible, to build your exposure to business in general if you have not worked at many places.

Once you have been exposed to more activity and have experienced mre things you will often find yourself in a better position to determine what is right for you and the problem, if any, you want to tackle in your business/startup.

Business/startup for the sake of it may not be the answer. We cannot know until we find out more about your sceanario.

This may sound very soft and general advice, but I hope it helps and if you can elaborate further I am sure I and the many others here will try and give sound advice to the best of our ability.

Thanks.
Silicon Alley Insider and Techcrunch to merge?
Why not do both? Go to grad school while at the same time working on your start up. You never realize how much free time you have at school until you leave it.

And don't worry about coming up with a genius idea, most startup ideas aren't genius. Its usually just another social network or travel site

I would also recommend you to move outside of NYC, since you are most likely paying 3-4 times in rent compared to outside of the city. Like everyone said your goal now is to cut your costs dramatically.
It's totally possible that the countries are cherry picked.

Still, my own personal experience corroborates the theory. Examining just folks that I know, women seem to be more attuned to social pressures than do men. If this were even partly true of whole species, then it would more than explain the gap.

Still, as you said elsewhere, differences within the sexes are by all measures more significant than differences between the sexes. With this being the case, we could have a great deal of difficulty isolating specific differences and yet still have them exist subtly.
The article discussing modafinil were a little over-enthusiastic, I think. It's more suited for people who have to say alert and watchful for long periods of time, rather than people who need to make better decisions. It would help night watchmen or troops on combat missions more than it would help a scientist or software developer.
Can you buy success with money though? I always looked at the lottery as VC or angel funding without payback to stop bootstrapping my ideas. The main problem with the authors reference story is that the man stopped living life, stopped working, went public with his winnings and did not follow through on his plans.
That's the difference, is it not? Many people go and they think people are incompetent. I go and I see that people are not working optimally, and I figure out a way to make them work optimally.
Jesus Christ, I just watched a video of Ken Tilton ranting on a beach (!?) and agreed with almost everything he said. That can't be a good sign at all.

(Hey smanek, this is eli)
Cheers!

Love to see some other startups throw up a muxtape mix. Good new music keeps everyone motivated throughout the day!
The most important sentence from the article, emphasis mine: "The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do."
This article has lots of generalizations but no data from surveys or other research to back it up.
Does anybody here use Stikipad (hosted wikis) and know what's going on with it?
Gigaom - In the Red? Sprint Says Gouge the Customers
Python: Save the interactive interpreter's state and reload it anywhere
The site has been down for over a week now and I haven't been able to find out what's going on...
OLPC project to get Windows XP | Mr Brooks
Ipod Touch Vista Theme
You might be able to negotiate a leave of absence (since you're walking away anyway)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184979

Or have you considered grad school abroad at a suitable university (ideally, where the academics meet your rigor and exchange rate is favorable)?
Wow, where did that come from? I'm not saying that all people who are "anti-immigration" are racist-- but some of them certainly are. I've seen my share of racism, without question.

In Norway, there is serious under-employment-- it is not possible to be "against immigration" per se; it's all a matter of degree.

Over-simplifying the positions ("people are not racist";"unlimited immigration") doesn't do the discussion any favors, either.
About 4 years ago I finally (it seems) stopped smoking, and my wife (then girlfriend) as well. Before that I was a smoker for about 12 years or so. In the last 6-7 years before realy quitting I was more or less constantly in the process of quitting. When successful for one years or one and a half, then I would lapse back into the bad habit. And always for almost honorable reasons. Paul's description is quite correct here. Who wanted to blame you for a single cigarette on your graduation party, and the like.

It became a bit disheartening, because once you had proven that you would relapse after apparently successfully stopping for so long, you don't believe into yourself any longer. If 18 months was not safe, would it be fair to feel safe after 24 months the next time? Or after 30 months? And in general it was really this continuous argument with yourself all the time. Just one tonight? -- But then I found a trick that worked. My girlfriend (who smoked as well) and me would set up a monetary fine. That simple. And effective. We agreed that whoever smokes a cigarette had to pay 500 euros (which was a lot for us then), no offsetting against each other!

Reflecting on this, it is curious that one should be more successful with a bit of cash, when years of your life and your health are at stake. And I was perfectly aware of the health risk back then, of course. I assume that one involuntarily calculates the net present value of your health in the future. I think your really have to beat the economics of quitting, otherwise you out-cheat yourself without end. Take an amount that hurts you. I am a idealistic person, and working with cheap money tricks was not much after my taste. We were making us the equivalent of a donkey tricked around by a carrot. But it work for us and was even quite painless. So I recommend this to other smokers.
<b>Paul Graham, a Luddite Technologist</b>

..oho-ho... Paul Graham (a creator of some scheme macro kludgy prototype that finally does what other people's micro-lisps and micro-schemes have done for _years_ if not decades) and his hot-air brigade declared the Internet Ultimate Evil.

The Internet is <b>an amplifier of thinking</b>. If in the past ages one would be limited by his access to books, had to physically travel to get access or wait for weeks, what is left to a human brain now is analyzing, discerning, hypothesizing, searching for evidence to confirm - because the Internet is an almost immediate reference with access to almost everything.

Note how different it is from the rammin into a passive victim faster and faster-montaged propaganda, to block any vestige of thought from this victim's head - what is television, of course.

With the Internet I have to get to the materials ACTIVELY. Although I switch off flash and javascript during normal work and browsing, of course.

A "computer specialist" that pushes us luddite idea of the Internet as the ultimate drug and evil! It's like a luddite who happens to be a technologist, only a bit more unnatural.
A man with access to the best instrument in aid of thinking incapable to see what he touches.

Only in Paul Graham's blog, only in Paul Graham's..
Favrd. Trickle-down egonomics for the twitter attention sp...
Okay, so despite me being a girl with zero interest in having children (at most considering adoption), desperately wanting my girl bits out (if it wasn't going to be a hormonal disaster), being on hormonal contraceptives all the time and not sleeping with men, I have the option of getting pregnant and stop working?

Even if I were considering that preposterous option at any time, it sucks to say this but it is really hard to live off of one person's income today.
Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong
Check out the "Review of Similar Projects" section in the Seasteading book:

http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/book_alpha/review.html#S...
San Jose is hell on earth
French Laundry?
Stop generalizing. I hate people, I am antisocial until I need to be nice (networking?), I'm with friends, or I'm drunk. Relationships I can stand because I really like cuddling and sex.

I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical views on it.
Make sure you save up a lot of cash if you're going to be staying in NYC!
University registrars do.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/con-mans-night...
Tim Ferriss Revisited
In regards to the first half of your comment, it's probably the case that a lot of professions are like that.

To the second half...I haven't even graduated college and I've dealt with more than I've wanted to. Sure, with some profs and at some of the places I've worked at it was awesome - people were friendly and treated me as an equal. But I've gotten my fair share of discrimination.

In fact, why do I end up writing so much about this. Lemme just copy and paste what I wrote on a similar reddit topic:
I was interested in computers and programming in particular since elementary school, and since then I've been harassed about it by the most unexpected people. My parents gave up the fight but not after more than a decade, and I get irked by the various types of people I end up talking to when my job/major comes up. "You're kidding, right? You're a woman, do you know what to do?" is not that uncommon to hear, despite the decent resume with good references or a word-of-mouth recommendation from some happy client who wouldn't shut up telling them about how much they liked me and my work.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Or maybe you just..don't notice it?
I'm glad to know I am not the only one who felt this way. I felt like I was in one huge shopping mall. Malls give me head aches.

Human brain has an upper limit on the fakeness it can take before it makes you throw up, I think. (I seldom complain and I don't drink 'orange mocha frappuccino')

[edit] deleted --> "SJC is the most depressing airport I've been to."
I used to think that. I think it less now. SJ definitely does not have the taste and cosmopolitan charm of SF, but as places to live go, it's really pretty good. Access to the ocean and amazing open spaces, etc.
> choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged... it's not so much a function of the nature of our field

Are you questioning which career is in fact more socially engaged? Can you name a field which is less socially engaged than CS/Math?

It seems to me that it is a function of the nature of our field, which demands long stretches of unbroken attention, that draws people who desire large amounts of social activity away.
The whole point of statistical trends is that they ARE generalizations. Yes, you can find individual cases which buck the trend, but across a large sample group, these are the tendencies...

How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of information.
In "Metcalfe's Law is Wrong" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4109 Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly argue that the value of a network should really be n*log(n) not n^2

I don't buy their arguments, certainly not for smaller values of n that Andrew Chen is writing about.
Stop generalizing.

Is it not meaningful to say that men are taller than women?
Then a lot of "adults" really aren't adults. I've met lots of people from all walks of life, and there's really nothing separating the cretins from the nice folks.

Mainstream media can be pretty disturbing. I have a bunch of friends my age (19), and I'm quite possibly the only one that puts makeup on sparingly only at special events like a concert I'm performing at - like, covering up a small blemish and putting on a teeny bit of eyeshadow to be a bit more photogenic. Apparently you're not beautiful until your face is buried under a ton of makeup. :(
From my experience not a large percentage of the guys who sign up for engineering programs actually WANT to become engineers. It sounds like a socially acceptable major, and sure maybe they like mechanical things, but a huge number of the guys washed out from mechanical engineering, (we started with 140, we are down to 80, of the 80 there are 15 girls, we started with 17 girls, the rest of the wash outs were guys). I think few girls go into engineering as a default major, so if they are there they really want to be there. In the end, the only ones who can get through it are those who really want to be there, so why encourage people who aren't committed?
IPhone QR code reader coming next month
There's a host of interesting startup ideas in this field, most related to 3D graphics. We need higher levels of abstraction for creating textures, architecture/models, decoration etc. The tools we have today are awfully rudimentary, and there's research indicating that much better solutions are possible.

See for instance http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Docum... - a higher-level language for describing architecture. In the marketplace there are things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree, which is already in use in a great number of games.

It is obvious that we could create a huge amount of tools to this purpose, and also that there is a huge market for software that makes game development easier. What's the sense in creating the 5000th 3D model of a human? Humans don't change that much. Not even fictional bipeds do. Have you ever heard a game developer or pundit complain about 'spiraling costs' for game development? It's because human developers have more and more work to do to make the games keep track with developments in hardware. It should be obvious to anybody that this development isn't sustainable; there's no way every room of a game designed by humans can have even as much detail as the room I'm sitting in right now. But most of this architecture is predictable, and could probably be generated by the right program.

Consider a lower bound of game development costs for this 'generation' of consoles at 3 million dollars. If even five percent of that cost could be eliminated by better development tools, that would mean savings (and potential for profit!) of 150,000 dollars. But the potential savings from automating menial modeling tasks are a lot higher.

Seriously. We need software to make stuff like this easier. There's a major can of worms in implications of sorting this out - a lower barrier to entry, more creative freedom, better-looking games and so on and so on...
It's not just bad press; engineers (of any stripe) are often frighteningly socially incompetent. In my experience, this is true far more often than for lawyers or medical doctors.

It's also a kind of stereotype to say that programming is about creation and empowerment; the existence of this forum (and most of what pg writes) seems to me a reaction to the utterly dismal, uncreative state of most programming jobs. So it's not really fair to say that people flock to other fields based on misinformation. Most computer-related jobs really do suck.
You presented an irrelevant argument which is based on imagined evidence; therefore it's easy to assume that bias underlies the argument. Whether it does or not, I won't judge.
SJC is a much better airport than SFO, but OAK is the one the cheap flights go to, and is inexpensive to get to SF from.
Those two are not wrong, but from personal experience, what's been happening is too many people telling me that CS is a bad choice based on my gender and not my interests or anything else. That is wrong.
When nerds hook up with nerds...
Erlang also has an optional type system, you can put type hints at function heads (these can also be built using typer, which is built into erlang). there is also dialyzer which does static type analysis.

It doesnt use loops because it doesnt have variables, once a 'Variable' has been bound to a value, it cant be changed
Hows San Diego?
I moved from Toronto to South Bay for work a couple of years ago. I couldn't face the commute from San Francisco to San Jose, so I decided to live close to work in San Jose. I almost cried when I first visited San Jose's "downtown".

The descriptions of the link are pretty much bang on, although I don't find the smog in San Jose so bad. And San Jose does have one attribute that's better than San Francisco: the weather. It's sunny and warm in San Jose with cool nights. Whenever I go to San Francisco, it is cold, windy and foggy. The San Francisco Zoo is situated close to the ocean in a part of the city that is seemingly permanently overcast and cold. I feel sorry for the animals.

Other than the weather, the best thing that can be said about San Jose is that it is close to a lot of interesting events and places that are not in San Jose.
"Envy never comes to the party dressed as envy, but as high moral standards."

That's a paraphrase, Wilde or Shaw I think, but this post is a perfect example.

I think the idea that "hard work is an end unto itself" is pretty dumb.

I'd also like to address his comment about "who will do the work?" if everyone implemented Ferriss methods. Well, obviously some people are going to lack the initiative, brains, risk-tolerance, information, or opportunity to do so, and will be stuck manning the refineries or stuffing the boxes. But you can't really blame Ferriss for that, as he wrote a best-selling book trying to show how and why to do it, even without having much money or "qualifications"!
Does anyone here have a story about a contested noncompete actually breaking in favor of the employer?
Heh. You haven't seen pre-fab until you've been to Orlando.
an arabic translation for this article is available here:

http://blog.amr-g.com/?p=11
My problem with discussing gender differences in engineering is that there isn't enough research into it. It can be a useful piece of information in the correct context, but I didn't believe the above was.

There are women in IT who are interested in people and relationships and they are still engineers. There are women who hate people and are engineers. There are men....you get the idea.
Having never been to SFO or OAK, I find this shocking, since SJC seems kinda slummy, especially when flying via NWA.
yeah facebook's attempt at blocking such an initiative is, at least to me, over stepping into my property rights... thus i will think to myself before spending much more time on their building my social connections ...
When I came out for StartupSchool three years back, I went back to Austin with the impression that the bay area was perhaps the most awful thing I had ever seen--strip malls, Starbucks, and on the "good" streets there would be a Restoration Hardware. Everywhere I looked, my first thought was "Do not want!" I would never live in a place like that.

Then we got into YC, and I had another look around, and it turns out there are little pockets of nice living on the peninsula. The downtown Mountain View area is great, as long as piece and quiet are positive attributes for you. It lacks the suburban sprawl and mini-malls of Sunnyvale and Santa Clara (the Rengstorff/Showers area excepted), and actually has a very walkable central core. And, I guess in 12 years a lot of good restaurants can happen, as there are at least a dozen good places on Castro and a few good ones sprinkled about in the rest of town (Amber India, for example). The library is awe-inspiring, the parks are numerous and just crowded enough to be interesting, and there are two little Asian markets within walking distance. I always see dozens of people walking when I'm out. There is a patch of soulless hell at the distant end of Castro, where the Starbucks and other polished up corporate turds reside, but one can avoid it easily (just stop and turn around at City Hall).
It depends on the context.