skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Similar setup at my school, albeit smaller. A single female goes through the CS major every year or two at most, compared to 30-50 males, and fewer still graduate with a CS major. We have a 2:1 ratio in favor of women, and it used to be higher, and still had a similar amount in the major.
"I don't know the answer, but I have to agree that it has nothing to do with silicon valley, venture capitalists,"

Yes. The "system" really does seem to try.

"or really the tech industry at all."

....aaaaand, No. You've just grossly over-generalized.

The tech industry is clearly unappealing to women. Maybe that's because women like to have a sense of the humanity of their work. Maybe it's because it's a terrible choice of long-term career. Maybe it's Barbie's fault. But just because you can't identify the reason, doesn't mean that the phenomenon doesn't exist.

Instead of observing that your freshman courses were hideously gender-unbalanced and then stopping the intellectual pursuit, you have to dig deeper. It's a hard problem, but even hard problems have an explanation. I can come up with one consistent pattern without even trying: most women don't like working with anti-social losers. And like it or not, our industry is filled with 'em.

Personally, I had about the same number of women in my CS101 course (back in the mid-90s) as you did, but the difference is, I saw them treated like shit -- usually by guys who didn't have a clue that the way they behaved was boorish and offensive. Those guys also liked to believe that the gender inequality in CS was "just the way things are". Nonsense.

More recently (just a couple of years ago), I had a female friend who became really interested in CS, and enrolled in the 101 courses at a top program. Because of the way the courses were structured, she was a brand-new programmer, competing with guys who had been writing code since they were knee-high. Doesn't matter -- she still kicked their asses; she was one of the top students in the class. But she ultimately dropped out of the program because she felt unwelcome, and felt that the barriers she had to overcome were too high. Every day, I was treated to a new story of how some dude ignored her opinions, stared at her chest, or belittled her in front of her peers. It was infuriating.

To this day -- from classroom to coffeehouse -- I see programmers who treat women like another species. Just today, I watched a guy write code, while taking a break every two minutes to check out a nearby girl's "attributes". It isn't cute, it isn't endearing, and you can damn well bet that this kind of stuff plays a role in why women decide that they don't want to work with us -- even before they get to school. And it's our fault.
And if your CS program is even halfway as "progressive" as mine, all 10 of those females will be given scholarships and aggressively targeted for retention far above and beyond the male students.
I think he means the written language doesn't work well for acronyms and other shortening. Each character is already so much work. You could never get words like SNAFU.
What excuse exactly are you talking about? That most tech startups are run by men? That's not really an excuse but a fact and I think people are right to demand more participation of women in the tech world in general.
You think? I thought the typical blame was placed on high school stereotypes; as you point out, by college most women want nothing to do with engineering or computer science. (Hence FIRST, among other efforts.)

Another explanation I've heard is that women are smart enough to see that the expected value of going into medicine or law is substantially higher. Given the social status and economics are better, why wouldn't they enter those fields instead?
I've already skipped a few services that sounded interesting because they used fb connect (I do have a facebook account). So, to answer your question, if enough people are like me, then yes it will kill your startup.
The United States: Land of the free, home of the biggest prison population in the world.

In all seriousness, I wish more USians were aware of how much of the rest of the world views the current state of your nation. I could address this specific point, but I just feel it's irrelevant in light of the much bigger issues. I think that this clip is quite insightful to the prevailing attitude in Britain and much of Europe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7wgFcCefE

At 3:06, Jimmy Carr says "I'd very much like to say something hilarious, but something must be done." Take note of his tone - it's not the indignation usually aimed at America. There's no sense that he thinks you should know better. It's the same tone he would use to talk about a humanitarian disaster in the developing world. He's just sad. We're describing "slavery by the backdoor" and we're not even angry.

We don't view you as "the evil empire", not any more. We don't hate you, we just don't have the heart to. We pity you. We pity what you have become and what you may yet become. You look to many of us like a punched-out former heavyweight - once great, now just an incoherent wreck, old and infirm before your time.

When hurricane Katrina hit, many of us agreed with Kanye West's sentiment that "George Bush does not care about black people". Five years on, many of us have come to believe that the US is just becoming incapable of managing its own affairs. I'm not sure which is a sadder thing to believe.

Us Brits can empathise to an extent - we used to have an empire on which the sun never set, now we're just a drizzly little island with a few rotten banks and a rubbish football team. Where we can't empathise is that we've always been able to feed our poor and sick and old. Since 1948 we've had a right to a hospital bed, regardless of our means. We used to think that you were unwilling, but now we're not sure whether you're just unable.

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704...
Awesome! A branded computer I can plug in to my TV -- hey, wait a sec...

Or is the appeal supposed to be the easy-to-use programming environment like the days of old? Qbasic on my TV perhaps?
There seem to be differences even earlier than high-school stereotypes or economics become a consideration, though--- my after-school Logo class for elementary-aged students was mostly boys too. Due to girls just not being interested? Due to parents pushing their male v. female children in different directions? Something else? Whatever the reason(s), it's pretty early overall, I think; all the techies I knew in high school began becoming techies quite a bit before high school.
Oh, and I like delayed_job as well.
When we started having to prioritize our time.

i.e., around high school, with a significant increase after college / marriage.
Use OpenID. I never give my user information to another site, if possible. OpenID is the most portable of those implementations.

Edit: Ah, didn't see at first that you can only have one form of login. I guess you can use FBConnect (and that provides a significant user base), but I won't be signing up...
Pretty sure there are tons of Wozs -- even here on HM -- but How many Jobs are out there? I'm usually the first to say that most "business" cofounders are dumbasses with dumbass, cheap, uninformed ideas...but Jobs-level is like top .001%.

And For the record, fuck Apple -- my startup is MS-tech based -- but respect for Jobs as as smart mother fucker.
Nice, but I prefer C# there as well where you use the var keyword, like this:

var tickets = new ArrayList<Ticket<ThingYouLove>>();

Actually, JDK7 is better in this case because it helps developer to "program to an interface".
This is awesome! I love the ability to drill-down to a specific method by fuzzy-searching! I was using gotapi.com for looking up help and reference, but they didn't scroll to the right method.

Most people who complain about the Rails documentations site probably don't use Rails everyday since it's hard to appreciate something if you don't use it.

I'm working with Rails almost everyday, and so far I enjoy it very much. The documentations are great, the Rails Guide is great (and very, very thorough and approachable), and the community is really active. As DHH said, all the arguments don't matter much once you start using Rails, since everything will all make sense (I believe this was in Rails keynote in 2009, he was referring to the debates between implementing .first, .second to the Array class, and he pointed out that these decisions were made to help developers think better and more expressive in their code and thus become happier -- and he's totally right!)
Honestly, why? What does bringing X demographic into industry Y accomplish?

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal."

Perhaps different people, have different interests?
The problem is that women in general do not feel comfortable in the male dominated ecosystem of tech startups.

You can replace "tech startups" with "med schools" or "law firms" or "MBA programs" or "factories" or "the military" or "science fiction fandom", but women have entered all of those male dominated ecosystems and are still there in far greater numbers than the tech industry. There has to be another factor.
Arrington disagrees that the criticism has any merit; at worst he's letting himself be trolled. I guess he feels something needs to be said, and I respect
that.
Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota, all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks, all pizza chains but Domino's ...
Pretty sure pg has said exactly the re: anchoring commitments (kids, mortgage, etc.) with regard to startup success -- not just YC acceptance -- a couple times before.
Like the subject of the article, I think this is a kind of low-grade dishonesty. Annoying but basically how people a living.

I'd see really high-grade dishonesty in the entertainment industry, the gambling industry, in defense contracting or oil and extractive industries.

These are the industries that occur to me who wield monopoly power and/or buy governments.
Brief is very cool. I loved his demo at iPhone meetup. Best of luck Rob!
"In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."

Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.

Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).

I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.
My guess is it'll be pretty similar to any other Atom PC running Ubuntu.
The military? I'd have to disagree with you on that one. The other ones I'm not sure about but I agree that women have entered those industries and it is because those industries started being proactive about recruiting women much earlier than the tech industry. Most things that are male dominated are simply because of historical accidents and nothing else. As soon as women are given the chance they tend to step up and outperform the men. Education is one example I can think of but I am sure there are many other instances.
shrug... you've named a bunch of things that have to do with the tech industry. The whole point I was trying to make is that women are deciding to stay away from engineering before being exposed to any of that.

A 17 year old who decides she's not going to take cs101 hasn't been treated poorly by awkward coworkers for years. she hasn't had trouble getting hired because of gender bias. She hasn't been disparaged in front of her tech peers.

And yet she still decides to not go into CS. I still maintain that whatever brought about that decision (maybe gender roles from an early age or being put off by awkward teenage nerds... whatever) really has nothing to do with the tech industry. Today's tech industry is a result of that bias not the cause of it.
Very interesting.
However, other "religions" such as Buddhism and Hinduism have spoken experientially of Nothing, and the universe arising out of Nothing. This has been misunderstood/misinterpreted as "nihilism" by the west.

Refer "Ashtavakra Gita" and ancient text, for example.
Chinese shortens words by replacing two-character words with one-character ones, e.g. 北京天津高速铁路 (Beijing-Tianjin High-speed Railway) is abbreviated to 京津高铁 (lit. "Jing-Jin High-Rail).
Well that clears everything up.
Are you seriously asking how having the views of different demographics represented actually helps? In any domain where ideas count having different views with different perspectives often enriches the discipline and leads to more breakthroughs and beneficial products for the rest of us. I point you to the civil rights movement and the fight to have more people included in the political process if you want an actual example of how having a demographic X in an industry Y can enrich the lives of everyone and make the world a better place and perhaps those different interests of those different people should contribute to the things that have such a large impact on our lives.
I certainly wouldn't blame Michael Arrington in particular, but this entire argument is precisely parallel in form to the one held up by casual racists in the US where they say, well, I haven't done anything to keep black people down, and I have nothing against black people (see also: "I have lots of black friends"), so don't look at me. The problem there is that white people (in the US) operate from a position of implicit privilege---not that we asked for it, but we are unable to reject it, either, not that it would serve any good to try.

The situation wrt women in technology is not quite the same, but it's not entirely different, either. As Arrington points out, techcrunch and YC and a lot of other groups go out of their way to try to recruit women, which is fantastic. But to then turn around and say, well, if you personally aren't out there founding a business, you have no right to complain... that's a pernicious idea and it certainly is not furthering any useful cause.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule

no apologies this time =(
Various results on Google say the US military is 10-20% female, which is low but, I suspect, still above the tech industry.

I'm not sure what you meant about "as soon as women are given the chance they outperform the men". Really? I wouldn't be surprised if women in male-dominated fields tend to perform well above average--they'd likely have to in order to stay in a male-dominated field--but you seemed to imply that, given equal opportunity, women would still outperform men in nearly every field.
There is http://jqtouch.com/ and http://jquerymobile.com/. Also http://openappmkt.com to distribute.
Twitter Direct Message API method now enforcing 140 char limit
"The whole point I was trying to make is that women are deciding to stay away from engineering before being exposed to any of that."

Yeah, I know. I see what you're saying, and I agree that the roots of the problem start young -- but I contend that even little girls are sophisticated enough to know that a particular subject is dominated by the least-social 5% of their peers. I'm sure there are tons of other factors, too.

That said, when I have so many real-life examples of girls who enter the field later in life, then get treated badly and leave, I know that it makes a difference. When only 10% of your incoming classes are women, it doesn't take much bad behavior to ensure that the number of women in the industry never grows.
Most people willing to pay for an iphone prototyping tool probably already paid the $99 fee to work on something else too.
A nice function (not mentioned in this presentation) is the ability to send commands (-X) to a specific window in a screen session. This allows you to completely control GNU Screen the shell or another programming environment while benefiting from the persistent or logging of a session.

screen -d -m -S mysession
screen -S mysession -X screen -a -tjob1 'top'

Using -X you can call the commands available within GNU Screen to control the session or the windows.
It's a bit facile to limit "the tech industry" in this way, observing that girls acquire their anti-tech biases while in school and therefore letting "the tech industry" off the hook. Your hypothetical 17-year-old may not have had problems with "awkward coworkers" or "getting hired", but you can bet that she's been influenced by the culture surrounding technology, as have her male peers, at least some of whom have almost certainly belittled her technical skills as a result. And she very likely has been "disparaged in front of her tech peers".
The hard drive industry also has this problem. They adopted an incorrect yet defensible definition for 'MB', 'GB', etc. The result is that consumers and engineers have to multiply the advertised MB by 95%, GB by 93%, TB by 91%, PB by 89%, EB by 87%, etc. This will only get worse as storage sizes increase.
> I have yet to see a language reference as good as the PHP documents.

Here you go:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...
Meh. I am well aware of how the rest of the world views the U.S., having spent a fair amount of time traveling around it. In Europe I got a sense that a lot of people were rooting for the U.S. to fail, and that those sentiments tended to cloud their otherwise sound judgement. Like for example the girl from Greece I met who swore that 9/11 was a CIA-instigated plot, and said everyone she knew agreed. Or the French guy who was berating America for backing dictatorships in the Mid-East and Africa, while his own government merrily sells them the guns and bombs needed to prolong the oppression. During Bush II I lived in Spain for a time, and the amount of distortions and outright fabrications that appeared in the papers there about things our leaders had said or done never ceased to amaze me.

And then we have the Brits, who never miss a chance to loudly empathize with what it's like to live in an "ex-empire", and boast about NHS--you know, the institution under which my friend waited 13 months to get a knee operation. (That's a long time to be crippled.) Of course, who knows how long that will last, what that hideous budget deficit you're now forced to confront.

The mistake people from other countries always seem to make when it comes to us Americans is that they mistake our politeness for ignorance. We're not blind to our deficiencies, our yours; we're just too polite to go around rubbing them in.

You could learn something from that.
It knows that I signed into your site. That's one too many things I want facebook to know - it's not their business.

So I'd say yes- subjectively, I would not sign up for any site that required me to use my facebook credentials logged in. I also tend to avoid sites that try to lure me into this option even if others are available. I like my accounts separate.

They are records that can be subpoena'd and data mined, and correlated, to show that I was on your site, and then, over to facebook, they can find out a whole lot MORE about me - so yeah, I'd say it would scare away a lot of people (at least in this crowd)

OTOH - it might be wildly successful if your target audience is the regular sheeple :)
With you so far...
I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.
So? They complied with the GPL. Why is it that people also expect companies to push code changes back upstream, maintain said parts of code upstream and properly document said patches?

If upstream wants patches so badly they can download the tar-ball provided by Apple, diff the two source trees and document, and submit those patches to the upstream. It is not the companies responsibility to do so. The GPL only states that it MUST make the source code and its changes available.
That was a side point, not really fully expressed. But part of the point I was trying to make is that there's no secret interview question and no trick questions. The best ones have been interviews where we talked about a problem they were working on. The best interview question is to tell the prospect about what the company is doing and the assumptions behind it, and see what questions they ask, and then go from there. Ask them about a hobby, ask them about anything that interests them. The important thing is to get them talking. In doing so you can find out how they think. Don't ask trick algorithm questions. (Got asked one of them 6 times in a row once because it was apparently the fad that year. )

Ask them how they like to work, do they like big projects or small ones? Do they like to work alone or in groups? What kind of reference material they like to keep handy. All of these can be phrased as sort of "how can we best support you as an employee" questions, but they will tell you a lot.
The general idea that there are a bunch of old men sitting around in smoke-filled rooms saying to each other, "Hey, I have an idea! Let's intentionally discriminate against women in our hiring and salary setting practices. Why? Because fuck 'em, that's why!"

This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself. Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit home runs.
You should try it sometime.
Should have been discussed and put in writing when the terms of employment changed to remote work - a whole bunch of things change in terms of taxes, liability, etc.

If you genuinely value the employee, and genuinely want to keep them, and the increase is not rediculous, then it's a perfectly reasonable request - especially if they only seem to be asking for the same standard of living and not gaming you for more spending cash.
If you don't increase their pay - will they leave?
What about paying for insurance and expenses for remote workers. Laptops, pcs, etc.
to me, it sounds like you're over-rationalizing this. The average user is either going to say "fuck, yeah, who cares" or "no way, they want to steal my data".