skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said that someone should investigate it. As in, actively. 50/50 is a null hypothesis. Another perfectly reasonable null hypothesis is the status quo.

For instance, do you know that the proportion of female software engineers is approximately the same as the proportion of females that pass the AP computer science exam in high school? This implies strongly that if there is some effect that's shifting the distribution against women, it happens before high school. That is to say, it has nothing to do with workplace culture or discriminatory hiring practices. Of course, that doesn't mean that those things aren't important - they are. But they likely aren't causing under-representation of women in CS.
Yann LeCun, Peter Norvig, Eric Horvitz AMA
The first one is easy, you just have a hard limit on runtime per invocation.

The second is harder. Last I checked, AWS Lambda for example would allow a loop between two functions to run forever. You have to build loop detection into your software.
Won't cut it for RethinkDB though :/
This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce.

The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity.

Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats.

Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc.

Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.

It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.
You’re turning it around, this is not about disrespecting personal choice, but rather to identify conditioning factors that effectively force out women that would have otherwise taken that path.
Just trying not to ignore what is spelled out:

>But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and learn Lisp. The purpose of this article is not to change anyone's mind, but to reassure people already interested in using Lisp-- people who know that Lisp is a powerful language, but worry because it isn't widely used. In a competitive situation, that's an advantage. Lisp's power is multiplied by the fact that your competitors don't get it.
Is anyone actually using this (and other open source solutions that do similar things) for anything?

The cloud providers offer "serverless" billing for AWS Lambda/GCP Functions/Azure Functions in the sense that you pay just for the compute time and don't manage the underlying infrastructure.

Outside of vendor lock in, what advantage does running a service like this really offer? To make a system like this usable you'll probably need at least a couple of boxes available 24/7
> [Damore's] argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks

The line and paragraph that quoted above makes no judgments about the capability of men or women for software tasks or otherwise, as far as I can tell. (Edit: I’ve read the whole memo at least twice)

The statements that men and women differ biologically, and that this impacts occupational preferences, is not scientifically novel or controversial. Writing about Damore's memo in Quilette, Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) said:

> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

Another other article by Koh goes into more detail about the specific scientific research into this topic, and includes links to several original research publications (so you don't need to take her word for it): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
> Girls, even with their ability in science equalled or excelled that of boys, were often likely to be better overall in reading comprehensions, which relates to higher ability in non-STEM subjects.

Why is reading comprehension non-STEM?

I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.
I assume you have some standards of behavior, though, right? If a member of your group, say, punched another member, you’d probably kick him out, right?

If so: you have a code of conduct, you just don’t have a _written_ code of conduct. You’re relying on the relative homogeneity and shared context of the group to know and follow the unwritten rules.

This tends to work ok for smaller more homogenous groups with shared social values. But unwritten rules fail for people on the margins, and falls apart at scale.
Tesla has already developed an electric semi that will probably be self-driving in the near future.

It's priced at under $200k. That's definitely cheaper than paying multiple people to drive me around 24/7.
We do something very similar, tho we don't use JWT, just a token, and store the userID in the KV store.

How do you handle cleaning up the vault KV store?
We have a separate process that runs around cleaning up old tokens, but am open to a better way.
>There's a lot of benefit to being able to state what keys may be specified in a certain location, though.

There is. I find examples - snippets of XML/JSON - to be the best way of communicating this - not schema languages.
Take a women who is a talented programmer and enjoys programmer, but chooses not to work as a programmer because she is sick of constant sexual harassment. Should we respect her choices or design interventions?
Well, if they don't want to pursue STEM careers, perhaps we should respect their decisions? Meanwhile most big American companies are bent on having a 50/50 ratio in all job types on all levels.
Or if you cannot allow a minority to participate in your field without becoming hostile to them, maybe the problem isn't with the minority?
I think it lacks nuance and can very well be mishandled as an agenda, but the reality is that simply having more women in a particular setting can help make the atmosphere more welcoming of them. (Or people of color. Or long haired hippies. Or whatever group you would like to see more of.)

I really think it matters how we get there and most people advocating for it seem to think that piece does not matter, so I certainly have sympathy for the skepticism with which the idea gets met. But observation of actual reality pretty strongly bear's out the idea that if you can succeed in passing a certain threshold, it will tend be self perpetuating beyond that.
Agreed. It’s bizarre to see this argument from people in places that have historically (and even currently) been epicenters of open hostility, harassment, and violence against “the other”, that the real injustice in our society is that too many people in liberal enclaves have disdain for conservative values.
This comment is peak HN arrogance. People rally behind charlatans because they don't have enough proximity to us engineers to think sanely about things? Maybe we could make them an app where they can get one of us engineers on the line so they're finally able to use their brains again and realize that they need to vote democrat.
> Feminism is ingrained into the cultures of these countries.

Given that the leader of the free world has said that he's not a feminist, I'm not sure I would say that it's ingrained into the culture. It's a recent cultural phenomenon of these countries, sure. But Western civilization has a much deeper culture of patrilineal succession, of the priesthood being restricted to men, of only men having political representation, of the father being the head of the household, etc. That stuff doesn't evaporate from a culture quickly, and even today many of those are strongly believed by huge parts of Western civilization.
One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated.

So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.
How do you define which countries have “more gender equality?” It seems like begging the question.

My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married).

Raising a daughter in the US, my perception is that girls in America are taught about “princesses and fairies.” We impress upon boys the need to get practical education so they can support families but are more indulgent with girls. Last summer, I signed my then four-year old up for summer camp classes. There literally was classes for “princesses and fairies.” Of course I signed her up for “little engineers.” My daughter was quite upset to be the only girl in the class. That’s not innate. It’s somehing we’re choosing to do to our kids.
Here are three possible explanations for the observed behavior that don't require a belief in inherent biological differences:

1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation.

2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM.

3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors."

To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference.

I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
[1] https://imgur.com/a/1Diel
Colly: Elegant Scraper and Crawler Framework for Golang
It seems HN is turning into slack with this colon emojis, you should stop using them! :wink:
Engineering and Science careers are quite competitive with law and medicine. That's why these fields aren't filled with male AND female failed lawyers/doctors.
Except the entire point of this article is about how more gender equality doesn't help anything in regards to STEM career choices.
> But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word?

Yes I could, and I did. My Master's thesis is written in Word and it was pretty heavy on the theory and the formulas. If you're interested it's online on http://e.teeselink.nl/thesis_et.pdf. It's not a particularly stunning thesis in terms of content, but in my humble opinion it's a pretty document, definitely no worse than the average LaTeX-produced thesis.

See eg page 58 (the 70th page of the PDF) for some large formulas. It's not arithmetic but Structured Operational Semantics, but I doubt that matters for this argument. (in hindsight I hate that page and the ones like it - the sheer overload of single-character variables makes it totally impossible to understand)

By the way you said "no git" but Word files can be version controlled just fine - particularly when you're working solo which I was. I used Subversion (hey, 2007) but ok.

I used Word because I noticed in earlier years that LaTeX made my mind drop down into "programmer mode" every time I wanted to accomplish something that was non-trivial. This nerd sniped me and it distracted me from writing the actual content. I ended up with super nice LaTeX themes and definitions and homecooked macros (excuse me for having forgotten the real names these things have in LaTeX, I last used it over 10 years ago), my content sources were super clean, but I spent at least as much time on setting up LaTeX as actually writing. Plus, I found editing large formulas frustrating because I had to find the right place in a fullscreen wall of backslashes and curlies.

Word forced me to focus on the content because everything layout-wise I wanted to accomplish was boring and, mostly, easy.

The only thing that was cumbersome was getting IEEE-style references (i.e. the ones that Bibtex generates by default) to work. It worked out in the end but wasn't as easy as it should be (I noticed that they fixed that since). Also I had zero problems with that thing where Word just doesn't want to do what you tell it to (indents jump, list items suddenly disappear etc, you know the drill) because I only used Word Styles (a bit like CSS classes) and never custom formatting. As long as you stick to that, Word sucks less.
You're past flamebait and into trolling. Please don't post like this here; it destroys the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
It's pretty loud down there. Cell phones work on the elevated portion of the 7 and you don't hear too many people talking on the phone. The LIRR, on the other hand, has an epidemic of loud cell phone talkers.
>Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.

This doesn't make much sense if we assume that "It may very well be that men and women have different criteria".

According to what you wrote, the real problem is that women in STEM have "have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions".

For this, the desired solution would obviously be "better treatment of women in STEM" -- not, "more women in STEM".

Now, getting more women in STEM might indeed be ONE way to achieve "better treatment of women in STEM", but it's the wrong way to achieve that if more women don't really want to go into STEM. If we are willing to accept that

(a) women in STEM have "have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions".

(b) "It may very well be that men and women have different criteria" (and might be less inclined to go into STEM)

then we should just fix (a). Ensure that women in STEM are treated better -- WHATEVER their percentage of STEM jobs.

>Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point.

At the same time not entertaining the thought that - as the linked study shows - that women might not just have "different criteria" but like some STEM careers less (and not just the treatment they get while in STEM careers, but some STEM fields in general as fields) makes it a "thought crime" and stops searching for truth in favor of what's the fashionable ideology of the day.
Alice: “Standard boring political statement.”

Bob: “Alice is a reptile from the planet Xenon!”

Carol: “That’s clearly not true. What Bob is saying is fake.”

Bob: “See! Carol is part of the concpiary!”
Not in my country (Europe), much less sexist to what I hear about US. Maybe you are talking about NYC?
Well Traders do have this barrow boy image medicine or law has a much higher "social" status in the UK and I bet the USA also
The police by the very definition of their job don't go around "tracking" regular folk. Only those that are doing or have done wrong. Seriously the police have better things to do than watch people on CCTV who aren't doing anything wrong. Not to mention the various laws and regulations that prevent the police doing just that.

Councils on the other hand are a different thing.
What does she hate about it?

The answer I usually hear is "an encouraging environment in college didn't prepare me for the abuse I faced in my career".
Beats having to wash used ones though.
I get the point of what you're saying but, FYI, my Series 3 watch lasts 3 full days on a single charge. I typically wear it all day and then to bed for sleep tracking and then charge it for the hour or so that it takes me to shower, get ready, make breakfast, etc.
> As expected, this is the top comment

That's because it's a good comment.

> men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant

No, it's not at all irrelevant, because the fact that fewer women choose STEM fields has been used to design a narrative about the causes when the evidence does not actually support that narrative, and in fact the simplest explanation is simply that women prefer other fields, and therefore choose these fields unless other pressures override those preferences.

> Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions.

Citation needed. All we have are (a) individual stories, read anecdotes, not data on actual problems occurring and (b) hard statistical data on the distribution.

These two independent facts are woven together to create the narrative that (a) is systemic, for which there is no evidence and the cause of (b), for which there is also no evidence.

(I am assuming you mean either "all women" or "women in general", rather than "some women")

The only actual data I am aware of was a survey by the ACM a while back[1]. It showed few if any significant differences in job experience, socialization and attitudes between men and women.

The differences it did find were "supervisor support, career related", where women reported slightly higher support, and "comfort with technical language" and "confidence in technical skills" where men supported slightly higher levels (but still not huge).

Motivation for entering the profession were also largely the same, with men supporting slightly higher for "love of technology/computers" and women reporting slightly higher for "ease of entry into profession", "job security" and "flexible working hours".

And of course there's the Ceci/Williams study showing a 2:1 hiring advantage for women in STEM fields (academia).

>Women are interested.

Yes, some are. But not very many. In fact, most people in general aren't that interested in STEM, it's a minority occupation.

> Many that do are forced out for one reason or another

In a big survey, the biggest reasons for leaving were "spend more time with family", "lost interest", "no advancement" and "didn't like daily tasks".

Again: you are being duped by the narrative. Neither the science (see article) nor the other data back this narrative.

[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/2/5453-women-and-men-in-...
> Most open minded liberal people with half a brain aren't going to move to bumblefuck, usa

How can you label yourself open minded, then brand anywhere other than SV "bumblefuck, usa"? Surely you see the hypocrisy?
Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing.

Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092
The democrats' last presidential campaign cost over $2 billion. The money definitely wasn't all spent on printing flyers.
Nope a senior lawyer or doctor gets paid far more on average that an engineer or STEM PHD
I'm not sure but publicly posting a portrait always felt uncomfortable to me. People on Fiverr create really nice 8-bit portraits from a picture so I commissioned one and use that instead of a real photo.
When "killing all men" type of behavior becomes problematic you will have a point. The problem has been that some people don't understand what "being obnoxious" is and need it spelled out for them. Because men have not been historically a target of oppression, the explanation now has the language that it does, using actual examples / lines of harassment.
Ok, I know this is a little bit silly but on the similar subject... but has anyone noticed pomeranian dogs tend to circle clockwise instead of counter-clockwise? My friend's dog does it so much we nicknamed her "The Anti-NASCAR".
As I'll reply to the other commenter, it's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
Yes, but the built in web editor is not very nice. So you have to copy/paste it, and of course you want to test and make sure it works first, etc, etc.

I think allowing patches is just a better solution here.
This argument would be more interesting if we weren't seeing heavy female attrition due sexual harassment unrelated to work content.
The entire country has awful city planning, SF just happens to be a highly visible example with some unique problems.

Conservatives have plenty of issues as well - look at Kansas or Alabama. Don't see those being discussed at a national level, though the politics that drove them into the ground as now steering the federal government.
It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
This is why I said, in my original comment, "and the property is large enough" (implying it doesn't interfere with others; or you have a permit, ...).

I'm sure you knew that though. What exactly is your point? Would you like me to rewrite my original post in fully specified legalese just so you can't nitpick? :P