skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OP's scenario:

1. There are a minority of women in tech.
2. Trying to correct (1) will do more harm than good.

aspaceman's scenario:

1. There are a minority of women in tech, because on the whole, more men like tech jobs than women.
NOT that NO women would do tech jobs, but in the "absence of discrimination", maybe gender ratios would be 60-40 men or something.
2. Because women are in the minority, male co-workers take them less seriously, and their opinions aren't as valued as mens'.
3. Womens' opinions being less valued, etc., results in women leaving tech for other fields.
4. Tech gender ratios are further skewed than they otherwise would be (Maybe 80-20 men).

Now here's where it gets tricky. It _is_ entirely possible that trying to correct these imbalances would do more harm than good. However, it is _also_ possible that there are some "low-hanging fruit" corrections which would bring tech gender ratios back into balance without really inconveniencing anybody. Given that it's possible that some interventions might bring about a more natural gender ratio, it's reasonable to try many different types of interventions, and see which ones work.

Note that the root of this problem is men not taking women seriously. The more serious men take womens' views, the better everything gets.
When it comes to building ecommerce websites, I cannot go without self-hosted website builders - http://www.bestfreetemplates.info/builders.php . These website builders are pretty intuitive. All you have to do is go in and replace its pre-populated content with your own.
Do you use them professionally?

It seems to me that very few companies use Lisp-like languages used in production. Even Haskell seems more common.

The big deal with using Lispy languages is that companies don't want to use them -- it's a lot easier to hire developers who know other languages. So, I'm stuck with Java whether I like it or not, and I appreciate any functional programming features that can be packed in to new Java releases, even if they end up being a bit clunky.
Reminds me of XSD - the XML schema definition language that itself is XML. Any takeaways (good/bad/ugly) from that experience that are applicable here?
Five More Years – Slate Star Codex
The problem is, who says what is real news and what is fake news? Do you really want a Ministry of Truth? The history of such things is pretty bad.

I'll take foreign propaganda over losing free speech rights.
Somehow the first substitution makes the analogy more arrogant. Whereas the original comment ultimately refers to those who are qualified for engineering jobs ("engineers") the substitution suggested here implies the engineer mindset is only present in engineers.

If anything, I've seen more engineers shedding their engineer mindset, but that's another conversation. (Disclaimer: this side remark is not about "fake news" or the 2016 election)
Ask HN: What about fixing recruitment?
While my latest, slowly-growing startup runs without my help, I started looking for either a new business idea or a job in a more exciting startup than my own. I got in touch with a few headhunters and I realised how broken recruitment is. During the last 10 years I collected a considerable experience in hiring smart developers (being a programmer myself helped a lot). Is it worthwhile to try to fix how tech recruitment is done? Why do so few tech people become recruiters?
I agree that there are many missed and incorrect diagnoses made not least by specialists.
> Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.

In what sense is it artificial? And why is it a travesty? Is it also a travesty that much less than 20% of all nurses are male?

Gender parity seems to have become dogma. I'm not saying increasing parity has no value, just that its value is not so evident.
I’ll mix it with Hindu/Indian rice and olive oil. It scratches the fried chicken taste/texture.
A slightly more technical article based on Boston's system:

http://www.masstransitmag.com/article/12242267/mobile-commun...
Yes, Paris mobile network in subway is now pretty good. My second job was to install BTS for FTM (now Orange) in Paris including the subway in... 2000 ;-)

And we had to do it cooperatively with competitive carriers because of the lack of space in the tubes.
The issue I’ve always had with Agile – with a capital A – is that the manifesto itself is not agile; it’s been cast in stone – or, at least, embedded in a static web page. (That’s why I’ve never “signed” the manifesto.)

I’ve been in this game for enough decades to know that you have to reinvent yourself every five years or so. Some things remain the same over time, of course, but a great deal changes. These changes must at some point affect the assertions laid down in the Agile Manifesto. Where is the mechanism for change?

I must at this point point out that I consider myself agile. I absolutely have skin in the game.

Now, to the language of managers.

I work at CTO/Head of Tech level. That involves a bunch of strategic, operational, and financial stuff that doesn’t pertain to tech matters (tangentially sometimes), but my role at the tech level I regard as supportive not <air quotes> managerial. I usually describe my role as “looking after” not managing – I actively remove the terms manager and management from that part of my role. I expect – nay demand – that the teams responsible for delivery drive development/maintenance. My role is to provide them with what they need – to support, to look after, and so on – individuals and interactions. For me, that’s agile.

That’s a dynamic process that’s enabled by tooling and that tooling changes rapidly. No set of pronouncements or practices can remain relevant in such a dynamic environment; unquestioningly following a static text is dangerously close to religious practice – I don’t regard this as a good thing, ymmv.

So, while I believe that the Agile Manifesto is an excellent baseline, it is flawed and somewhat contradictory in operation. But, like democracy, it’s the best we’ve got.
Do you need to learn a diverse set of things are just be aware of a diverse set of things?

For instance, we just moved to AWS. I am not going to spend hours upon hours learning in depth all of AWS's services. I did watch a few videos and subscribe to the AWS podcast so I could be aware of the different services to know what they have. When there is a business need to implement X, I'll know what's out there and then do a proof of concept to see if what AWS has fits our needs.

Learning best practices transcend technology. We've had "consultants" come into the company where I'm the dev lead and question my choices of technologies. I ask them two questions - what's the business case and what industry standard best practices are we not following?
That would be great, but you’re basically wishing for smarter people. The urge for tribalism will always be greater than the the urge for reasoning, and since that’s the case we have to do what we can to stop tribalism from being inflamed by propaganda.
I'll ignore the irrelevant marxist talking point and trump references, and redirect you back to the data. The Nordic countries always lead in these stats.

These are the countries that are the most egalitarian in the world, where 3rd wave feminism forms a major part of social policy, where women have an equal level of opportunity to men and the freedom to choose their own paths in life. The data shows that under these conditions, this freedom has a negative correlation to women choosing a career in STEM.

You can't say that this is a remnant of some patriarchal system of oppression, because as women's freedom has increased in those countries, their participation in STEM has decreased.
How do eggs compare with yeast and whey and other protein foods, on your parameters?
> You also say that Word has been getting better

I didn't say that. Like, not even close, where did you get that from? In fact I haven't noticed a single improvement in Word since 2007 except the installer.

> And to add, I am also pissed by the appearance that Microsoft - not specifically for this comment, but very much in general - seems to follow the strategy to make their commercial products mentioned as much as possible in the context of free and open source software,

I'm seriously bothered that you're accusing me of being a talking head for some multinational corporation. I'm a moderately happy customer, that's all. Our financial relationship is 12 euros a month, from me to them.

If you really can't discuss the merits of software alternatives separately from some big "everybody who disagrees with me is on the enemy's payroll" conspiracy theory, the IMO you already lost the argument.

> As here, somebody who really has medium knowledge on how to use LaTeX will rarely suggest to use Word instead.

I used LaTeX in anger, then noticed that getting comfortably good at it doesn't make it a less shitty experience, and I decided that I preferred Word. Please note that I think that both Word and LaTeX are pieces of shit, I simply think that Word is slightly less shit (or, well, shit in a way that bothers me less and you're free to disagree).

I think the fact that you can't imagine anyone knowledgeable could prefer Word over LaTeX shows a severe lack of empathy and imagination on your part.
[Citation needed] for "Engineers are usually conservative because they mostly come from stable, conservative households."
I've heard the "loaf" position called the "lozenge" (my fat barely-a-mouser does that a lot).
That's a great example. Someone (like your wife) may be bothered by being contacted by pushy activist groups and then even castigated for not participating. We weigh that against systematic income inequality and sexual harassment along gender lines.

It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits (for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace).
Reading the NXP thread, it is not yet clear that NXP considers this errata, only that it is something that is desirable to avoid.

Does anyone have a link to the changes to FreeRTOS & use of libclang mentioned in the article?

NXP thread: https://community.nxp.com/thread/459977
>Do people really need to be told what not to do and say like that?

There isn't any evidence of it. On the other hand the language in the CoC itself is evidence that it comes from busybodies.
I agree about not forcing the distribution. I think positive action either solves no issue (no sexism in the industry and the current distribution is simply the "natural" one); or doesn't solve the deeper issue (sexism in the industry). However, until there's no scientific consensus about whether or not there's sexism in the workplace, the current state is not satisfying and we should continue until we clear out that concern, and if there is sexism, fix it.

My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.
Not since I discovered GraphQL. It's hard to imagine any other abstraction on top of REST APIs that packs as much robust functionality in something so easy to use.
"In 1997, a consortium that included the AAMC, the AMA, and other major organizations declared that [...] 'the United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians'. The consortium recommended limiting the number of residency positions funded by Medicare, a goal that was partially achieved in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997" [1]

See also the 1997 senate finance committee hearings on graduate medical education [2].

[1] http://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/717927

[2] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/hrg105-901.pdf
> I again return to the example of HN, which has higher standards of conversation than many other boards

Do you truly think so?

I like it here well enough, don't get me wrong. But I don't know that replacing flame wars with passive aggressiveness - which is essentially what HNs moderation does - is a great tradeoff.
>> Imagine a real crisis hitting, and what this White House would do.

Like, for example, the flu season becoming a crisis because key medical manufacturers were devastated by a hurricane and found limited support from a government that barely realizes Puerto Rico is part of the US, much less that its industries are so essential.
GitHub doesn’t ask for gender, yet you assume the 3% figure is accurate.

Even if you do, it doesn’t make sense to correlate GitHub contributions with “intrinsic” motivation. You can still love to code but not want to contribute to Open Source.

Also, what percentage of software engineers regularly contribute to a non-corporate sponsored GitHub open source project? I would bet it is a small number, which means you shouldn’t use it as a proxy to generalize for the industry and gender differences within it.
Nope, you are turning it around.

The data from the article shows that women aren't "forced out", but rather that when external forces are removed they prefer to do other things.
I think that these observations are important. Imagine if some cats did have a preference for sleeping on one side rather than the other, 'clockwise' rather than 'anti-clockwise'. Why would that be, and why would nobody have noticed until now?

There must be important evolutionary benefits to sleeping on each side an equal amount, more study is definitely needed.
They are called life

There is no such thing as a career without having to overcome obstacles
> 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.

You're being uncharitable again. What it does establish is that the most common narrative for gender disparity in our field doesn't cleanly explain all of the data, unless you simultaneously push for the belief that programmers are more sexist than every other previously male dominated field that has since achieved better gender ratios, and that this bias exists across different cultures thus yielding the same disparities in all of these different cultures, and that this systemic sexism is what's driving women away (despite not keeping women away from other fields in which they achieved parity).

Of course, there's another explanation, which is that women have inherently less interest in some subjects for some reason, and there's considerable evidence for this possibility. To ignore it is dishonest.

Which isn't to say that there isn't sexism, but you're making a positive claim that the sexism is so much worse than everywhere else.

As for why some STEM fields have improved, there can be plenty of reasons, and those are all worth studying. To simply declare it's because they've made inroads against sexism is assuming the conclusion.

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

You keep saying this, but you cite no evidence of artificiality. There's actually plenty of evidence that it's not.
I just asked my stepdaughter "What is 33 minus 18?"

"Because ... 18 plus 18 is 36 ..... it's 18 minus 3 ... 15!"
> Most people do not have the capability to appreciate the criminality that has gone on in Washington, London and elsewhere over the years. So this criminality goes on and the Western democracies exist in their special lawless way, preparing for war and actively beating up the world for profit.

The problem is that the idea of law is one of the Western definition. Unless I'm not aware of something, it is almost certainly (domestically) lawful for Washington to act in a way that allows for expansionist and imperialist policies. Whether it is a good idea in the long term (winning hearts and minds) is another debate to be had.

> The funniest bullshit is the 'al-qaeda' nonsense. Not one person has ever met an al-qaeda person even if dead people in brown parts of the world are obviously al-qaeda. In previous wars you at least knew the enemy existed, now it is just fake news that you have to believe, on the Koolaid.

I'm really not sure if I have understood you correctly. I'm inclined to believe Al-qaeda was a thing. Whether it was an existential threat the the US is certainly questionable and whether the military response was therefore justified is certainly questionable, especially given that they have so far included four of the six countries listed in Rebuilding America's Defences [0]. I am inclined to agree there was a degree of dehumanisation of the civilian casualties of the ensuing wars that had at least the undertones of racism.

[0] Rebuilding America's Defences was a 2000 publication by "The Project for the New American Century." It contains a a list of countries the think tank argued the USA should invade, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea. Afghanistan was mentioned as a training ground for terrorism. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmeri...
IBM offers that open-source platform as a managed service, IBM Cloud Functions (https://console.bluemix.net/openwhisk/).
Well, let me explain to you not caring about it:
Israel and Saudi Arabia regularly run information warfare campaigns in the US, and actually influence election outcomes in obvious ways.

For that matter the US has boasted of fixing the Russian elections in 1996, overtly committed a coup in Ukraine in 2014, and has attempted to do similar things since the fall of the soviet union for example by supporting evil murderous clowns like Khodorkovsky. So, if Russia took out a few ads or posted from twitter accounts; big deal. And that's assuming Russia (rather than Russian people acting on their own) did something -thus far 100% of the "evidence" for this sort of thing has turned out to be a big nothing burger.

The media obsession with finding a Russian under every bed is absolute insanity; McCarthyism pales in comparison to this hysterical nonsense -communism was a real threat back then. It's also obviously organized: basically the same idiots telling us Putin is behind everything they don't like are the same idiots who sold us on the Syrian war, Iraq and so on. I mean, we have Rob Reiner, aka meathead telling us anyone who doubts the former heads of the CIA is a traitor. This is NUTS.
Intro to Mill (new Scala build tool)
I completely agree with this description of my point, and would only add that this sentence

"the root of this problem is men not taking women seriously"

is what I find to be the most important takeaway. As a person in STEM, you need to take women seriously when they talk about this stuff. Ask yourself why you're so quick to dismiss the "minority of women" and "activists'" experiences.
So a solution could be having less men in STEM
If STEM would "naturally" be 60% men, 40% women, and sexism makes it 80% men, 20% women, it's important to fight sexism so that the 20% of women can get their career back.

It's just insane that people make the leap from "STEM might not have equal interest between men and women" to "Diversity-promoting programs are harmful".
The term was adopted by Trump as a way of subverting its then-emerging use to label the phenomenon of propaganda being produced supporting the Trump campaign following what a RAND Corp report has described, in its recent application by the Russian government, the “firehose of falsehoods” model (at the time this was seen as analogous to the Russian use of that propaganda style; it's since become clear that at least some of it was, in fact, Russian state propaganda, making it following a current style of propaganda observed in Russian state propaganda less surprising.)

Trump's adoption of the term to preempt that use was very successful, as is evident in the common perception that it is something he invented.
chopsui is right on track with what I'm thinking. The web and browsers are broken, and this is the answer. You're a wizard.
Now if only they could get actual trains in their tunnels...
A while back I looked into Wayland and what was missing that I would need to replicate my current setup. Here's the list I came up with...

openbox - window management
xinput - trackball/input configuration, disable touchpad
xbindkeys
setxkbmap - control/cap-lock manipulation
redshift
Xresources/xrdb - urxvt & general X settings
xdotool - script-able window movement
xclip/sselp - script-able copy-n-paste
zenity - scripting gui things
xset - dpms, screen blank, keyboard auto-repeat, mouse movement rate
conky - system info
dunst - notifications
unclutter - no pointer
xsslock/xtrlock - screenlock
xrandr - display config
urxvt - terminal/shell access

Most of these had no Wayland equivalents that I could find. I have no plans on switching anytime soon.
This light bulb is exactly why many people prefer statically-typed programming languages, especially above a certain codebase size/complexity and team size.

Make my tools do the grunt-work for me, thanks, so I can focus on the actual problem domain.
I don't know what the averages are, but reviewing my comment history, seems to be more upvotes than downvotes.

I don't post comments on HN to stir the pot. I post comments on HN in the hope of getting other perspectives. A comment with a downvote and a reply is more valuable than a comment with upvotes and no replies. It's not like I can redeem HN points for cash and prizes.

I think I can do an OK job of not being an asshole, but I honestly have no idea what is or isn't going to piss people off or classify as flamebait here. So, if those are the stakes now, I will just have to accept my place on the shitlist.
While I agree with the articles sentiment I think missing enough with the engineers mindset is only part of the problem.

I recently wrote thoughts on the rest of the problem (having honest disusssions about problems to gather the insight and data to engineer with in the first place).

It was in response to a friend's social media post which read something to the effect of "Whats your most controversial opinion? No judgement"

"[... It] is nearly impossible to have completely honest versions of these conversations attached to your identity today because of a mixture of

- extreme militantly politically correct culture

- the existence of social media itself (allowing for identification and easy witch hunts from the comfort of your home)

- and in aggregate many people operating from completely different and often incompatible belief systems and sets of facts

For instance try to have any conversation in public with even slightest bit of negativity about any group of humans that are not rich, male, and white.

People in most of western civilization today would be hard pressed to voice any opinions because they would instantaneously be labeled a "fascist", "misogynist" , "racist", or a litany of other "-ists" with a dizzying amount of speed and force.

No matter how well you argue any point you are now inextricably linked with some "-ism".

Someone screenshots this opinion and posts to a group like Occupy Democrats with a person's full name...

And bam life quite possibly on the way to ruin.

It will affect your social and professional lives for quite some time.

I feel like until we can come to some form of consensus around the state of the world and how to use observations about it to discuss it we will continue to have situations where people cannot understand each others side and constantly talk past each other to all our detriment."
Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free
> I'll ignore the irrelevant marxist talking point

Which part of the parent comment was a "marxist talking point"?
Where did you say “the property is large enough”?
the problem with that also is that humans have emergent higher level reasoning, as a trivial, super simplified example, imagine if you trained a fictional AI on policy towards slaves before the worldwide ban on slavery, what sort of things would it suggest, its highly unlikely "banning slavery" would be one of them.
supposing that within the next few years, Trump disbands the CFPB, what's the next option?