skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes."

Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions?

You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why?

(Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?)

Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation.

Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
can anyone see this completely eliminating human taxi drivers within the next 10-15 years?
Disappearing Jobs... Computer Programmers?
>Rather than cameras and lasers providing situational awareness and plotting course, the TTS uses high-resolution comparative GPS to follow a pre-plotted course at an accuracy up to 1 cm of deviation.

Don't think I like the sound of that...

>The only trouble with this set up is the car will be incapable of reacting to unexpected obstacles, say a boulder rolling onto the road or a spectator jumping out to get a picture. Careful spectators.

Seems they agree.
I'm totally wrong. I meant to write .NET (not ASP.NET) and .NET isn't even a language, so I'm doubly wrong. It's probably been four years since I've touched the code :\

It isn't written in VB and never was. In 2000 it was written in classic ASP (vbscript) and c++. Probably a few years after that it was converted to Wasabi, which at the time was very close to VBScript, but is now equivalent to C#. For the last few years it is shipped as a .NET product on both windows and unix, and the /Dev.html page you cited is accurate. (The articles you cited from four years ago aren't accurate anymore).

http://xkcd.com/386/
And his particular domain is exquisitely narrow ... as further evidenced by the breadth and depth of his ignorance. Sorry to rant, but there's a guy that gets on my nerves.
Part of the "secret sauce" of Agile software development is that Agile teams micro-manage themselves. I love Agile. I hate micro-management. Hey Alistair, isn't that a logical absurdity?

Not really. Let me explain.

I love to work with Agile teams that are responsible and accountable for what they do. The best way I know to do this is to check-in with the team everyday and talk about we're going to get done today. Of course, this has to be done in the context of some vision or plan that has a horizon greater than a single day.

I hate it when someone who doesn't really understand the tasks tells me what I'm going to do today and wonders why I didn't do something yesterday. I hate that kind of micro-management.

So, everyday I take responsibility for my tasks and hold myself accountable to my team. I don't let someone else be responsible and then hold me accountable.
This is a Windows-only product. It is doing Windows API abstraction. They could, of course, get this running on an Intel-based Mac or Linux, but they would have to do a whole lot more API translation to get it working - and probably have to use Wine and X11 in the process. Quite a lot more work.

I'm happy with it. I have Parallels. Now I can use just one VM for all my Windows testing.
Most of the time, I dont mind signing up for apps on HN, to review them using my twitter account (I dont use FB), but I did not do it for your app, because I dont like it doing auto following by my twitter account WITHOUT an option to avoid it. Also it seems like it will spam a tweet from my account.

I dont mind giving feedback/review. I mind if apps spam my followers, to gain traction.
One of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."

I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies, search, its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation), etc.
Couple of points:

1. If by "startup" you mean tech startups as opposed to bricks and mortar businesses, there are fewer women programmers around to front tech startups. The law of averages is at work there, but I don't think it accounts for the whole disparity.

2. The VC model specific to tech startups is not what you'd call kid friendly. Please note that we are discussing this issue at Y Combinator. Submitting your startup to YC requires that you be willing to move to the Valley for three months. This is incredibly difficult if you have kids; if you are primary custodial parent, it is virtually impossible.

3. When women do run tech startups, they are not necessarily granted the credibility or profile. Penelope Trunk's article appears on Techcrunch. Ravelry has 850,000 members. It's been covered exactly once by TC, when it rolled into beta, with the line "If you’re a knitter, join the waiting list immediately. Everyone else, nothing to see here." Thanks, Michael.

All of that said, it is being done - just not necessarily according to the popular startup formula Penelope herself followed for Brazen Careerist.
I imagine he's trying to suggest it is in Joel's best interest for people to have buggy code so he can sell more bug tracking software. It doesn't sound like a very good argument, but I think it's supposed to be a joke.
See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I really like the "Advanced Cruise Control" branding idea--it makes the concept much more palatable to frame it that way. I hope whoever introduces this runs with that idea.
The US military has experimented with LSD, psychic phenomena and for a period of time "Believed" in UFOs.

The "vaccines cause autism" is another political issue where pseudo science is being used to argue for government dictating medical choices to families. The "Debunkings" I've seen have been political nonsense.

I don't take a position either way on whether vaccines can cause autism. Just that the constant propaganda on this issue is a form of a political witch hunt that has nothing to do with science.
A night in a Detroit trauma ward
only if they throw in a chat bot :)
It is really nice! Does anyone know what tech is used in 360 degree views?
The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market?

I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."

I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies, search, and its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation).
People have an obligation to disobey unjust laws.
thanks for stopping by and giving your honest feedback.

first let me clarify that this will not be a site writing about web apps. i didn't want to join the already crowded space. Apps To Win will host contests from fellow startups by asking questions about the services they provide and the problem they are trying to solve. the winners will receive either the free subscription as prize or any goodie item like iPad or iPod Touch etc.

i agree with your comments on the landing page. i just scrapped a landing page to see how much people are really interested in the concept. i will redesign the landing page with probably a sample contest soon.
If Google paid me to sit at home, I'd have a lot more free time than if my car drove itself.
But his points, at least as he wrote them in the particular book I mentioned aren't invalid or interesting because he's a jerk (his chapter on wanderlust had my head spinning).

"Follow the money" is a guideline that makes sense. I even thought his reasons for -not- dismissing astrology outright were somewhat interesting, although I see in his wikipedia entry that he now 'believes' in astrology.
> The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.

duh, of course! The question is - at what premium? Because you know, actually it's customer in the end who pays the price.
thanks for stopping by the site. i created a scrappy landing page @ 3AM. will update the landing page with a sample contest soon.
If you liked that, take a look at the Navigation and Bombing computer from the Vulcan, restored to working condition by the brilliant Tatjana van Vark: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/tvve/dduck0.html

(you must look at her other work if you haven't yet, it's a treasure trove of cool stuff: http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/index.html#works )
Without the talk, you still get the progit.org at slide 8 or 9, so I guess even by your standards, there is some value here!
The race to buy up the world's water
The button text "Sweet I Got It" didn't make any sense to me at first.

I got what exactly?

I certainly didn't read any of the text above it, even though I eventually clicked the button to make it go away.
Charlie Rose interview with Jeff Bezos (July, 2010)
APS is an organization that publishes papers in the field of Physics. not "climatology" (which really sounds like astrology to me.) He is a physicist.

You may not be aware of it, but much of the relevant work in the area of the global climate is being done by Physicists. Not all, of course, but Physics is a pretty relevant field.
I dont use Facebook, but for Twitter, you can go to Settings > Connections, and revoke the permission for any/all third party apps.
Well, tethering also isn't free, unless you're with T-Mobile. Everyone else charges roughly $20/month for it.
"Men Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Watch Football"
Nova did an excellent (and surprisingly technical) episode [1] on the 2005 race mentioned in this piece, including Thrun's Stanford team. It was especially impressive as a triumph of Thurn's software-based approach over several of the other veteran teams that relied heavily on complex hardware (e.g., those teams used camera gimbals while Thrun's team just compensated for camera bumps using code).

For those of you on Netflix, it's available as a streaming video [2], and I highly recommend it.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/
[2] http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race-Nova/700...
Will you upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 tonight?
Will you upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 tonight?
Is that a bad thing? :)
Seriously, posts like this often enough cause a lot of interesting discussion. I usually learn a lot reading well thought-out responses to Joel's posts (though usually not from reading those posts themselves).
Why It's Time to Reimagine How We Manage Everything
This explains Eric Schmidt's "casual" remarks about cars that should drive themselves recently at the TC Disrupt conference ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/schmidt-on-future/ ).
Finally! A giant step towards 'packet-switched' personal transport, using dynamically-routed, market-dispatched autonomous cars on standard roads.

Cancel the bullet train, and instead plow all that money into rapidly deploying this.
> Wastes billions on the nearly impossible task of enforcement

Rarely mentioned is the cost to law enforcement, in lives.

How many police officers have died fighting with criminals over pot? Cannabis should be legal, no one needs to die over it.
How To Send 1 Billion E-mail Marketing Messages Per Month
It means they could theoretically partner with car makers to sell it as an expensive option -- advanced cruise control.

The first uses will probably involve traffic between large distribution centers located out in the suburbs/exurbs. To begin with, the trucks could park themselves at a staging area out on the tarmac, and a human driver could go out and bring the truck to the loading dock. The USPS, UPS, and Fedex could be the first big customers along with Walmart.
Open Bookmarks and the future eBook
Chrome on 5Mb connection. I was clicking pretty fast (two or three times a second)
Actual link is here;

http://www.jaspersoft.com/sites/default/files/Jaspersoft_Sur...
Here's the problem: whatever you create, will not really be a natural language, it will just be another programming language.

This is not what I was suggesting at all. I am thinking along the lines of Knuth's literate programming. What I'm proposing is a programming language combined with natural language, but instead of annotating a programming language with natural language annotations, I'm proposing doing it the other way around. There would still be two separate languages involved. You are talking about a single notation system with the qualities of both natural language and a programming language. Yes, that is a crank idea, which your mind seems to be stuck on.
My review:

1) As you already know, landing on the page is very harsh. The very first thing I saw when I arrived at the page was a popup that asked me to sign in with Twitter or Facebook. I didn't really read the title or the text; I immediately pressed back. This is easily fixed by letting the user know what you are before signing in.

2) Switching between sites is really well done, I instantly understood how to do it.

3) I dislike the "I like this too" button. It's not clear with what it does; I clicked on it hoping for a "post to Facebook or Twitter" option but it went straight to my Twitter. I'd prefer having two separate buttons to know exactly what I'm doing.

Overall, neat idea -- but it feels like I'm being tricked into doing certain actions since I don't quite know what's going on at first.
I call bull.
I thought that was Sideshow Bob's gag on the Simpsons.
I am surprised that the nytimes would run such an obvious hatchet job of an article. I am not saying that they are always honest and truthful and fair, but at least they used to be smart and skilful enough to make their hatchet jobs not that obvious.
"the free software"? Is it me or is this blog horribly written, I can't interpret most of it without reading it at least 5 times.
I wonder if this is legal. I mean, if one of these cars went haywire and mowed down a bunch of pedestrians before the "driver" was able to take control, I reckon Google would have some splainin to do. With autonomous vehicles coming closer and closer to a reality, it's somewhat alarming that there appears to be no legal body attempting to define some guidelines on this subject. At the rate our government works, we'll have fully functioning, marketable autonomous vehicles long before it's legal to use them.
Cybercrime Supply Chains
Comcast's offerings are arguably more "essential" and "desirable" to more people than Groupon's.
Why do you say you're on the fence when you characterize those who are skeptical of the AGW theory as "conspiracy theorists"?

As an aside, I find this characterization generally amusing because it seems to come from an assumption that conspiracies are so rare as to not be worth considering. The climategate scandal is a pretty clear conspiracy. In fact, the review policy of APS that he's objecting to is a conspiracy. I think it would be hard to argue that conspiracies are rare. Every time more than one person cooperates to hide, obscure or perpetuate a fraud, it is a conspiracy. APS's policies that affect selection of papers based on a pre-scientific conclusion are in effect a fraudulent distortion of the state of the art in physics.

This isn't like finding a unicorn.
Haskell in JavaScript
It is impressive how Google just goes to new areas with success all the time.
Personally the global warming thing kind of fries my brain.

I'm an ecologist by training, but there are so many papers there that it's impossible for me to make a good decision about it. On a scientific level, I find myself screwed.

I'm inclined to trust scientists because I am one, but I'm disinclined to trust the establishment because I'm a libertarian. So no help for me there. On a loyalty level, I am screwed.

However, this is my rationalization for doing nothing about global warming (the position of the agnostic): The amount of co2 in the upper atmosphere is increasing at amazing rate (280 ppm pre-industrially to 388 ppm, current); this is a fact. All the proposed legislation would have a completely negligible effect on this. In order to really stop global warming, not just slow it down, we would need all nations to completely stop co2 production. That isn't going to happen. So if global warming is real, our paltry policy is going to do nothing to stop it. So why bother?

Anyway, just to emphasize, this is my rationalization. It's just something to make me feel better for being unable to grasp the topic scientifically.
It is not an attack towards person. It simply points that a guy selling bug tracking system makes his living from people having bugs in their software.
You could characterize it that way, but realize also that if the set of the "in group" is people whose livelihoods are based on finding evidence for AGW theory and those in the "out" group are those who don't, then the set of people is the same as the set of theories.
I solved all three in Perl 6... ;)
What you can learn from The Social Network (by Babak Nivi)
As far as I am aware, no. But I would love to proven wrong ;)

Milan seems to have a lot more tech activity than Rome.

At this point I am just curious if there are HN readers here in Rome.
Whats wrong with the North American Marlon Brando Look Alikes ?
easy: controls and indicators are used only when it's required :)
I started reading this thinking "maybe he's onto something".

But then the first worry seems to be that someone is going to arise that is charismatic and honest. Umm- wouldn't those be good things? Who ever heard of an honest politician btw?

Then he states the fear that this person would be anti-(name a race/nationality/religion). I think probably won't happen. Obviously it would be bad if it did happen, but WWII is fresh in most people's memories, and people wouldn't let it happen. Should we ensure that nationalism and anti-immigrant mentality doesn't run rampant? Yes. Are tea partiers and the American right the same as Hitler? No. In fact, a good number of them are just fiscal conservatives, that aren't anti-immigrant.

It is more likely that a charismatic leader arises who is pushing for "collaboration" and "open-mindedness" while pushing for greater government growth and control. And with that additional power comes additional corruption, because we are weak.

The best society has divided and restrained goverment power, which is what America was founded on. We shouldn't let any private entity nor any government entity gain too much control, and in a mostly democratic and fairly capitalistic society, that balance of power is possible.

There are still organizations with terrific power, don't get me wrong. But it is diversity in power that keeps things from getting out of control.
Why would their technology just lower the death rate instead of eliminating it almost completely?
Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?
I'm sure people would be equally offended as I am if the app had cutesy pictures of Pol Pot, or Stalin or any other brutal dictator known for mass genocide