skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, geeks are mostly male right now. It makes sense that geek startups will be mostly male, as well.

It's very difficult for women to break into any field that is male dominated. The fact is, just being different causes a woman to be treated differently in a male-dominated environment. That makes it hard and un-fun. This is exacerbated by the fact that some guys really are jerks, and enjoy exerting the power that comes with picking on someone in the minority -- women, in this case.

If something is more difficult, there are fewer people who are willing to do it, regardless of gender, race or creed. So when women break into a male dominated profession, it first it starts out at a trickle; just those who are very brave.

I really hope that this changes pretty soon. Women have a lot of things to bring to the table that men don't -- namely, they're (on the average) familiar with a lot of markets that men aren't (on the average) as familiar with. There's a lot of money to be made there, and a lot of cool new stuff to be invented.
feel what way? i wasn't being sarcastic.
I think that most intelligent women are capable of not getting pregnant while developing their startup.
I don't think there's a single culprit. Now, I'm not a sociologist, and I'm simplifying here, but it seems to me that it starts in childhood with the selection of toys and judgments on character that parents and family members apply. Boys get Legos, girls get dolls. This gets reinforced in grade school where perhaps girls are rewarded more for excelling in "creative" activities while boys are subtly steered in a different direction. In high school, science and history books are almost devoid of women. Meanwhile television and movies continue to portray stereotypical views of women. By the time college and career roll around, you've got both subtle and explicit forms of discrimination to contend with -- not to mention a complete lack of role models at the CEO and founder level in Silicon Valley. So the cycle continues.
Don't forget you can also send messages to the regular inbox, so no need to be running the app at the same time, which would, as you said correctly not exactly a way to replace SMS. As to the penetration rate, the people that I communicate 95% of the time are all on facebook. Maybe I need to add some older people to my social circle :D
Why does there being fewer of them increase their likelihood of getting an opportunity to pitch? Because they are a curiosity?
Key point: LLC's can't offer stock options. If there's any hiring planned, you're going to want to offer options.
Generally when people refer to the bible they are talking about religion. Were you referring to the study of the bible as literature?
Depends where the company is in its lifetime.

Basically, it sucks to be an early employee in a startup that does not yet have traction ("product/market fit", in Marc Andreesen's words). You take on most of the risk of a founder yet have nowhere near the reward. And the hours are often founder-like as well, since the company often has no clue what it's doing and so you just keep doing everything until something works or you run out of money. And if you do run out of money (pretty likely), nobody knows or cares about what you did, which can hurt you in your future career.

Being an early employee in a startup with traction can be a very nice place to be, though. Many people underestimate both the chances of success once traction's been achieved (high, even if you're not yet profitable) and the potential market size. And you don't have to put up with the uncertainty and risk that the founders did. Most startups with traction don't get sold for $10-50M that's common for a startup with a product and a couple customers, they get sold for $200M+ or they go public for $5B+.
The thread was clearly about Christianity, and you were talking about the Christian holy book, and you're going to blame other people for thinking you were saying something to do with religion?
Besides aggression, the explanation that I've heard that makes the most sense revolves around risk: men can effectively have more than one mate (and do in many cultures, especially non-western), so there's more benefit to genetic risk-taking in men. This isn't a big effect, but is very noticable at the ends of the bell curve: more male serial killers, more male ceos.

Anyway, take all evolutionary psych with a grain of salt, but it's interesting to talk about.
In a darwinian sense men and women are profoundly different and have seperate tasks to perform in the process of creating offspring. This inevitably leads to natural selection acting differently on men and women, as exemplified in the above post.
If only you didn't have to manually update it on iPhone. You still have to launch the app.
From the article:

"In 1991, all that was left was the kernel, the brain within the brain of the computer, and thus the most essential component of any operating system, and the hardest part to create. Before Stallman could finish building his, an ingenious young Finnish computer scientist named Linus Torvalds—who was initially inspired by a Stallman speech at the Polytechnic University in Helsinki the year before—played off a Unix-like operating system called Minix to develop a free software system of his own. Incomplete in other respects, it had the kernel that Stallman's lacked—one that meshed so beautifully with the GNU system that it seemed destined for it. Strictly speaking, the complete operating system should have been called GNU/Linux, representing the combined contributions of Stallman and Torvalds. Stallman always insists on the term, pronouncing it "GNU slash Linux." But in the popular mind, it came to be known as only Linux. Stallman has never gotten over that."
The iPhone makes better use of the data plan than anyone has before. Disagree with anything else about it, but MobileSafari is by far the best browser on any phone.
This may be true. However, I do know some very smart women who have gotten pregnant accidentally.

It's claimed (by?) it takes an average of 7 years to exit your startup. That is a large chunk of time for women with a ticking biological clock. I do realise of course that it is possible to have kids in to your 40s, but most women choose not to do so.
I had simply taken shortcuts I'd seen later in the book for factoring quadratics. They wanted to see it written exactly as it appeared in the current examples.

I realized that math in school was more like one of those simon games where you just mindlessly press the arbitrary sequence of lights you just saw, than actual mathematics. This analogy helped me suffer through "school math" while I perused real math on my own.
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You're right, but Kawa compiles to JVM bytecodes and SISC is just an interpreter.
I've been following (and rooting for) jaanix for a long time now -- pretty much since their debut -- and it's strange: I really really like their idea, and I really really like that they've put a ton of work into improving it. Yet, I have a really hard time sticking with it myself; I find myself gravitating instead towards Reddit, which frankly I have come to loathe. I don't understand it, and I wish I did.

| Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic? Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other.

That's an interesting angle. I have to chew on that for a while. I always just figured that it went that way for the same reason that all the cheap glittery celebrity gossip mags line the supermarket aisles: it's everyone's guilty pleasure. They sell more copies of "People" in a week than they'd sell of "Discover" in a month.

But, it could still come back to the news always being new, that people are drawn to junk like Britney's latest embarrassment because it's always new, even when it's really still the same old thing.

Or, maybe they're just barely literate gossip hounds that get some kind of psychological positive feedback from finding out that there are other people even more screwed up than they are. ...
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No one's going to even suggest sexism?

Or the fact that many, many people (men and women) look at any woman between 25 and 40 and expect them to leave to have a baby and raise a family?
(It's linked from the main page, BTW.)

Yes, I clicked that link. And then what? There is no "add to cart" button anywhere on that page. Maybe you're far better at browsing a website than I am, but I simply could find no way to click on something I wanted to buy, find out the price, and fill in my billing details.
That implies that women have a greater biological imperative to reproduce than men. I don't know that that's true.

Honestly, I see my "grad school clock" as an equally big, if not bigger, problem than anyone's biological clock. When you do a startup, you have to choose your priorities -- the implication is that neither kids nor grad school are amongst them.
" ... and their job as citizens complying with the government."

The job of citizens is to question the government. They work for us; it's the job of the government to comply with the citizens.
I made no comment about how previous data plans have been used. I was merely pointing out that the assertion that the iPhone was the first to offer an "affordable unlimited data plan" was simply untrue. I'm sure MobileSafari is better than donuts, but it has nothing to do with my comment.
This is sad, but from a biological perspective, it's oddly tautological. Men are organisms that run huge risks in hopes of huge payoffs, while women run smaller risks for more certain rewards. One could consider a male lion to be an entrepreneur, and a lioness to have a steady job. However, in nature both strategies are equally successful, while in the modern world being an entrepreneur is more effective.

On the flip side, men are incarcerated much more frequently than women, and for similar reasons. This is somehow not as surprising.
Unfortunately, your explanation does not go the whole way.

Consider the evolution of biological genes:

a) Men and women share mostly the same genes (the y chromosome is a desolate wasteland), and there are few (if any) known mechanisms by which gene merging is different for male and female humans.

b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men. Note that I leave high status out of this equation.

Compare the mathematics to the evolution of culture:

a) There are numerous known cultural differences between what men and women grow up with. There are also many known mechanisms for which cultural meme merging is different for men and for women. Our culture directs different memes towards men and women, to a far greater extent than gene selection does (if it does at all).

b) High status women are in fact less likely to have many kids, as is shown by an abundance of demographic data. Therefore, the mechanism by which they can spread what's responsible for 'high-statusness' is limited mostly to memes. But culture strongly moderates this influence of dominant, high status, intelligent women. Consider the treatment Hilary Clinton is getting now. Even in a more ordinary circumstance, male bosses can wield power in a way that would label their female cohorts 'ice queens'. So the influence of powerful women is labeled a bad thing, and the adoption of those values by other women is severely inhibited.

---

So, for this case, at first glance, it seems like the evolution of cultural memes completely dominates the influence of the evolution of biological genes. Does anyone see a hole in this argument?
FDIC will not be allowed to fail. If they can't pay, the government will give them the needed cash. They have to or they are toast.
"But you just cannot have an orderly society in which corporations are expected to pick and choose which laws and governmental agency requests they are going to follow and which they are not."

Court orders and subpoenas. No need for arbitrary picking and choosing.

And, really, in the end, I would hope that something was learned from Nuremberg.
You know, the Bible helped me too! Things like "Don't kill your neighbor"... I never would have came up with this myself!
that's close - but not quite what I was taught.

Basically, men aren't as important as women. If 99.99% of men died today, the human race could be back to it's normal population within a generation (a man could easily father a child a day for 30 years ~10,000 children). On the other hand, we'd have much more trouble if 99.9% of women died, since a women can only realistically have about 10 children in a lifetime. This encourages men to be bigger risk takers - women were the limiting reagent to population growth.

Similarly, the potential gain for a ridiculously successful man (genetically speaking) is that he can have several thousand children. A women, on the other hand, can likely have 10 children whether or not she is successful; so there is little (evolutionary) benefit for her to be hugely successful (or take risks necessary to do so).
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While that makes for a neatly packaged Darwinian theory, it's important to remember that genetic selection is not the only force that affects our decisions. Medicine, culture, technology, and many other factors affect, and even override, what our genes may steer us toward if they could "act in a vacuum."

Not convinced? By the same theory, one would think that men in today's society would be highly encouraged to have children with multiple partners -- at roughly age 18. Yet, we discourage both for no apparent genetic benefit. Rather, it's for a societal benefit.

Unfortunately, Darwinian theories about "women being wired for different work than men" are perpetuated at all levels. (Anyone remember Lawrence Summers at Harvard?) And because people actually begin to believe the theories, they become in themselves a form of subtle discrimination that both discourages women from attempting certain activities and prevents them from being offered certain opportunities.

It's really important not to belive it yourself and to consider all the many factors at play here.
It's people like you who inspire me to post examples of Christianity genuinely helping people. I am an atheist, but I don't agree with the hateful or mocking attitude many atheists have.
Well I wouldn't use that exact word, but it works.
How many people do you know that have quit grad school to do a start-up?
A women, on the other hand, can likely have 10 children whether or not she is successful

Surely you are joking... Miscarriages, even a century ago, claimed so many women. You would be lucky to live past your third, much less your tenth!

Without some network to provided for her (either by her family, or the village, or her mate, all of which are strongly effected by status), the likelihood of surviving a pregnancy becomes much lower.

Women couldn't just flip a switch and get pregnant to satisfy a biological urge. Pregnancy represents both an enormous investment in time, effort, and energy, and a gamble on life. Status structure reflects this.
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Lawrence Summers, if you read or watch the talk, did not, in fact, assert that the dearth of women in science was explained by biological factors. He brought up the question. Even considering the insufficiently delicate way he put it, there's an exceptionally important distinction. Unfortunately, people heard what they wanted to hear.

---

Not convinced? By the same theory, one would think that men in today's society would be highly encouraged to have children with multiple partners -- at roughly age 18. Yet, we discourage both for no apparent genetic benefit. Rather, it's for a societal benefit.

As I note below, often societal benefit trumps genetic benefit, which remains true as long as there is a high genetic correlation between the people in that society.
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This article is bunk and a clear propaganda effort.
GM is dying because its a big old company and big old companies die..and..because as a nation, the U.S. does not protect its companies/citizens from the effects of global free trade.

The stock price is a different story.
This article misses something important. Was there some massive cover-up with GM's financials? No. The debt due to pensions and such is not new information. If the stock buyers and analysts didn't adequately project a meaningful market price based on GM's published financials, who is to blame? Unions? No, the stock should be priced lower if thats whats on the books. Don't blame unions for bubble markets and the unfounded position that stock prices and company value should always grow.
I really don't think that being a curiosity helps much.
No, it's a clear case of assisted suicide, not murder.
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Treating Google as a VC is in fact what I'm doing right now.

PG and YCombinator and all of the associated acquired Google companies have significant mindshare in the startup world right now. Most of these people are pretty fine with working with Google as a proxy VC. And as Google gets more and more of these it will become less and less of an issue, in the public mind, to treat a product failure as a google failure.

And while they may have dropped the ball a few times, they are one of the best acquiring companies by far, and ona scale of VCs they are probably among the best.
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As far as I'm concerned, GM had it coming for illegally destroying the USA's electric streetcar system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scanda... It's too bad, really, every city could have had public transportation like San Francisco.
The numbers alone don’t work out. 48% of the class or 06 at MIT were female (up from like 2% back in the day) and most of them were serious hackers. Yet today almost all of the girls who didn’t go to grad school are working for either one of the big tech companies (Oracle, M$ etc) or an investment bank.

With the whole goddamn responsibility of keeping humanity alive on top of them undoubtedly there’s a genetic disposition for women to be more risk averse. That though probably does not matter as much because women have clearly been extremely competent in pretty much every other field now for decades.

So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of human potential in both men and women, from the day they are born (and thus being most effective at it)

Heard this joke? Why do baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink?

Cos they don’t have a fucking choice!
We don’t have an energy problem, we have a storage problem
Why the key to the energy crises is better battery technology.
Women certainly do have a greater biological imperative to reproduce than men. It's for the very simple reason that a woman's fertility starts declining in her early 20's and bottoms out around age 40 -- a man's fertility erodes very slightly and is usually in perfectly serviceable condition at age 60.
fair enough. Let me rephrase to say that a moderately successful women (on the par of a low level aristocrat) could easily support 10 children. It still supports my contention that men had more to gain from being hugely successful (king level) than a women.
The Brain Hides Information From Us To Prevent Mistakes
They invested in 23andme...
Thanks, that made sense.
Yes. The reference to cultural memes is a chicken an egg argument; by claiming "complete domination" you essentially overlook the origin of said memes.

I'm not armed with sources, but I daresay that nature has given everything specialization, so much so that applying the same ideas to the sexes is not the slightest bit strange. More strongly said, there is nothing surprising when one sex exhibits traits much more ostensibly than another. While I am not referring to the superiority of a specific sex, specie, or trait, it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture.

Back to your arguments specifically. These come from a fuzzy memory, but they provide a complementary view.

a. Even a single genetic difference can lead to drastically different results. We are close enough to chimps. Men and women have different brains; different areas activate up when shown the same picture. It's not a stretch to say that risk evaluation is done differently as well.

b. I recall at least two matriarchial societies in which women called the shots. Nevertheless, the men were still the fighters, which is perhaps the most competitive, aggressive, and risky behavior possible. Women can be dominant, intelligent, and decisive, and still partake in less adrenaline-laden activities. There may be something else in the motivation.

a. I think this is a good and important point, and am not trying to underplay it, but this argument is usually the convenient one, and the hardest to make any systematic observation. Thought experiment: try comparing startup founder numbers of Japanese men to those of American women.

b. Again, true enough, but also: the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters.

Does this poke a hole in your argument?
gcc was an important piece of work that Stallman started. The rest of the GNU stuff was a bunch of knock-off code because the original code was bound up in lawsuits (just like the kernel) or later replicated because of licensing purity of essence concerns. Writing a second verson of tar, cpio, cron, etc. hardly counts as a great piece of innovation, and Stallman is kind of a git for acting like it is. The thing about Linux is that Torvalds just went ahead and wrote it, rather than wanking about it for years and years like Stallman did.
Graphs aren't social
Women have stormed the academy in most fields, and around half of new medical doctors are female. I think it's time to retire knee-jerk sexism as the main explanation for the lack of women in tech.

While I'm confident that women face more barriers than men, it's dubious that sexism is sufficient to explain such extreme numbers. The same goes for math professors, Wall Street traders, and the NBA for that matter.

More smart women choose to become doctors or lawyers, it seems, than to study physics or to roll the dice on a startup. And a lot of those 25-to-40 year old women want to have a baby and raise a family, even if it means a less resume-impressive career. (My sister, an M.D. who specifically chose a family-friendly ophthalmology specialty, is one of them.) And what's wrong with that?
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That was the point I tried and failed to make.
Traditionally speaking, don't most people have (their own) kids and raise families? If so, then post-menopausal women have significantly less "value," whereas a childless man hitting jackpot at age 70 can still build a new one from scratch.

If having a family fits into one's life equation, the strategies involved are much different, sexism or not.
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