skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Female-only programming events and CS groups are like female-only gyms, they provide a more low-pressure environment to gain confidence and skills. It's a great place for a beginner to be turned on to a rewarding and fun activity/profession and receive mentorship from more experienced women. It's fairly natural for people that share similar characteristics and experiences to band together to form support groups.

The author is an atypical female, so she doesn't see the need for such groups. She would be a techie regardless. But I expect that the gender ratio in CS would be worse than it is if these groups did not exist.

Software is only growing in importance. I would guess that these groups do a good job at drawing highly talented people into the industry. That's important for the future of software. If these efforts at outreach are effective, then I am grateful for all the talented future coworkers that I gain from them.

As a member of the majority, it is easy to feel devalued by special events for every subgroup who is not like us. And when members of the majority speak up about it, their concerns are considered illegitimate and even evil. I think it would benefit everybody if we were all a little more open and less judgmental.
Please explain to me where I made an assertion about how women should feel. I said that girls will wonder why they are being treated differently and I said that people do not like being segregated. What words am I putting in whose mouths? What type of argument?
Facebook User #41
Just like guns and sugar.
Don't worry, this video of the same test has 3.2 million views :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PEXLODw9c
The problem I've experienced is that whenever I talk about software security with non technical people I get a lot of "I thought this dude was normal until he put on the tinfoil hat" looks and overall lack of interest.

The only time people become more aware of security is once they've suffered the consequences of a lack of security. To be fair, the only reason it concerns me is because I've been exposed to so many stories and somewhat have to deal with it in my field.

So it follows naturally that as incidents of security crimes and overreaching governments and corporations increase, then so will the awareness surrounding information security. It has to be actually happening to most for humans on a crowd scale to pay attention.
> I've worked in two departments headed by a woman who made all the hiring decisions and the entire team they hired was men.

Given the lack of women in the field, this isn't all that surprising and cannot be unilaterally blamed on gender biases.
On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their ecosystem.

Maybe there is no serious money on that type of business model. Remember, most employees, investors and execs are trying to dump Twitter to investors, who cares what happens 2-3 years from now? The revenue needs to be shown now, ideally before advertisers get to see any hard stats on effectiveness.

Facebook has been adding more ads, Google is virtually all ads so why not Twitter. Facebook will tire people with ads, Twitter too, Google will lose their reputation little by little considering that fairness is the core of it's business. But many will have cashed out and others will hold the bag
Yeah, I'd like to know what this particular professor was trying to teach me.

The semester was almost over, and I was turning in my last paper. I tried my best to do it well. But he kept returning it to me, saying it was "bad" (no reason given even though I asked several times to know what was wrong so I could fix it). Each time I tried to improve it, he said it was "bad" and returned it to me, saying he refused to grade the paper I was really ill at the time (sleeping 14+ hours per day, then falling asleep everywhere; I was really weak). The effort I put on the paper was making me have bad grades on my other classes. I begged the professor to let me turn in the paper as it was, even if I got a zero (I would still pass the class). I explained my situation, but he still refused. I dropped out of the class even though semester was practically over. The stress of it was killing me.

So I got no grade or credit for the class.

Idiots like these shouldn't be teaching. Then again he was pretty racist and misogynist, and was always picking on me and glaring at me even if he was talking to another student.

Wish I'd known better at the time, I should have reported him, but just the effort to get to my classes everyday was awful. It took me 6 years to get healthier (I had to drop out because of how bad I got), so it's only recently that I realized how absurd the situation was.

I wonder what he was trying to teach me?
Comic Sans is the Justin Bieber of fonts - hated by a lot, yet incredibly popular.
Is this not true?
There is definitely an internet lynch mob mentality on this even though the inappropriate use critique is spot on. You'd have to be a brave designer to use it, even in an befitting way. Apps like Balsamiq have dropped it and subbed in look-a-likes just so people have cover to say it isn't Comic Sans.

http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/font
Beginning guys who find themselves in classrooms full of people that started programming in their teens do what they always do - suck it up or fail. Such is the life of a member of the majority.
And who is to decide the orgs that have the proper bylaws and restrictions and the orgs that don't?
Stop trolling please. You are advocating for `==` doing type coercion of arguments and that is almost always a misfeature in any language that has that (and the fix usually involves adding an ugly `===` operator after the fact)
FWIW, I‘ve seen several recommendations for “Essential ActionScript 2.0” by Colin Moock, which has a chapter on MVC. ActionScript is of course a useless language nowadays, but the explanation looks pretty useful so far (I haven’t finished going through it).
Do what cultural dissidents have been doing for decades - home school.
Not sure what you mean, but this code runs https://github.com/japerr/Steganography
Simon Garfield wrote a great book called "Just My Type"[1] which dives deep into the history of landmark fonts. Includes a full chapter on Comic Sans, highly recommended read.
Let's not devolve this discussion into a language-parsing exercise. Take your comment as a whole, its clear you are saying "this is how women will/should feel". I'm saying there is no reason to suppose how women will feel: they can tell us themselves if they feel this way.
Racism, sexism, etc are necessarily wrong. However, discrimination is not necessarily wrong. Whether its wrong depends on the context and the motivations. I submit that this is a valid form of "discrimination".
1password integrates with dropbox so your (encrypted) passwords are available on all systems that you install the 1password client on.
Thanks for the kind words and support. I agree it feels a bit random at the moment, and I've been mulling over what would work. Crowd-sourcing is an interesting idea, will definitely think about this some.
I learned something new today because of your post. Thanks
Microsoft did partly address that by making Cambria and Calibri its default header and body fonts.

But really, basic knowledge about Typography would help a great deal in creating decent looking content. A Serif title with Sans body-text for the web makes content easier to read, and the inverse is true for print.
Bahahaha comic sans sucks.
This isn't an apples to apples comparison. Asian Americans have never systematically disenfranchised white Americans.

However, you bring up some interesting points but that I have a couple of issues with including probationary whiteness, survivor-ship bias, and performance vs. access. I don't think Asian Americans had to drink from the "colored" fountain. It's easier to win the game if you are allowed to play. In many cases, Asians are considered probationary white so should we be talking about a White/White achievement gap?

Children of immigrants are highly motivated to achieve by parents who selected to come to the US. The folks that immigrate were motivated enough to come here and be successful. This is the essence of survivor-ship bias.

There was a study a couple years ago that showed that having an black-sounding name on your resume lead to fewer callbacks. You have a better shot at batting .300 if you are allowed to pick up a bat.
You are ignoring initial conditions. I understand rayiner's comment as:

1. high male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining male culture
2. affirmative action as a temporary kludge to shift male/female ratio
3. lower male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining new equilibrium

That is after affirmative action stops; it is not necessary that the system returns to old high male/female state.
It's just irrelevant. If the argument is wrong, then explain why its wrong. Trying to shut it down because someone has misused a similar-sounding argument in the past is not a refutation.
Similarly, the font assembled from scans of the lettering in xkcd comics is called "Humour Sans".
I explicitly stated that people choose to group together to concentrate power.

The examples given were to counter your specific argument against corporations by showing you that there are many similar organizations that are acceptable concentrations of power.

The rest of your post ignored that context and furiously battled a straw man.
Speaking of Comic Sans…here's a $100,000 rebranding for a town in Ontario - Port Hope.

http://www.designedgecanada.com/news/2013/20130115688.shtml

:P
I've suggested before that we should explore an independant organization that rates companies and their treatment of devs who use their API. If a company has a history of constantly trimming usage limits, it should be documented. At some threshold, recommendations could be made to avoid or be weary of certain APIs.

We are returning back to the 90s where API access came from BD deals and the rest of us did dirty parsing to make things work.

For a while we got the illusion those days may be gone. And why not, it sure felt like that. But now we are getting to a stage it's almost worse for services to have public or free APIs at all.
I don't think even the most pretentious of designers would ever scoff at the use of Comic Sans where it was appropriate and fitting, such as on the invitation to a 6 year old's birthday party. That's where is fits, it exudes 'fun'.

Where 'pretentious' designers do begin to huff is when it is used in a clearly inappropriately context such as on police notices raising awareness of rape.

The handwriting example isn't particularly good because learning calligraphy is a skill that I assume takes a decent amount of time to reach proficiency in. Making a couple of extra clicks in a word processor and selecting something like Arial is not.

http://inappropriatecomicsans.tumblr.com/day/2012/03/17
In the US at least we put all our eggs in one basket (the Shuttle) and ended up foregoing about 2 decades of development in conventional launch vehicles (until the Challenger accident forced some sanity). Also, a lot of the big aerospace companies (such as Boeing) have surprisingly shallow experience with orbital rocketry (although it's improved a bit with the EELV generation). Very few folks at those companies actually had hands on experience with building or flying rockets, and even less experience with testing (as a rule most launch vehicles fly straight down the middle of the flight envelope as much as possible, so even in a vehicle like the Shuttle with 130+ flights that's nowhere comparable to having the same level of understanding or confidence in the vehicle if it had flown that many flights while exploring the envelope).
On top of the fact that it's practically impossible to make a libel accusation stick when political speech is even barely provable - being incorporated doesn't prevent a libel proceeding from moving forward. It just means that it's more difficult to pin it to individuals within the corporation.

Even then, there are ways that the corporate veil can be pierced to still go after individuals.
There's a good reason for it, and usually is a sign that the video is immensely popular. You can find out why on Youtube it self: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI
I love Automattic for this!

Go and bash this troll out of business.

However, it makes me shiver in fear thinking how many hosts didn't tell public about or notices like these and gave away private info!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but in America WASPy types of persons enslaved black and "mixed" types of persons, and even after that was theoretically eliminated post-Civil War, Jim Crow laws ensured that racial equality was not even possible until near the end of the 1960's.

So certainly at a socio-political regional and national level it was very much a "competition between races".

At an individual level then sure, it's not like you could point a finger as a black man at one particular white oppressor, but that still didn't make it any better for you (statistically speaking) to have been born black.

That's the whole point about the discussion about a meritocracy: How can you say that the alpha nerd on this side and the failed athlete struggling with math on the other were ever engaged in a fair competition for that one programming job? Alpha nerd had a two-parent home (probably a two-income home as well), with computers to practice on since he was a teenager (or earlier), didn't have to worry about being stabbed at school or shot at the public park, went to a public school with a stable and well-established tax base, etc. etc. Whereas Super Jock came from the slums, had to step over the passed-out crackheads on his way to walking miles to school in the morning, his dad was floating along from prison cell to prison cell and it would be even odds if his mother was drunk or not when he got home that evening from his hours of practice for the sport that represented his only effective chance at a stable life as an adult. Math homework? He don't have time for that shit!

Now obviously both of those are highly contrived, but the issue is that it doesn't even have to be that severe in practice to go from little individual effects to a noticeable high-level socio-economic effect.

Is affirmative action the answer to that? Hell man, I don't know. The underlying issues certainly go much deeper than just "we should give more scholarships to poor minority candidates", for all we know that's 10 years too late to even get minorities interested in STEM, let alone struggling to catch up with it.

But HELL YES the concept of "competition" applies to meritocracy. I'm not saying race should have something to do with a meritocracy, I'm saying that it shouldn't, and so are people who actually argue for affirmative action for future equality.
No, it's pretty clearly a parody of Slavoj Zizek with a PLT focus.
SQLAlchemy 0.8.0 released.
What you have in CS now isn't "blind meritocracy." If the male culture is turning away qualified women, you don't have a meritocracy.
First, nothing is necessarily wrong, as that would imply an absolute rather than relative morality. All morality is relativistic.

Secondly, I would argue that your list, from my point of view, denoted 'racism, sexism, etc' is more rigorously defined as 'discriminating based on anything other than merit'.

Given that assumption, discrimination by race or sex for any reason would be wrong.

With those premises, I stand by my original conclusion that discrimination on the whole is wrong.
Surely rich people in Manhattan never travel?
http://www.corsix.org/content/look-lua-52-work3 (#19)

http://lua.2524044.n2.nabble.com/petition-to-keep-ipairs-ali...

Edit: both are from 2010. This never became final perhaps?
I agree with everything she had to say.
If Virgin Galactic can get the costs down enough, the really exciting thing about what they are proposing to do is turning 18 hour airplane flights into less than two hour suborbital flights. Even if you don't care about space for the sake of space, it's obvious that that would be a huge improvement in transportation between various points on Earth.
>It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech...

I think one of the purposes of these kinds of separate events is to make it so that women in tech are not "special".

>I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect.

Unimportant to you, maybe, but not to the people who face barriers because of their gender. To make an analogy, is the success of some African-Americans today "devalued" because they didn't have to work as hard for it as the "exceptional blacks" of previous generations?

>It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help...

One of the benefits of living in society instead of striking out for the frontier is that, when the deck is stacked against you, you can band together to solve problems that might be too hard to face on your own. Yes, there are always "exceptional" people who can go it alone, but the fact that _somebody_ didn't need extra help doesn't mean that _nobody_ needs extra help.

>I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary.

Necessary for what? In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to take gender into account, but (imperfect as it may be), I think women-only events are a way to create environments where gender issues don't come into play.
So far, I've got:
https://hirethere.com/
http://remojobo.com/
http://jobmote.com/
It's about the target audience. Most normal people aren't going to be using their registered domain name for extremely high-value and highly targeted stuff, and they'll be upset if you say "Oh, you forgot your random string? Well, I guess you're screwed bub, sorry". But if you're doing something involving btc, you should be conscious enough to know "maybe I shouldn't put the security of my account behind easily locatable public info like the name of myself or family members".
Musk extends Times feud, calls Model S review "ethics violation"
As mentioned in the original link, Times New Roman and every font has inappropriate and appropriate uses, though that in itself is an absolute judgement we can probably do without.

Those inappropriate uses involving Comic Sans may be more funny, but other than that, it's hard to argue pretentious designers have not had a bit too much fun bagging on Comic Sans simply out of schadenfreude.
Chris stewart nhl jersey
> 1. high male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining male culture

Based on what, the assumption that women are self-selecting against wanting to be programmers due to it being a male dominated profession?

In that case, the action should be taken to promote CS education and inclusion at the preparatory level. Creating a bias away from the meritocracy at the hiring stage is still discriminatory and results in an overall lower skill level.

My personal problem with this is that you're looking at it on a generational scale.

You're basically telling multiple generations of men that it's okay for them to be discriminated against for their entire life due to something that their fathers or grandfathers did.

That's not 'equality' for them.
The Importance of Benevolent Dictators
Money & Journalism with adampopescu, nate_thayer
I was saddened when LEGO started branding their toy blocks for girls (big, dumb pink blocks) and for boys (all the cool blocks and kits). The gender division is introduced to kids very young.
..because if it's true that history repeats itself, then studying history is effectively studying the future?

(i'm sorry, i couldn't help myself)
Have you never been in a minority status in anything you've done? I'm not talking about race, just situations where your background/traits/etc. are much different than those of the majority of your peers.

I started as an "odd man out" for practically every major peer group I've ever been involved in and I can tell you, it sucks. The way I've successfully acclimated is usually with highly informal "incubator" groups that help with the integration process by breaking it up into steps. These groups were so informal that we didn't even think of it as such, but in retrospect that's what had happened.

But an actual majority wouldn't need this exact type of support, they already have been acclimated to it and can easily integrate into similar peer groups, so it's not even an exact comparison.

But to the extent that this GitHub project is focused on ensuring that this particular minority of this particular peer group has a place to go for support and successfully working their way into the larger peer group I think it's a wonderful thing. Hopefully someday we can discard it as redundant and unnecessary, but today it can be very helpful.
Whither Comic Serif?
Except that doesn't make sense.

Given the assumption that it's a meritocracy, then qualified women won't be turned away.

If women are being turned away, then they should be being turned away at a rate equal to men, relative to their applicant pool.

If there are less women applying in the first place, then the problem exists in the educational\ preparatory stages of one's career. The solution should be directed there, not trying to correct for the problem afterwards.
Apple: Windows started it! (copying)

Microsoft: Apple started it!

Linux: Come here you two, no dessert for either of you tonight

(sorry, couldn't resist :P)
And I would have to reject those premises.
Reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215 which talked about an ebook which was making 400k/yr, which also had a long form sales letter style web page.
What's the importance? And why is this on the front page?
Zuck is id #4, for those about to go spelunking. ;)
Of course this blog has poor typography: small font size with no attention paid to margins or readability. You may design typefaces, but you sir are no type designer.
Last night I heard a comedian described Dane Cook as sans comic.
What would BSD say?
damn, you beat me to it :P
yay Canad! I'm from Toronto and went to US :)
Live in Seattle and work at Amazon... Missing my poutine...
maybe its just funky or nerdy... or both
Defensive much? You might want to actually read the article before you write a post.
I use blogofile [1], a Python tool that generates static HTML, running on a Linode which hosts a few other sites.

[1] http://blogofile.com/
No, I am saying that people don't like being segregated (not that they should not like, do not try to put a different spin on it) and as a person who has interacted with other people my whole life I do have a right to say that. Yes, women are people so I believe this includes women. Maybe there are people that like being singled out based on their gender in this context but I have definitely not met any.

>they can tell us themselves if they feel this way

Yes and they do. I am not sure if you realise this but this actually what the female author of the article says:

"I also have grave concerns regarding activities and events that are for “girls only”. These events instead enforce the stereotype, segregating girls and giving them (and everyone) a message that they are different. It is a band-aid attempt at a solution to a problem that starts at a much younger age, and seriously neglects those girls (and women) who don’t want to be segregated (many of whom never even come out to such events, and whose voices are sadly never heard). Children do not grow up into a segregated world, so why are we reinforcing that message? Why are we not just creating a variety of activities that may appeal to boys or girls or both? I can see taking issue with creating explicitly sexist activities, but there is nothing inherently sexist about having activities that may attract more of one gender than the other, especially when we make the available to everyone.
"