skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I understood your comments in this thread correctly what you are calling an inconsistency is that there are many values x for which

if x then print "OK" end

prints "OK" but for which

x == true

returns false. Is that right? If it is, then this is completely normal for languages that allow non-booleans in if statements. For example, x=2 is "inconsistent" in very many languages such as C, Python, Ruby, Perl, most Lisps, etc. I've never heard of this Squirrel language before, but if I read the docs correctly, x=2 is also "inconsistent" in Squirrel. In fact I'd be very surprised by a language that had no "inconsistent" values of x and that didn't achieve this by simply restricting x to be Boolean in an if.
> I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender.

Certainly! Nobody's goal is to reverse the historical situation so that men are systematically shut out of the field in some sort of vengeance for women being shut out for so long. A level playing field is absolutely the goal.

But despite all the progress we've made, there are still many, many places where women have to deal with negative biases as students, as job applicants, and as employees. Women still routinely face exactly the sort of bias that you're concerned about, except that it's no longer socially acceptable for people to admit (even to themselves) that they're doing it. (Different industry, but there was a study not long ago that conclusively demonstrated subtle but meaningful bias against women when hiring science lab techs: fake applications with female names were rated lower than identical applications with male names, by men and women alike.)

So my understanding is that when a company or college explicitly states a policy prioritizing women for help or hiring, they usually hope that this overt boost to female applicants will just cancel out the invisible but just as real biases against them.
Ask HN: does your company respect your holy days/Sabbaths/anything similar?
Just wondering what the industry is like in this regard. I don't work from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (the Judeo-Christian Sabbath) and my company has no problem with that. Does anyone here have a similar experience? Anyone has ever had trouble with this?
I don't think that hiring women over equally or more qualified men is truly the norm, though it did certainly occur in some companies and with some individuals - and I'm sure it still does, to some degree. But I think it's a real stretch to call it the norm. And even if you accept the argument that it's the norm, the practice is certainly failing, isn't it, since men still dominate the ranks of programmers. They are no longer 100%, but they still are a huge majority.
They should get BitInstant added to the HSTS list. It'll prevent attacks like this.
Golden Gate Bridge Toll-Takers Get Layoff Notices
Also, "The Tangled Web".
> Teaching, especially at the elementary-school level and younger, nursing

Have you stopped to consider that these two (in particular) might be true but you're not in the circles that talk about it? There's significant demand for male elementary school teachers[1] and while I can't find with a couple of quick Google searches, friends of mine who work in the medical field say that there's a drive to get more male nurses because male patients generally seem more comfortable around male nurses.

> Firefighters, soldiers, police, etc. I don't see anywhere near the level of pressure to bring women into these fields as there is for CS/Programming.

I can't speak to firefighters or police (though cursory Googling for the latter seems to indicate nontrivial demand), but the goal of more female enlistment in the military has been ongoing for quite some time.

And in any case, that there may not be such a push for more women in field X does not imply that that is the desired state of affairs in that field--it states only that it's not happening right now. It is happening in software development. And you're on Hacker News: it trends toward software developers. There's going to be more bits perturbed on the topic than regarding firefighters or police.

[1] - http://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage
Wish I could upvote this enough.
Are there any monitoring services, like Pingdom, that do external 3rd party auditing of current DNS endpoints for a domain and offer alerting whenever a change is made?

That service (being external from the registrar or DNS provider) seems sorely needed by everyone in our industry because this method of attack is starting to become the standard.
Sure--hence groups like LinuxChix.
The Most Admired Companies Aren't Always Great Investments
Cartoon-Empty Nesters
If it is this hard to 'express' our email address I'm not particularly excited about how we might express our ideas using this...
SQLAlchemy 0.8.0 Released
Here's the problem: even with this ruling, there is nothing preventing the border patrol people from continuing to seize and search laptops and phones.

In other words: there is no adequate punishment for violating a citizen's constitutional rights. At most, the evidence (if any) can't be used in a court of law. But there is never any punishment. For example: the dude who was imprisoned in solitary in NM for 2 years, without a trial or being presented before a judge (6th Amendment?). Sure, he got a boatload of money; but _no one was punished_.
They're pretty inventive, so I'm sure they could surprise us. I'm sure they'll have some reason why they can't come to court, ever. Perhaps the judge will have the Federal Marshals "help" them make their way to court? :)
I think the best thing you can do for your daughter is help her learn not to be bothered whenever she thinks and acts outside the norms. Teach her to be comfortable with who and what she is. Of course, mom and dad will have to feel that way, too. :-) It seems that you do feel that way, - you just need to pass that strength on to her.
When 'Jazz' Was A Dirty Word
I think he is missing a zero. 17 sqft is a mini-closet, not a mini-apartment. 170 sqft would still be pretty small, but doable.
Is Yap Ready For The World?
This seems to me to be the problem. They took too much money to monetize in this way. A few bucks a month from a few million users, plus whatever they can make by occasionally inserting ads into the stream (which can't be that much considering how many people would never even see an ad because their streams are too noisy) just doesn't seem like enough to justify all the VC money...
Zizek is a humorous commentator, not a joke account. You may disagree with him, but he isn't writing sarcastically.
there's no reason for you to give them your actual mother's maiden name though, just tell them M)z&1<$Ccy(i]Kg&&dp` or something
Being a male elementary school teacher can be a very dangerous career choice in the era of "stranger danger" and the like.

And I think that the conversation focuses on programming here, but there is a genuine issue with girls being disinterested in STEM careers.

There's a chance that the world is missing out on the next female einstein, because she became a nurse instead of being encouraged to follow her dreams.
>Holding "women for CS" events only makes the women in CS feel even more isolated from their male peers

I don't think this is true at all (and usually you never see women say this, just males rationalizing their position). Women centric CS events are to encourage those who have an interest but may have been hesitant for some reason to seek it out. Or to encourage those who are students to seek help and find comraderie/validation.

A common theme from women is that they often feel like imposters in intro CS classes because its always guys who seem to be so much further ahead. Of course, guys will chime in that they experience impostor-syndrome just as much. The difference is that girls have an immediate re-enforcing explanation for that sense of being out of place: you don't belong because you're a woman. This is the curse of being a minority in a field that you aren't well represented in. This is why these CS-centric events are important.
Humor, not parody.
Question: how different is it from today?
Um ... but K&R did. Chapter 8, section 7, "A Storage Allocator". Yes, it's simple, but it's there.
I've been in the software industry for a several decades (I have a grey beard if that helps). I have never encountered any man that I felt had a gender bias against women in computing, other than if he was an ass in real life.
My wife is also a software engineer - and she has never had an issue (to the best of my knowledge).
What I find frustrating is that some people choose to identify themselves as a gender. Gender becomes a convenient excuse. I can't tell you how strongly I oppose this "I define myself by my gender" view. Feminism, chauvinism, the works - I strongly oppose the lot of them.
I'll say it simply ... you either see yourself as a person or a gender. If you don't see yourself as a gender, then you'll let equity (ie. NOT equality) drive your view of yourself and others.
Why Are Our Kids Useless? Because We're Smart
If I had to take a stab in the dark, I would guess she is:

1) Familiar with the image of a "geek" (how could you possibly not be?)

2) Intelligent enough to notice that the image of a geek is always of a male

3) Also intelligent enough to connect the dots between "programming" and "geek" based on what she knows of geeks.

Children are often a lot sharper than we give them credit. It doesn't need to be explicit; they will pick up on subtle things like omissions, and they will connect the dots.
Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson
IMHO Women are doing great in CS. They are not doing great in 20 hs/day crazy devops/IT work that nowadays passes for CS, that only men from 20-30 can endure. Edit: Right, women also can physically endure the developer death march, it's just they don't want to. And I don't blame them.
My initial reaction to these types of observations about sexism/racism is to agree with the underlying sentiment of the post: give a completely blank stare and say in all seriousness "why wouldn't it be okay for a girl to be a programmer? What does that have to do with anything? Do what you love, and screw everyone else"

Then, I remember that for centuries people have been actively attempting to be dicks to other people that aren't "like them" and exclude, harass, and demean other people for no other reason than they are afraid that giving dignity to someone else somehow takes it from themselves. It's a thing, and it happens – way more than you might think. And ignoring that it ever happens will not make it go away. In fact ignoring it will only continue to empower those that have the power to abuse it.

So, as much as my gut wants to say that stuff like "women in cs" meetings are unnecessary, I know that they are very necessary. If only as a reminder to everyone else "there is still a problem, so remember: don't be a dick"

If only it were that simple of a problem to solve.
Eh. AAPL is down a large percentage from its value in recent many months, and Google has been rallying.

The $1000 bit is a silly, but since both stocks have been INA similar price range in recent years, it makes dense to talk about which one will roughly double first.
People who work in CS are known to work with scientific methods. "What if" is simply not enough.

To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.

We, that is people who work in the field of computer science, need to demand more than guesses and beliefs when dealing with "solutions" to gender inequality. If someone has an ideas on how to improve the community and industry, those ideas need to be first tested and validated using the scientific method. Testing in Social studies are not a new concept, so we already got the tools we need.

If "woman in CS" programs can help to get women with intellect and passion into CS, it should be testable. Do that first, and then argue for it use when there is data backing it up.
If you are genuinely curious, then why not fire up an AVD instance and check it out for yourself? We are hackers after all..

To the OP.. I did just that for you, and it works as expected: http://imgur.com/a/YdRbO
Sorry, this is not going to be gentle.

This post is clearly written by someone who is new to Java, and starts with the antique assumption that the runtime/checked exception dichotomy is a good idea. After nearly two decades of experience, programmers and language designers have resoundingly voted this language design feature to be a failure. A little bit of experience catching idiotic exceptions like UnsupportedEncodingException and you start to see why. But it goes deeper than just bad design in the standard libraries - checked exceptions fundamentally violate interface encapsulation - try throwing a meaningful exception through Runnable or Iterator. The net result is stacktraces with dozens of wrapped exceptions that destroy any hope of meaningfully handling known error conditions.

Stop it. JUST STOP IT. Checked exceptions have wasted hundreds of hours of my time, not just writing lame wrappers so that I don't have to type try/catch on every line of code, but also by making debugging and error handling five times more painful than it should be.

If you're still touting checked exceptions in 2013, you are part of the problem. Stop it. Java needs to evolve, and your fresh-from-1995 opinion is not helping.

TL;DR: Of course you should catch RuntimeExceptions. There should be no other kind of exception.
And as my compensation I would like 80K per year, a long vacation ...
It's not a choice between ignoring or "tackling it head on". In the early days of tackling some kind of systemic bias, it makes sense to talk about it all the time. Now that most everyone agrees it's a problem, it seems (to me) like the most productive way to move forward is to only point out sexism in specific instances where it occurs, providing reinforcement to help change our mental habits, making pariahs of persistent offenders. But if you continue to "tackle" the problem, you're just badgering people about things you've already convinced them on, which leads to annoyance and backlash, as we've seen.

I'm not sure about girl-centric CS activities. Sometimes guys and girls just want to hang out and do ${activity} with members of the same sex. We can have guy-only or girl-only camping trips without any problem. Camping is pretty well-established to be a unisex activity. You'd think the same would be true for CS or any other field, in an unbiased world. But who could get away with an explicitly guy-only CS event? It would be politically difficult to say the least. Something is clearly wrong here.

Maybe girl-only gatherings, as the next step past mixed gatherings, help further the subconscious idea that women have a natural place in ${activity}. How's that for compensating? But this sort of falls flat when it's hard for guys to do the same. And as a blunt weapon against sexism, well, it still doesn't make sense to me, because if it's wielded that way it's inherently polarizing.

Humans are so complicated.
If you replace 1 with 2 this is an argument against using a vast number of languages, including Squirrel, I think. So maybe you're really saying that languages should forbid non-Boolean values in if statements. Maybe I agree with that.
Racism is quite simply prejudice based on race, and prejudice does not mean hatred.
HSTS would not make a difference here. They redirected the DNS for email to take over the email accounts.
The Like bait
>Kids are very perceptive, they notice the apparent differences in acceptable behavior very early on

Yes and if young girls' early exposure to the industry consists largely of "Girl-centric CS activities" then they will immediately wonder why they need such special treatment. People do not want want to be segregated, even if it is, supposedly, for a good cause.
iOS is so last decade :)
The true cost of free-to-play games
There were several women, along with Hedy Lamarr, that stood out, see my comment below. You only hear about her because she was also a movie star.
Norway: The New Yale?
Very slick. Wish there was more room for the question titles while browsing, but love the clean interface and left/right swiping navigation. I'll definitely be popping open this app when out and about to absorb some insights from the top gurus in the RoR community. Cheers.
Mark Cuban: How I Built My Empire
If you think that's strange, I personally consider CoffeeScript preferable to JavaScript, and some Lisps easier to think in than all the other programming languages. No stranger to ridicule and disbelief. :)

(Which reminds me a bit about how the author is alienated from fellow females. How many of us feel alienated from our fellow programmers? Or fellow males, if you're male? Ever look at world events, and see humanity as a bit... strange? Realizing that, statistically speaking, you yourself almost certainly have many strange beliefs too, for being a member of such groups?)
Dalton Caldwell on our software choices: You are what you eat
I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?"

Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?"

I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe that any discrimination for one group is discrimination against another (which, incidentally, is axiomatically true). Many in this camp believe that lowering standards for one group encourages a perception that any member of that group did less to get where they are (correct or not).

The other side believe that an artificial environment needs to be created to correct an imbalance. Rooted in this principle there is often a belief that this situation only exists because of artificially created and perpetuated gender roles.

Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender.

In this post as one data point, the author notes that she felt socially isolated from other girls. The question then is: is this because she didn't share the same interests as her peers or did she develop separate interests because of this social isolation? I suspect the answer is a little of both.

The stereotype of an engineer is that of a judgmental introvert, two traits that tend to negatively correlate with having many social connections. Of course this stereotype isn't universal but we're talking about patterns in a large group, not specific individuals. If such personality traits are causative (rather than simply being correlated) in choosing CS as a career, you then need to ask if there is a gender basis for these traits? Males and females form very different social structures when left to their own devices.

For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is.
> It's known that girls are more vocal and proactive in a classroom full of just girls.

Isn't that an argument that all schools should then be boy/girl schools, always separating kids based on their sex? After all, this is the most effective model right?

If schools has gone away from this model, I assume they had a good reason. We also used to separate women from men in the work place. That too was changed in the last 100 years. Business somehow decided that productivity went up if did not separate people based on their sex.

If we moved away from this in both schools and work, why are we then trying to reintroduce it again with the same argument they had a hundred years ago? Is there any exceptional detail that only computer science has?
So a corporation (many individuals acting in concert) funding a movie should be unconstitutional, but a single billionaire natural person funding a movie should be constitutionally allowed?

Because free speech? That seems horribly backward.
Wordpress to fight “legally deficient and objectionable” Prenda subpoena
> Most of us won't pay $1 for a great game, but will pay $99 in IAPs

Here's the difference: by the time you're even considering an in-app-purchase, you already know you love the app. Would you rather support a product that has given you lots of pleasure, or an unknown product that lobs a couple of screenshots before footing you the bill?

While I don't have much experience with purchases in iOS, I can say for sure that of the apps I've purchased through Android, all but one (around three dozen total) SUCKED. They had good reviews and good screenshots - that's what made me buy them - but they didn't follow through with the promise. I'm willing to take the <$5 risk to try a new game with "good" reviews and pretty "screenshots", but so far, empirically, it has almost always ended poorly.

... lending the more interesting question: how do we get out of THAT rut?
>Each generation of CS pioneers includes a few more women with passion and intellect like Hopper or Bryon that cannot be ignored,

So your message to, say, young women who are facing barriers to success in CS is "Be one of the most exceptional women in the field, or wait a few generations until successful women in CS are no longer exceptions?"

When someone with a desire to become a programmer can say to themself "I can achieve some level of success _even if I'm not the greatest programmer of my generation_", that's a good thing. Exceptional role models are nice to have, but so are "average" role models. "Women in CS" programs might increase the latter, and I don't see how they could decrease the former, so I don't think such programs can just be written off as "not the answer".
I like CentOS/RHEL/Friends a lot better than Ubuntu. Packages are better quality (not the packaging system, the actual packages that is), things are well understood, simple, and just work.

Also, no upstart crap ;-)

I have a better experience with actual pure debian.
Aye. Wealth of Nations was brilliant logical analysis of the realities of markets. It was not the moral apologia and religious gospel that free marketeers pretend it is.
I think it's a little more insidious than that. It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech not because of what you've done or want to do, but simply because of what you are. I think this devalues the accomplishments by focusing on an unimportant aspect.

It subtly suggests (unintentionally) that girls can't make it on their own and require this extra help - which I think reinforces the sexist stereotypes that are the core problem. Intimidation, feelings of inferiority and difficulty with work are universal issues, I don't think excluding people by sex is necessary.

There's also the very non-zero chance that I'm underestimating the value women get out of these events, but exclusion based on gender just does seem like the best way to go about it. Maybe it's just that nobody likes to feel left out.
The New Star Trek Trailer looks AMAZING
Perhaps this is obvious, but this affiliate marketing in a nutshell - that is, the heavy usage of "dark patterns".
You should watch Disney movies with your kid and discuss them. Ignorance won't stop anything.
Avoiding something is not the same as oversight. Oversight is failing to notice something. DADT did not stop observation of homosexual activity.