skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're conflating issues here. There is a point where continually beating the drum about overt sexism in the field becomes counter productive. But this is a different issue. Having women-centric CS events arent necessarily about shielding women from male sexism, but about creating environments where they won't feel intimidated and can commiserate with others who are experiencing or have experienced the same issues. Like I said in another comment, countering the gender stereotypes against women in hard science and engineering fields isn't about banning certain types of humor. The problem goes much deeper than that.

>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.

I really wish people would stop trotting out this shallow argument when discussing inequality in various spheres. The contexts for the two groups are completely different, thus a simple "swapping the two labels and seeing what results" gives absolutely no insight.
> For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is.

Demographic dramatically over-represented in government, corporate boards, startup founders, growth industries, etc unconcerned about status quo.

And there's the problem.
Why immediately assume that the idea comes from environmental factors?
s/can/want to/;

When it comes to "going to war" for some cause, men are very programmable, especially when we're young.
I just used it. I needed to do some analysis on Netflix streaming data (about 700 million rows in my dataset).

I had a bunch of text files that are basically logs, so I wrote a parer that injected or updated each row in DynamoDB and then put a queue item into an SQS queue to process that row if it was new (since the same ID could show up in any number of log files).

After the initial parsing I ran the other script to do the actual work by sucking items off the queue and processing the rows, which at that point had a column for each log line for that ID.
Google, Adidas Partner For Shoes That Talk
If males and females think differently, CS is missing out on some unique perspectives by not having more females involved in the field. Barriers or not, less gender imbalance could enrich the the field.
"Standing" is horribly abused. It is used to reject plaintiffs challenging government secrecy, because they can't prove they have standing unless they win the case -- a Catch-22. Similarly, if you are banned from doing something, you don't get standing unless you do it anyway, at great personal risk. Wanting to do it is not granted standing (though it should)

Standing is the legal equivalent of launching the Challenger with known frozen o-rings just because it hadn't crashed yet
Reading the article, I don't think bitInstant ever gave that information as valid answers to security questions. The attackers convinced site5 to accept that information as security questions and answers.
If you're right, what is the worst that could happen? That girls might opt out of pursuing CS? Well that is already the situation now.

It's easy to poke theoretical holes in any proposed change...but the status quo should not get a pass just because we're used to it.
>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?

It might be, and I'm not completely sure it isn't the best model.

But work environments are totally different situation. School is an exception because it is at a time where kids are in their formative years, thus creating artificial environments that are maximally conductive to learning is appropriate (which is what "school" is to begin with).
I would say that racism is about hate, ignorance, and creating systematic barriers to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Women are considered a minority group; yet, white women still retain the privilege of being white. It sounds like the essay echoes the sentiment of being privileged and not wanting to be sub-grouped. I've noticed that some white friends didn't consider themselves to belong to any special "ethnic group" - they considered themselves to be "normal".

The point of the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, and implementation of affirmative action policies was that hatred and bigotry gave way to the people creating barriers that prevented minorities from pursuing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Affirmative action is needed because the impact of centuries of systemic discrimination cannot be undone in just one generation.

The solution to ending racism, homophobia, and sexism cannot be to ignore these evils. Shine a light on them.
The UI is sick!! So nice, clean, and fast!!!
Where else do ideas come from?
>The contexts for the two groups are completely different, thus a simple "swapping the two labels and seeing what results" gives absolutely no insight.

This is an argument that has been used by most proponents of discriminatory practices.
Today I learned it is possible to do fan service badly.
You changed the meaning of 'concentrate'. People don't intend to have their orgs hijacked by their leaders, and some groups have bylaws to prevent that.
This looks slick and is a good development of the original idea! I would like to see another angle/play. Maybe there could be crowd-sourced curricula with SO answers as the content? Just looking for a way to make it less random. Also, it's a shame your HN post hasn't gotten more attention for your efforts--i was there a couple weeks ago. Keep it up!
You giving money to EFF has nothing to do with being a corporation. You are not a controlling member of the EFF.
On somewhat of a tangential note affirmative action is an interesting issue.

Assuming the goal is to provide equal opportunity for those that were unlikely to have the same advantages as others through their childhood, I think making this distinction by race instead of socio-economic standing perpetuates a lot of racism. It suggests someone is disadvantaged simply because of their race. While it creates an ethnically diverse student body it doesn't create a class diverse student body (so it's a bit of a pseudo diversity).

Using a socio-economic standard you abstract away the race issue and give an advantage to those who have less money which has a stronger correlation to actually having less opportunity. This also creates a more diverse student body as well.

There is one very important reason it had to originally be done by race - the choosers in the original system were racist.

If admissions is racist then you can't do it by socio-economic standing because they'll just only pick whatever race they prefer. To make the switch you have to be able to determine that the choosers are no longer racist.

It's another hard problem, but I'm not entirely sure I understand the connection to this issue. If the comparison is that women should be given an advantage because they're disadvantaged technically I'd think that is exactly the sexism that's the core problem - and is unfair to the women who are really great.
If you commit libel, you are liable.

If your corporation commits libel, you are not liable.

That's one problem.
Would like to learn more about your opportunity. Can you please contact me at juan[at]grouptalent.com ?
> Why Nvidia (CUDA)? It it the only hardware you have access to?

Yep. Also, learning CUDA would be a benefit for my graduate research, so it's not a complete loss :)
Sorry, units wrong. 17 square meters, obviously. That’s about 180 sqft.
This is absolutely the truth.

I know folks that make 6 figures yearly and still cannot convince themselves to pay $4000-$5000/month for a 2 bedroom.
Can we please let the women speak for themselves? I absolutely abhor when white people tell me that as a black person I should not want scholarships/education programs/tutoring/etc geared specifically towards people of my background.
If you want the array elements to shift into the gap, you want to use table.remove:

local array = {1, 2, 3, 4}
table.remove(array, 2)
-- array is now { [1] = 1, [2] = 3, [3] = 4 }
Women are naturally going to be more attracted to software development as a career as time goes on, because everyone is realizing it's a lucrative career that's becoming more and more mainstream and even--dare I say--cool. It's one of the few career options left with high pay and low unemployment. It used to be assumed that only geeks could understand how to do it, but that isn't the case anymore. Things are changing.
> 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.

If you're referring to affirmative action, the other side is more akin to the belief that without corrective action of some sort, that there will never be a fair environment in which to have a true meritocracy.

This is due to nothing more than competition theory; if you have two evenly matched teams, and one has a substantial lead on the other at the halfway mark of a game, you wouldn't expect the losing team to come from behind except in rare cases.

Given that Real Life is very much a Winner-Takes-All type of game that has sharp implications for later generations of each team.

Now it may be that there are other reasons for a gender imbalance in this case and so your revised question is probably as simple as it can feasibly get. But affirmative action, while being one of many distasteful choices for a distasteful situation, isn't necessarily just a bunch of do-gooders trying to force things into balance. It's an attempt to ensure a meritocracy is even possible at all.
There are entire sub-disciplines within history devoted to this sort of stuff. Social history. Micro-history.

You could try The World We Have Lost. Or The Cheese and the Worms. Among others. Really, the options are almost infinite.
I got the units wrong. Really stupid error.

It’s a mini apartment with huge quotation marks around it. One 9 square meter living room (with cupboard, sofa, table), one 8 square meter bedroom, including a shower. Toilet and tiny kitchen niche in the tiny, 1 meter wide hall not included (for whatever reason) in the 17 square meters.

I still think the 270 Euro/month are pretty expensive for what it is, but luckily I only have to live there for four months (and in the summer, so I’m not going to be in there all the time and will rather try to enjoy the city).
Exactly, and that's the key, and why I'm always excited for initiatives to create more gender balance in the field. We sure are missing out on half of humanity's perspective by having women so dramatically under represented.

And if engineers tend to be judgmental introverts, I think that's a pattern that developed from being statistically more representative of the reasoning and frame of mind needed for the profession, to being a vastly socially constructed barrier. By which I mean, yes, it's statistically easier to find good engineers who don't mingle well with society at large, but you can find extroverts and people on the grey areas as well. The thing is they tend to repelled by the current status quo. Which affects a lot of women.
Your tone suggests to inform rather than speculate and I would like to respectfully point out you might not be right: my fears are really happening, and we have actually got to the reverse of the historical situation.

Here is an article that was posted on hacker news saying just that, and notice the very positive reaction it got from the community here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673

EDIT: I know this is anecdotal evidence, and it's from Europe not the US. But notice what a positive reaction this had from HN. To me it shows that we don't mind this reverse historical situation.
If you install Debian Stable on the day it comes out, Debian promises[1] to keep issuing security updates until one year after the next stable release, whenever that might be. Usually they're about two years apart, although that varies unpredictably.

By contrast, Ubuntu promises[2] that LTS releases will happen exactly every two years, and be supported for three more years after the next LTS comes out. That's an extra two years of breathing room to organise migrations and refresh production machines, which can be pretty important in a large enterprise.

[1]: http://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan
[2]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
Twitter is trying to go public and everyone holding shares is thinking of the possible riches. After that, they can leave to start their own thing, stay or possibly retire.

What we/others say is a distant second. Right now they need to show growing revenues and that's it.
How often do software engineers get sued for bugs in their code?
sheez man
This line of thinking is well documented. It is referred to as stereotype threat. There have been some excellent studies done with the most profound being around the female math stereotype and the GRE.

http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html
I'm beginning to get real respect for Mr Pietz.
Unless you are someone like Aaron Swartz, who was incredibly influential as a teenager.
I think that ignores the fact that socialization is one of the most important things you learn at school. I'd imagine separating sexes would just create even more stereotypes/generalizations from both sides.
I have very little sympathy: "Reached Thursday, a VirWox representative said that the exchange has had multi-factor authentication since September 2012. “Bitinstant was not using it (they learned and do now),” the representative said in an email message."

If you're going intentionally fuck yourself and your customers over by not using real multifactor authentication (not just "a password and some security questions"), then I don't even know what to say. At this point it's on par with having a startup and not having any on-call tax or legal guy-- the inherent ignorance is almost incomprehensible.
Did many people even go to school in Founders time? Did we even have public school?
Disgusting? My food budget disgusts you? I write that blog to help people know how well one can eat at that price, and to refute people like you.

If you had read the parent post you'd have deduced I was responding to "even in the US you can eat quite well on $13 a day if you are frugal and know how to cook and budget".
The problem is that it is using discrimination to fight discrimination.

What about the boy who can't afford the tuition for the computer science course, his best friend, a girl who he has just introduced to programming, gets a bursary to the course just because she is female? The boy feels that he is not wanted in the cs community because of this discrimination so he begins to pursue something different and the girl feels that she was given an unfair advantage over her friend and does not want to ruin the relationship so she pulls out of the course.

Anything like this that isn't based on merit or interest can be pretty devastating.
I believe what's morally wrong is morally wrong and should not be done. Someone could speculate that the US would be better off with the cheap labour of slaves but that's morally wrong so we'll stop doing it period. I don't care why you're hiring a gender over another. In my humble opinion it's wrong and should stop.
http://bluehackers.org/

Has anyone looked into this org?

Seems like a good resource for us
Site5 have given a response: http://www.site5.com/blog/s5/security-and-social-engineering...
Compile your own kernel – Tutorial
I don't remember anywhere near enough basic to try answering my own question, but: BROKENHEART. What?
My answer to that question was the same everywhere, because I think you'd be crazy to use these tools to fight an oppressive regime. Just different levels of crazy.
That's a great idea for online services, assuming that they don't have strict validatation ("your mother's maiden name can not contain symbols"). I'm not sure it would work as well with companies who call you though.
Very impressive UI.
From the comments section of the linked blog post comes this quote (apparently) from Ben, the CEO at Site5:

To be rather blunt you should have better security questions. You should always put in a custom answer, for example I might use the question mother's maiden name and then the answer is "L@J-289098=a9jaosdjf" which I keep in an encrypted text doc or ecrypted note in 1Password.

Not a bad point.
That's right: someone who knows their credentials will be the focus of deliberate attacks should never use truthful personal details in response to these "security questions." Perhaps this is a "best practice" for anyone involved in such sensitive situations, even while the true best practice would be for sites to not allow password resets using such unreliable authenticators.
Is there a best practice for keeping a secure copy of one's password manager database? USB key in a safe? Single use Dropbox with an anonymous email? Encrypted file container by yubikey?
Men dominating the ranks of programmers, I believe, is due to women being less interested in programming. You could easily see this if you look at CS class. There is no discriminating employer there, and yet still the classes are men dominated. I believe in getting women interested in CS, not discriminating against men in hiring and access to learning resources.

As for whether it's the norm or not, here is the article that gave me that impression: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730673
What the Chromebook Pixel is really about.
Beards Keep you Young and Healthy (Scientific Paper)
Why I created Comic Sans
Why call out Disney for such special treatment. Should he do similar with the Rambo series?

Not watching Disney movies seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the content of Disney movies. There is no shortage of other things to watch.
their != there.
CS should belong to women as much as men and in an ideal world it would. But you're 55, how much has the percentage of women in CS increased since you were 21?

That is a slightly disingenuous question because I know the answer which is that it hasn't, it has in fact fallen. While I wish your argument were true it is clearly not.
A Bad Blender Design
I'm there! Us HN nerds ought to meet up!
Thanks for the details, but I remain concerned about taking a language, clearly with some tricky aspects, so closely identified with 16 and 32 bit computing into 64 bit computing.
Have you looked at Redmine? It includes a wiki, as well as 'projects', issue tracking, and email notifications for stuff.

http://www.redmine.org/
Some is bought in bulk, but not all. In response to similar concerns, some meals listed were prepared & cooked with just a knife, pan, spatula, and open fire of scrap wood.
Not true.

Some of us are still on shared servers or have limited bandwidth, or just care on principle.

When the leechers are popular forums it can be a definite tax.

Making a local thumbnail isn't that difficult, likely in whatever language you happen to use.
Ask HN: What is your personal website setup?
I'm trying to reduce the friction in managing my personal website. That's includes everything from hosting services, to ssh & ftp clients, to content management tools.

What do you use and recommend? What are you using that you don't like and would like recommendations on better alternatives?
> For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is.

It's potentially very productive. The culture of CS, "judgmental introversion" as you put it, is not anything intrinsic to CS. Indeed, software engineering is a profession that demands a high level of communication and cooperation. The "lone hacker" stereotype is in my opinion quite the opposite of the kind of people you want in software engineering (or engineering generally).

One of the things the whole "affirmative action" debate ignores, on both sides, is that cultures are self-perpetuating, but affirmative action can move cultures to new, self-sustaining equillibria. The lack of women is by itself something that creates a barrier to entry for women, and once the ratio is corrected through affirmative means, the new equilibrium becomes self-perpetuating.

I'll use as an example the profession of accounting. Accounting, like CS, has a perception of being introverted and nerdy. Yet, 45-50% of the employees at Big 4 accounting firms are women. Across the field, 20% of all partners are women, and more importantly, 43% of new partners are women (http://suite101.com/article/accounting-is-becoming-a-womans-...). But there is no affirmative action for women in accountancy. It's not easier to get a job at PWC or E&Y as a woman. The affirmative action is no longer necessary--because women aren't self-selecting out of the profession, firms don't need to dip down to get equally qualified candidates.

The legal field saw a similar shift as a result of affirmative action for women. In a field that used to be an "old boy's club" half of new associates are women and 30% of new partners are women (http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/2012/01/report-30-o...). But at least at the associate level there is no affirmative action any longer--the new equilibrium is self-perpetuating. It's self-perpetuating because balancing the gender ratio changed the culture in a way that made the profession attractive to women. And you know what? The culture is better. It's modern and professional. There is nothing intrinsic about smoking and dirty jokes that made you better at the practice of law, and frankly there is nothing intrinsic about playing WoW in your spare time that makes you better at programming.

So your dichotomy about "meritocracy" is short-sighted. There is nothing "meritocratic" about indulging male culture to keep a field male-dominated. Indeed, that's anti-meritocratic. Affirmative action, ironically, by balancing gender ratios can move the culture in a direction where you can have true meritocracy--where women don't self-select out of a profession because they don't want to be the minority, and where in the long run you don't have to dip down to get qualified women because the qualified women aren't turned away by the male-dominated culture.
That was pretty cool. Why was I the 314th person to watch it. Surely there must be more interest in rockets like the Sci-fi books always described? In most books, the rockets came down like the Grasshopper.
My Back Hurts: Experiences with Chiropractors
In order to be testable there need to be a statistically significant number of women in CS programs so I assume from your comment that you arguing for them.

Or are you saying that these programs need to scientifically prove their value before existing in order to exist?
This was actually a surprisingly worthwhile article. Thanks.

I find the headline contradicts the conclusion though. Really the IT department is useless on its own these days; however, the new digital divisions the article praises will rely heavily on IT doing the grunt work in bringing their visions to life.

IT departments are just getting knocked down a notch, which makes sense given the knew omnipresence of tech.
"How can we make money off of what everyone in the world is thinking right now?"
Pure, functional JavaScript
BodyCom turns human body in a medium for short-range communication
Maybe Site5 should ask better security questions then. If they want users to enter what is effectively a password for "Mother's maiden name" they should just ask for a security password.
When people talk about meritocracy, they are thinking of a competition between individuals. When you assert that it's a competition between races, or between sexes, or between other social groups, the concept of meritocracy doesn't even apply any more.
This.

The best way to reciprocate is to commit to being the best "you" you can be. Good things will flow naturally from that.