skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, but I think this argument is flawed. The author notes that different professions tend to have different distributions of male personality types. Programmers tend towards meek and introverted, lawyers and businessmen more alpha, yet women don't shy away from those fields.

This seems to assume that women must magically all have the same personality type and/or no personality selection bias in their career choices. Since women are comfortable going head-to-head with alpha-male lawyers, they therefore should be totally comfortable with geeky programmers. I don't buy it -- all women are not the same, just like all men are not the same.

It seems to me that women who become lawyers or businesspeople likely have A-type personalities themselves. Accordingly, they are probably more likely to view competition or confrontation with males in the workplace as a motivating challenge. Women who become programmers are probably, just like male programmers, a bit more introverted and geeky. Accordingly, confrontation/competition with males in the workplace is probably less likely to be motivating, and more likely to be intimidating -- especially when you consider that many "meek" male programmer types tend to drastically overcompensate for insecurity in physical situations with hyper-competitive and vitriolic behavior in virtual environments (I wonder what the gender and programmer/non-programmer ratios are like on 4chan).

In other words, just because male programmers don't rank as alpha-males relative to the general male population doesn't mean they don't behave like alpha-males in their own environment, especially relative to the female personality types interested in becoming programmers.

My 2 cents.
Hi, i posted a response to the same link about my experience developing iphone apps.

I've published two of my own apps. One of them fulfilled a specific niche and was picked up right away. Its not a blockbuster but sales have been significant (i.e. living wage) and steady.

My other app disappeared very quickly and i was pretty discouraged. I made a light version and it wasn't much help. Then it miraculously appeared on the "what's hot" list and sales are ok now.
Because Google's goal is "to organize the worlds information."

Twitter's goal is not "to make organizing our data easier for Google."
Note well that there is no text on the page unambiguously indicating that this is something other than what these people think it is.

It'd be easy to say that they are just stupid, but the page is a cluttered mess in the volume and variety of information it is trying to present and the number of actions it is inviting the user to do. It is a breeding ground for stupid.
Spam, Phishing, and Online Scams: A View from the Network-Level
I agree it suggests a systematic bias.

But like DHH, I don't think it's anything to do with male programmers. They act no worse than men in other fields, maybe better.

And I don't think this problem is programming specific. It also happens in math, physics, and a variety of other fields.

So, where is this bias coming from? Who teaches girls to take up girly interests? I think it's primarily their mother.

This ought to change. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
This is such a poignantly obnoxious post, because your sarcasm comes dangerously close to seriousness.

The reason women aren't, on the average, as measurably good at math as men is strictly due to cultural differences. Women are more prone to experiencing stereotype threat in mathematics ("girls aren't as good at math as boys"), which makes them suffer in early mathematics performance, which makes them less likely to take increasingly more advanced math classes.

I have yet to see a study that conclusively proves (or even suggests) that women have inferior innate capacity for doing mathematics.

Women indeed may employ different strategies to solve certain classes of mathematical problems (e.g., those involving mental rotation) but that does not mean that they "aren't as mathematically inclined."

I hope you are never put in a position of power over a female engineer in the workplace. Christ.
Maybe initially things are fine--the balance is skewed, but it happens to reflect the individual choice, regardless of gender, regarding what field to go into. It becomes a problem when an environment is created that perpetuates the situation--when a subtle attitude shift interrupts promising careers. If women who would enjoy programming careers are made to feel uncomfortable and subsequently leave the field, the world suffers.

Imagine you are purple.

You are in a room filled with green people and a green lecturer. The lecturer's presentation is nothing but slides of purple people making goofy faces. All evening, everyone who approaches tries to get you to tell a joke. You try and show your new project off, but no one seems to take it seriously.

You object in private conversations afterward, and the green people all tell you they weren't offended--what's the big deal?
There's not a single scale for outrageous behavior; context changes everything. Musicians, lawyers, and doctors generally understand and adapt to the social norms of whatever situation they're in. This is only sometimes true of computer programmers.
If the parents don't care about their kids' education, you generally have a problem regardless. The kids are likely to pick up this attitude, and forcing them through the current school system will not change it.

Anyway, it should definitely be possible to test out of the default classes/curriculum. If one understands what one is ostensibly going to be taught for the year, one is better off spending one's time doing something else.
Unless you're working on computer graphics, there's no math in programming / IT...
So there is no difference from "native" browser text?

That's rubbish. You can't even select flash text + native text in the same selection. It's completely broken.

Also, flash bugs are platform specific. Like printing issues on firefox in linux, z-index issues on some browsers etc etc.

None of this happens with native text.
If we assume that men and women are identical when it comes to intellectual pursuits (which I don't really believe) and that men have chosen and continue to choose the jobs they perform the best at and enjoy the most, then the gender imbalance is a sign that there are women who would enjoy programming and be good at it if there weren't sociological issues in the way.

In my opinion, the problem isn't with the people in the field of computer science. The problem is with the pipeline. There are fewer girls than guys who explore computing when they're 12. If that can be "fixed", which assumes that it's something to be fixed in the first place, that's probably where it needs to happen.
Forget Math. Women Lag in Becoming English Professors
Hey, turns out he has a blog

http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/
Three reasons to dislike Flash text. First, it does not look native. I have certain anti-aliasing settings, for example, and Flash text looks totally different. Second, copy-paste, as others have pointed out, is a problem --- yes, it can be done, but enough apps out there fail to enable it properly, so it does not really work. Third, if I have browser plugins which operate on text, they break.
PNG dominates CSS/HTML/JS for rendering text accurately too.

I'd prefer something usable. Something that matches the rest of my apps, and something that used the font sizes and types that I specified (I set a minimum font size so I can read the test, for example). This doesn't do that.
> It's a problem because in lieu of evidence that women are innately worse programmers, it suggests a systemic bias keeping women out.

There is another option: programming hasn't done a good job of appealing to women. It's entirely possible that it's not a case of women being shut out, but rather they haven't been sold on the profession to begin with. In short: an image problem.

I know this doesn't apply to the situation we have here with this ruby presentation full of porn, but as long as we are generalizing this specific instance into the "why aren't there more women in CS?" question, I thought I'd throw it out there.

It's not like programming is the only profession with this problem. As a male, I haven't been particularly sold on being a nurse either, despite the fact that (in my area) it pays roughly the same and the few male nurses I know love the flexibility to move around the country almost at will. I just never considered it for a career because of the gender bias regarding that profession held by society, not by the members of the profession itself.
I'm curious why you consider that embarrassing to admit? It's completely natural for human groups to seek gender balance.

Very few engineering schools let themselves get to such an extreme gender imbalance, but if you really were picking between an 80/20 split and a liberal arts school, I'm highly confident that you are much better off for having picked the liberal arts school.
You're not honestly suggesting that developers start using flash to render their body content, are you?

Besides the copy/paste argument that people have already mentioned (yes, I know there is a "solution"). It's also inaccessible, takes longer to render and relies on a 3rd party product to render your website how you intended.

I know you'll probably say "give search engines and accessible-concerned folks a text version", but who honestly wants to maintain two different sets of code for ALL body content? And all just so the text looks a little better? Why not just tell everybody to use Safari/Mac?
I've seen uneven kerning in a lot of flash apps.
Evidently, you have never taken a class in algorithms.
Flex and bison? See, that's a mistake right there! The tools often end up more hassle than coding the lexer and parser directly.

Writing compilers is normally fun, not a nightmare. It does tend towards nightmarish if your implementation language is very low-level, though; particularly if it lacks type safety and garbage collection.
Brilliant, thanks a lot.
A few more thing, take this as an example: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/
(not an Apple fan, but they usually get this stuff right; this page is not perfect, but not bad).

A few things:

* Notice the background color is darker than the content; this is to emphasize the actual content of the page. I would make the background color a bit darker.

* You probably don't have as many "categories" so I would put everything in one page.

* Notice the attraction points. Close your eyes for 5 second then open then. What do you notice the first second? This is where people will look first. You need to have the important stuff there or near it. The attraction points are usually images.

* Make a video or what your application does. People expect to be entertained, not to read. Once you capture their attention you can present more text / information. If you entertain somebody, either with a good video or nice eye candy, they will feel indebted to look more into your product. So the stages / levels should be 1: wow them, 2: convince them, 3: educate them

* Pay attention to details in your website and also your product. If your presentation page is good, people will at least give your application a fair shot. Their first impression is your site not the first time they use your application; that's way later.

For more tips:
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=112 and
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=123

Good luck.
I don't think that the lack of women programmers has much to do with male programmers or computer science programs. Male programmers and computer science programs always seem to love women who express an interest in it. Let's face it, none of us want this to be a male-only profession.

However, society does socialize people into gender roles. Women are taught not to go for math (which computer science, at least at an academic level, depends on) and the sciences just as men are taught to forgo sociology. Remember, there are departments that are mostly women at colleges and it's equally telling to ask why there aren't men in those departments - not as a matter of discrimination, but a matter of socialization. Anyway, women tend to be pushed away from certain paths just as men are pushed away from certain paths (while I find nursing to be an admirable profession, what percentage of nurses do you think are male? And I think it's decently clear that from a young age, many of us have the image of doctors being male and nurses being female).

It's a big problem in our society, but I don't think that programers and computer science departments are to blame. We train children from very young ages to go into certain roles. Once you're along a path (any path at any point in life) there is a high cost of switching. If you've been pushed away from math and science through high-school, the chance that you can switch that in college is very low. You have to make up a lot of work that the other students already did - and you're throwing away the work you've done on an alternate path. Having not had biology and chemistry in high-school, medicine was simply out of the question for me in college unless I intended to work much, much harder than my fellow students - and the premeds were an over-achieving bunch.

And, really, this is more of a problem if you're going toward the science than if you're going toward the social sciences or humanities. Why? At my school, computer science was an 18 course major; nuroscience 21 courses; biochem was up there too. What did you need for history? 8 courses. Sociology? 10. Anthropology? 9. And you could usually take those courses at the same time while the sciences tend to build on each other in a linear fashion to a greater extent.

It's harsh. Even if you want to change into a science, sometimes the barrier is too high. We need to do a better job teaching children that it's unacceptable for both genders to forgo science and math. Otherwise, you end up (like me) in a freshmen bio class realizing that you have to learn everything that everyone else knew from high-school without falling behind on this course. And I'd say that the majority would take the path of least resistance and go for something they weren't missing knowledge in.
Or natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval, artificial intelligence... The things that most programmers do on a regular basis don't require much math, but most programmers don't do graphics either.
O(log(n)) and such stuff is not exactly algebraic or differential geometry, buddy...
Twitter's goal should be "to properly use html tags/properties in a way that does not ruin search results". If Twitter provided no meta description, Google would be forced to create their own description, which you could then blame them for getting wrong. Instead, Twitter uses the tag inappropriately, which Google trusts.

This isn't Google's problem; it is Twitter's. Whether or not Twitter cares is a different story entirely.
Ask HN: Presenting a company at TechCrunch50. Virtue/Vice?
The TechCrunch50 is coming up in August sometime and the deadline to accept an application is at the end of June.

I am considering submitting my startup company for a shot at presenting at the TechCrunch50. However, I am thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of it and am somewhat ambivalent which way to turn. I would like to get HN thoughts on this.

Pros:
(1) You get a lot of publicity.
(2) Resulting in which...you can get a nice amount of venture capital.
(3) It sounds fun.
(4) It gives your team a date to perform by as well as something to look forward to.
(5) Anymore I havent thought of?

Cons:
(1) You open yourself to the competition by giving out your idea.
(2) What if you don't need VC...is there a need? benefit?
(3) Can you think of anymore?

Thanks.
Read the book Bowling Alone.

If you are poor, TV is probably the only entertainment you can afford. America has lost or greatly diminished almost all its local communities. A poor person without television would need a lot of other local poor people without televisions to start recreating a community where people do things with each other.

(Nobody say "library". I love libraries, but in low-income neighborhoods they're usually less common and less well-stocked. If you can even afford to get there and back.)
I enjoyed the conversation. I'm a bit surprised that the community got so fired up about it. I haven't been around on the site for all that long, so I'm a bit curious to know if there are other topics that are so divisive to the group.
The Demise of Crypto Anarchy (and privacy) [2003]
You're totally right. We could go on discussing what is Math and what is not. Some of what you have listed would probably fall under the category of "Theoretical Computer Science", which is mostly Discrete Math. Of course, the pedantic mathematicians don't want to label it as Math because they're too in love with the continuous math paradigm. In any case, most programmers build GUI's and play with sockets and stuff, they don't do AI, graphics nor ML. In any case, who cares? It's not math that keeps women out, and I don't care if there are no women in programming...
I liked it -- heck, it sounds like me -- but I do wonder why the author only has criticisms. It's easy to criticize, but as a management guy himself, doesn't he have any idea how to do it better? "Don't be bullshitful" isn't enough.
If they're going to write their own compiler/linker/assembler suite, why even bother remaining compatible with C? Why not just create a specifically-optimized "kernel-ese" DSL?
Straight from the latest HTML 4 spec:

The META element can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties.

No matter where you choose your source, meta elements apply to the document. The document is not the web site. It is an individual page such as a tweet, a user's profile, or the homepage.

Is that authoritative enough?
I did use the Five Run script as well (http://railsnotes.com/38-ruby-on-rails-hosting-for-your-new-...) and I kind of had the same issue later on when I needed to get things upgraded and when I needed to install additional stuff. I haven't had that issue with Moonshine yet.

One of their goals with Moonshine was idempotency and from my perspective, they've really done a good job of reaching it. I've found that I haven't needed to hack around the production server much because I can do (almost) everything through moonshine.

It's kinda like Rails in that a lot of things seem to happen automagically but you can easily look at the source code and understand how it works. The recipe files let you see exactly where things go and change it to suite your needs.

Give it a shot. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I don't think DHH really understands what an "Alpha Male" is.
Code Sample Taxonomy
So, Perl was modeled after human language (which both molds human thought and is molded by human thought). Math only found its way in many years after Perl was invented. And, incidentally, I know more female Perl programmers than all other languages that I pay attention to combined (except maybe JavaScript). Could just be a coincidence or a bit of selection bias, though.
IBM prepping "Watson" to compete on Jeopardy
May I ask why you chose Word as your comparison? It's not known as the paragon of typeography. :(
"The reason women aren't, on the average, as measurably good at math as men is strictly due to cultural differences."

Citation? Testosterone has been proven to enhance spatial ability[1]. Why wouldn't there be other differences in cognition between the sexes? You haven't seen a study that proves such a difference with math, but where's the study that disproves such a difference? Until there is one, you're more wrong than he is, and your condemnation is ridiculous.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/brcg.1995.1269
It's a different field of math. See http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

And I'm not your buddy, guy.
A little crappy building would be a building which contains small amounts of crap, I think.
I intentionally listed fields that require a strong grasp of probability, not just discrete math.
Really? Have you seen it with the new flash.text.engine API? Or just other forms of text in Flash?
Nikki catsouras car crash photos
I guess I'm a UI critiquing mood right now, so here it goes:

1) There's a little bit too much white space around your logo

2) There's not enough contrast on the menu bar between the lime and the white text. If you want to keep the same colors try to make the text in the menu larger (16/18px).

3) "Tranquil Checkers" rivals the logo in terms of importance, i.e. needs to be smaller or make the logo smaller. Basically, my eyes are not sure what's more important, the logo or that text. The icon on the left is also out of proportion with the text on the right. You could move the "Tranquil Checkers" text a bit higher and add a short explanation below (smaller text) so that the height of the changed block of text matches the height of the icon; or just make the icon smaller.

4) The text on the about section makes my eyes hurt. There's not enough contrast. Play around with those colors a bit.

5) "Download free 7-Day Trial" is too large. You could put some kind of icon on the left to draw attention.

6) The two columns of icons looks good.

7) See 5 for the text at the bottom.

Otherwise it's so close... :) I hope this helps, good luck!
Dude, chill out, will ya?! Go to a math department and claim that algorithms & complexity is math and you will get lynched by some topologist. Most of EE & CS is quantitative, but it's not exactly math, in the sense that it's not formal. Physics is quantitative, for instance, but it's not math either.
Whether twitter cares or not, Google should care. That's what this issue boils down to. It's a problem with the Google user's experience, not the Twitter user's experience, despite who's fault it is.
Sony Ericsson W995 Theme: Sexy Babes
Well, that seems normal to you because it's how the educational systems you know work. It's hard to even objectively evaluate the current system in comparison to other possible ones.
Paper is better still...
Do you have a reference for 'framesets'? They sound interesting, but I have not been able to find more info on google.
Ask HN: Getting a CS job in a country other than the US
I'm a graduating math major who is pretty proficient at a lot of languages. I want to travel for a while before I decide if I will go to grad school or start a start-up. I was wondering if anyone had any advice about finding CS job in another country.
So I'm supposed to be excited at the prospect of ditching open web standards in favor of embedding proprietary Word into proprietary Flash for minor aesthetic enhancements?
There have been briefly existent gcc forks in the past, specifically for kernel compilation on various distros.

I suspect there probably will come a time when gcc is replaced. Possibly by an LLVM compiler like clang. But, the likelihood of a from-scratch C compiler just for the kernel seems very low, to me. Yes, the kernel developers could do it. And, yes, Ingo is one of the most productive developers in the world, and if he got it into his head to make such a thing happen (despite the general mood of the community being against such an idea), he could probably do a large percentage of it on his own. But, it's just a very large undertaking, and the things that we all find irritating about gcc are often the things that make it suitable for so many situations and architectures (edge cases are ugly but necessary when talking about supporting huge numbers of architectures).