skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture, and (b) sexism is pervasive

I agree with these statements. I think that they needs to select different copy, in light of the sexism in our culture.

Here's what happens when you replace the word "developer" or "engineer" with the word "girl" in the sample copy:

Ridiculous Girls

Girls that cost $0110110001/hour. We invoice in Binary, Try Risk Free!

We Recruit Top Girls

And Bring Them To You Fast! $1800-$2800/wk. Try for 2 Weeks, Risk-Free.

I'm not sure about you, but to me, these ads feel like they could easily be selling sexual services if you don't look closely and notice the words "developer" and "engineer". It's the little things, like capitalizing words in the middle of the sentence, and the use of the term "risk-free", that throw off the heuristics I use to determine the legitimacy of this ad. Imagine if someone saw this ad while looking over your shoulder, didn't look very closely, and all they saw was a pretty face and "$1800-2800/wk".

I think that just asking to change the pictures is a terribly simplistic response, but it probably is enough to bypass the association with sex.

I think that this problem is symptomatic of how adult services have been advertising themselves on the Internet, and symptomatic of the sexism that is pervasive in programmer culture. The knee-jerk shutting down of the ads is probably due to the ads being flagged by viewers, and I think that this is going to be a problem until the culture changes (if it ever does).

One experiment I would have liked seeing (if it wasn't for the account being on the verge of being banned) is whether the ads are still offensive if the women were depicted wearing something that wasn't cut so low (like a suit or even a T-shirt). I know that in reality, many of us go to work in casual clothes, but I think it might have helped.
Toptal chose an outlier to represent the majority and that is dishonest to the user population

I don't think this is a valid objection. Just about every print or video or TV ad I've ever seen (for any product or service) uses good-looking outliers to represent the typical user.

And in many cases, unlike this case, the models in the ads are ... actors. Not actual users (of cigarettes, or McDonald's, or Windows 8) at all.
I agree that it's probably not something a Cisco engineer would be wearing, but it seems like a normal 20-something outfit in Manhattan.
Would be nice if FAA would set up an experimental rocketry like Experimental Aircraft segment.

I understand realities of our govt paranoia will not allow it happen. It's a shame. Homebrew cars, motorcycle, airplanes etc have a long tradition in the US and we benefited enormously from that. Rockets are a natural next step. Or we won't have Zefram Cochrane ;)
Problems with pay were one of the primary reasons I didn't reenlist. This was an issue in the 80's. I lost days of personal time talking to yeomen, chiefs and officers just because every other check was late or missing. Turned out for the best, since I would have ended up on the USS Stark since my current ship was going to be decommissioned.
Aereo, Internet-Streaming Technologies, Scares Pants off the Pay TV Industry
Pay TV has enjoyed for a long time double dipping from the advertisements already paid for in the market place while we pay to view their programming as well. Now, all that’s in jeopardy and they don’t like it.
Some say we need to get behind them ;-)

But more seriously, the only healthy basis for a way out I see is to make literally every part of the "stack" open and transparent. "Open" as in "open source", both regarding hardware and software.
Here everyone, this is the second "loudest guy in the room".
Principles of Lighting and Rendering with John Carmack
I disabled 2-factor auth on my Google account for the same reason: the only time I need to use it is when I'm not using my computer because I'm on vacation somewhere remote, and most of the time I don't have access to the network on my phone or I don't have any battery left...
The price of electricity varies by location. I expect within 9 months Bitcoin mining will only be profitable for people with the cheapest electricity. Essentially there will be three phases: first, ASICs will get more efficient as they move from 130 nm to 28 nm (this is in progress with KnC and HashFast), then profit margins will reduce from 90% down to ~10%, and finally there will be an endgame where even a 28 nm ASIC sold at cost won't be profitable unless you have super-cheap electricity.
>"Most female developers simply do not look as 'picture-perfect' as the one Toptal decided to use in their ads or at least not at work."

That depends, I did some work in a place with a large contingent of developers from post-Soviet states. Every one of them, men and women dressed to the nines pretty much every day.

">That particular photograph looks too staged and is not particularly suggestive that it was shot to be used in a technical career context."

Does it really look any more staged than the typical technology advertising photo of a group of attractive, widely smiling people looking thoughtful or excited about the contents of an unseen display?
Exactly. Let's not pretend they aren't experts at framing false narratives.

Actually, that's pretty much the #1 prerequisite for the job of a being a politician...
Take a look at http://musicforprogramming.net/, you might find something you like there.

I personally use di.fm or soma.fm and pick a channel that suits my mood, usually something a little more downtempo and free of vocals.
If they were advertising for fashion models would the ads have been rejected? What exactly are these folks at LinkedIn being paid for if not to distinguish spam from legitimate ads?

(Side point - Toptal has 8 dudes and zero ladies on their home page; not exactly a company dedicated to eliminating institutional sexism, AFAICT.)
> Well, it is in fact "unnatural".

Perhaps, in the sense that, ignoring the fundamental fallacy of the "natural"/"artificial" divide [0], software and software engineering and people being software engineers are all creations of humans and human culture, and thus would seem to be on what is generally described as the "artificial" side.

> Seriously, lets cut the PC nonsense; how many gorgeous female software engineers do you know? They are an exceedingly rare breed, and it can be proven statistically considering the low number of females in the industry and cut down further by the low number females in general who would be considered attractive.

This logic assumes that being attractive has no correlation to being a software engineer, such that the "low number of females in general who would be considered attractive" is a proper guide for how to reduce the "low number of females in the industry" to find the expected number of attractive females in the industry.

This seems counterintuitive; for one thing, subjective as attraction is, there are things that can be observed about general perceptions of attractiveness and how they correlate with other factors, and higher socio-economic status correlates positively with attractiveness, and being a software engineer has some correlation with socioeconomic status.

[0] Which, of course, there isn't. Humans and everything they produce are, themselves, products of nature.
Hiring is also a consideration. Young, talented engineers often pick the latest "trendy" language/framework as their first, so if you're starting a company and want to hire young talent, you will be at a disadvantage if you don't use Node.js, Rails, Go, etc.
> That's true, but consider this: the fact that it's true is, itself, a confirmation that (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture, and (b) sexism is pervasive. How strange would it sound to say "that male engineer's handsome picture sure looks spammy"? Apparently our stereotypical view of a female engineer is that it's unnatural for them to look so pretty!

Nonsense.

If those ads were for medical services, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for managerial consulting, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for educational services, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for fitness services, they'd look like spam.

Advertisers all over the world learned that generic pictures of pretty women sell product more effectively than generic pictures of pretty men—even when selling to women.

That's why the internet is full of cheap-looking ads with generic pictures of pretty women pasted next to lazy, attention-grabbing text.

Humans are pattern matching machines, and those ads [EDIT: they just removed one of the ads from the post] look just like spam. That's all there is to this story. They make the LinkedIn website look cheap.

> Note that LinkedIn wasn't concerned that they might be spammers. If that were their concern, then LinkedIn wouldn't have offered to reinstate their account in exchange for changing their profile pictures. So the issue is strictly one of physical appearance / stereotypes of female engineers. Hence LinkedIn's concern seems to be that the attractiveness of the photos are either giving an unfair advantage to the profile, or contributing a "noisy" feeling to the results of searches. Yet we wouldn't bat an eye at a similar picture of a handsome male engineer.

LinkedIn wanted the pictures in those spammy ads changed because they don't want their site looking spammy. That's it.

Should companies now fear a western feminist backlash when considering whether to reject advertisements that have generic pictures of pretty women on them? What might be the end result of that be?
Floomatic: A Headless Floobits Client
This is quite embarassing to share with you all. I know I'm in the bottom 1% of programmers that frequent this board, but after a couple of beers I mustarded up the courage to post what I've been working on.

Connoissumer is a Rails app hosted on Heroku. Currently I'm stuck on 3.2.13 and have not made the move to 4, Turbolink scares me as I'm still very green with Javascript.

Major projects I'm using to make it work at Nokogiri, Zurb's Foundation, Pg_search for full text search, devise & omniauth for authentication.

The way it works is it uses Nokogiri to try to find (what I think) is the price of the object on a page. I continue to search the page and then let users know about it when I see the price change. It works fairly well at this point but still am working on improving accuracy, and adding features like coupon codes and deals. Anyway, I'd be honored to hear any feedback you ladies and gentleman may have. Thanks!
It's very simple: a free country is run by free software by definition. A free country has published laws that are implemented and debugged (adjudicated) in public.

If the FBI wants carriers to install software on their network devices, the FBI is implementing regulatory law as code in the network substrate. The source and its build and development process must be public. They have no magic tricks and there is no unknown capability that this could compromise. It's simply a requirement for a country governed by the law. It's how we watch the watchers.

Seeing as how we can't even get voting machine source code released, I have little faith that the spy state will cede its code in the near future. Given this, it's now time for all able-minded hackers to build tools for personal liberty and spread them far and wide. Godspeed.
They should also be able to move their fradulent money away from those countries which is going to be problematic.