skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to have to contest the complaint on "gendered wording". Ironically, this is coming from the same people who will often berate you for "tone policing" them, judging by the ideological dispositions of several of the linked resources in the footer.

I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator.

Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days.

But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves.

So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, so you can't narrow your focus, but instead approach it from multiple angles. Women aren't encouraged to get involved in tech because they can't find good role models, and there are no good role models because women aren't being encouraged to get involved with tech. It's important to have initatives like this to get more role models so we can encourage more women and get more role models to encourage more women ...
I'll concur with this on most levels. The change I made was from a slightly different place: boxing. I joined a school that did BJJ and Muay Thai.

It worked out beautifully. After staring at a screen and sitting down for 8-10 hours, I could spend an hour or two getting the shit kicked out of me. Since I lived in the city and was traveling against traffic, it had a chance to die down while I was working out. Aside from the endorphin rush that accompanied the workout and the physical changes that accompanied struggling to the point of immobility 3x/wk, I got a nice confidence boost which stayed with me through most of the job interviews that followed after I relocated. It was like all the panic and nervousness of the week got expelled in the span of six hours. For six months after I stopped (moved across the country for grad school) I could sit through job interviews thinking, "There is nothing this person can do to me physically, mentally, or socially which I cannot handle. This person has no power over me. I am in control. I am the authority."

I might try ballroom dancing when I have the time again, as I think it's more practical from a social perspective than fightin'. (Seriously. The knowledge and confidence to dance wins 10/10 in social scenarios.) Still, try both!
You're thinking it has to be time invested on the x-axis and level of expertise on the y-axis. That's certainly possible, but I think most people interpret it with level of expertise on the x-axis and (cumulative) effort invested on the y-axis. So a steep curve implies that you'd need to invest a lot of effort to become only a little bit better at something.

Sort of like climbing a steep hill because there's treasure at the top of the hill, not because climbing the hill itself is something you intrinsically care about.
Tell me about it.

First system I did for a company took 6 weeks of nights and weekends and I charged 1500 quid (pounds), I was working for minimum wage (long boring story, been programming since I was 7) and it seemed an insane amount of money (it was effectively two months pay after tax back then).

It ran for 4 years with no changes (still running).

They rang me up about a year ago wanting a new different system, spec'd it out with them, figured two week build time (in those 4 years I'd gone from working retail to running my own business as a development consultant), quoted 6000 quid (pounds) and a month and they accepted immediately.

That system has been in production a year with one bug.

I'd learnt in those four years that programmers than can deliver a reliable solution to a business need on time and on budget are worth a bit more than 250 a week.
Show HN: #LebronWatch2014, get alerted the moment there are actual updates
Ask HN: What do you make of Potato Salad KickStarter project?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad
People getting caught up on the name of something rather than discussing the thing itself, it's like bro[1][2] all over again.

[1] http://bropages.org/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268
I think you could say train more women in tech and you would have a better staring point. The 80s and 90s were graduating more females.

From Wikipedia:

In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

I graduated with an Information Systems degree and we probably had something like 30% - 35% females that I walked with.
I always feel slightly bitter about stuff like this. As a male, I don't ever recall being encouraged to work in tech. Any geeky pursuit made me the subject of ridicule. There was always a battle with my mother as a child to even be allowed access to a computer. Bleh.
He wrote a good book too

crockford's: javascript the good parts

Not for beginners but a good intro to javascript and some its oddities. Its thin too which I like in books.
‘Mississippi Baby’ Now Has Detectable HIV, Researchers Find
How the Cloud makes Windows irrelevant
Wild guess: Amazon does nothing to solve sync conflicts, because it's highly correlated with your app business. Amazon gives you all conflicting versions and some flags telling your app "there's a conflict, you should fix it". Much like CouchDB.

So if it works like that, you absolutely can encrypt your payload client-side, and use Cognito as a mere transport.
They are definitely much safer. But I always wonder, if we have a choice and redesign things again, could we make a better and smaller design while retaining all the safety features?
Mercury was Born from Hit-and-Run Interplanetary Collisions
Software defined everything
Y combinator in TXR:

http://www.nongnu.org/txr/rosetta-solutions-main.html#Y%20co...

:)
The Uses Of Being Wrong
Obsessing over the pipeline is a handwave that doesn't address the outsize attrition afflicting actual women in current technical roles.

To say nothing of how hostile the industry leadership can be to women (cf Richards/SendGrid, GitHub, Tinder, Urban Airship).
The title should be, "Elevate interest from women in tech, so the qualified ones who want to learn, have a better chance"

To not pay attention to anything else but gender, that's sexism.
42 top examples of JavaScript
offering a service to users, those users being in the UK should come under UK law

This is an attractively simple but terrible line of thinking. It implies that everyone is e.g. obliged either to block Chinese users or obey Chinese censorship (and infosurveillance) law.

Global jurisdiction is bad enough when it's just the US. If every country's jurisdiction extends to every website, that's a disaster. It's entirely possible for countries to have laws that are completely incompatible: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679...
I'm not going to change the wording of my job postings to "make women more comfortable". That's bullshit. Women are adults too, we should not do them the disservice of coddling them. It is much better to let them rise to the challenge. Many do, and many do very well. As noted in the article, and something I agree with, companies do better with women in management. However, this is not due to babying them.
The wording changes in job descriptions strike me as treating a symptom rather than a cause.

Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?
The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline. Hiring in tech is the end of pipe-line, if people do not enter the queue i.e. get some form formal or semi-formal techEd they are not going to make it to the other end.

Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative.

Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share.

So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions.

Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).
Because there are places that will loosen qualifications to attract people of a specific race or gender because they can't find enough qualified candidates of that race.

One of the universities I attended had a lower set of requirements and scholarships for those that identified as "black". (The region was 96% white at the time so not really a surprise. Diversity was lacking and the admissions department was desperate.)
You haven't addressed my point. The parent comment was arguing that I could give away my material for free as advertising for services.

I pointed out that I couldn't do that without intellectual property, as someone else with a larger platform could give away my material for free.

Does that book you linked to address this point?
With so many new AWS features rolling out, I am worried that Amazon is spreading themselves too thin and will soon decide to stop supporting some of their less-popular services that I happen to be using.

As far as I can tell, there is no guarantee anywhere that they'll maintain any service for any length of time.

If that happens, it could waste weeks or months of engineering time trying to migrate to something else, or I'll just have to shut down my own services if I decide it's not worth migrating.
Citation needed. If I was going to go out on a limb, I'd say a large part of the reason women aren't drawn to tech at a young age is because it requires you sit alone in front of a computer talking to it for long stretches of time instead of interacting with other people, but I have as much evidence as you do that it has to do with a lack of role models. (I got into programming well before I knew any famous programmers.)
As I said, it's simply an anecdote of teacher tracking, and you've mischaracterized what I've said. I've noticed all semester long he's been ignoring girls trying to participate, and on the last day my daughter raised her hand the entire class, not just once. Still, as I said, it's an anecdote, not statistically significant, but if you want statistical evidence, teacher tracking is a real and widely known problem with lots of studies and policy discussions.
"A diverse workplace is proven to get better results" citation needed
Note that the job descriptions the site labels as "better", and which it presents as neutral, are those that are explicitly labeled as "feminine" in the source it quotes. If you want to recruit an even ratio of men to women, use actually neutral job descriptions. The original source [1] notes that the experiment only tested female aversion to the masculine job descriptions, and not the other way around. Treat these examples as the ends of a spectrum and shoot for somewhere in the middle.

Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do.

[1] http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...
> This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women.

They are Department of Labor statistics which, I believe you will find, measure not the people qualified to be employed in a particular role, but the people currently employed in that role.

So, contrary to your position, if the current numbers on that are 74/26, it is not a logical contradiction that every company in the industry could get closer to 50/50, without either reducing the total number of employed programmers or convincing anyone who doesn't already prefer to work as a programmer to "enter the field".

You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.

(I'm not saying that the latter population, without changes earlier in the pipeline, would necessarily support a 50/50 split either, I'm saying you can't draw conclusions about it from the former population.)
Amazon Zocalo rocks Box, socks DropBox, clocks Google Docs
#WorldCup: Does leveraging global Twitter trends work?
Hell, you're more likely to be rejected with today's policies.
MIT students are 45% female.
But they have a pool of 12 applicants for very seat.
(fewer than that for female and minority)
I'm a man, I support having more women in tech (thought I don't agree it is the companies responsibilities for this) but I can honestly say, her rewritten job descriptions would make me NOT want to apply (maybe that is the goal?).

1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients'

2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients'

First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.
Amazon is a weird name too.
Much like CouchDB.

Exactly. I don't know why people are so attracted to locked in solutions like Parse or now this when Couch has already been doing it for a long time, and there are mature third-party providers (Cloudant, Iriscouch, etc) that can help you get off the ground just as easily without ever being locked in with them.
A child doesn't get picked for an entire class and loses out to a student that doesn't have his hand raised. Sounds like bias to me.
That is pretty awesome. Thanks for releasing this!
Even with perfect naming you have to jump down to the bottom level to see the details. And details are the only thing that matters in the end.

You can't put all the details in the name of the main function (otherways just change the name of that 100-lines-long function and keep it - if it can be named perfectly (and shortly) without skipping any details - it's OK as it is, no matter the size).
I am confused with the section about job descriptions. A firm must not have gender biased descriptions is the OP assertion yet the ere article that was cited specifically states the "BETTER" descriptions are feminine.

So to solve the issue of low representation of woman in tech the industry must introduce a bias towards men?
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-allegedly-manipualtes-...

Looks like it's happening for TripAdvisor searches, too.
Exactly. And if you're actively seeking out more candidates who are women you're likely to get a better gender ratio than companies who aren't as proactive.
Every time this comes up I'm dismayed at the responses on HN. No wonder some women don't feel encouraged to enter the tech. world.
> Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant?

Let us say someone does what you and the OP suggest.

We have a pool of 76 men and 24 women [using the original percentages here from the OP].

The end result is a 50/50 [20 men, 20 women] ratio in Company X.

Company Y & Z have a pool of 56 men and 4 women to choose from. Let us say they both put the "normal" level of effort into the process.

Company Y ends up with 28 men and 2 women.
Company Z ends up with 28 men and 2 women.

How is pushing down the ratio of women in less progressive companies a good solution?

To me, that seems like a significantly worse situation for the women who end up in the less progressive companies.

The situation with women speakers in conferences is completely different. The ratio of speakers to audience allows you to do that. If you have 10 people in the audience [seems reasonable for a minimum] at a talk, you only need 10% of people in the field to be women to fulfill demand for conference speakers on a 50/50 basis.
> It’s tough to prove gender bias.

followed by

> Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings"

I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.
Put down the "corporations" outrage and realise that this is a case in which the "corporations" are on the losing side: ISPs obliged to retain data at their own expense in order to satisfy law enforcement.

Elections still work provided that you can get people to agree with you. It's an uphill struggle on complex issues but it's far better than a violent alternative.
One of the major things that discourage women from entering tech is a lack of role models. So companies can have a big impact right now by hiring more women.
There's a lot of information on the link you can refer to before spending your valuable half an hour on this video. But I will make sure I post some details in the title.
The Convergence of Medical and Consumer Health Apps
Isn't there a startup that does this already? Seems way too intuitive and natural to not have happen already.
As far as I'm aware, official stats from Blizzard is that the player going first is wins a higher % of the time than going second, despite the coin. I'll try and find the source.

User dtech already found the source for me (: -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020232
I felt exactly the same as your daughter as a kid, and I'm a guy. The cause was the shyness, not gender.

>even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this

Seems like the problem there is extroversion vs introversion. Less sensitive vs sensitive. Something I can totally relate to.
The Curious Case of Cynk, an Abandoned Tech Company Now Worth $5 Billion
The Cognito marketing materials claim that it supports "intelligent conflict resolution".
On my first day of engineering school we were given this problem and similar materials to work with.

Pretty much the best possible "real world" exercise that focuses on limited materials, time, and most importantly, simplicity of design and manufacture.
Yah, it's not easy to find the implicit and definitely need to use a solid IDE to track these things down. I've gained enough experience now that I can track things down quickly but it's taken me a while to get here. I wonder if others will be willing to do the same or adoption of the language will stagnate.
I think the point of the job postings was to point out how those postings can be seen as biased even when they weren't intended to be.
I don't thing I completely agree with the "role-model" effect you are describing. There are women like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limor_Fried
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

And many more. If these women aren't role models enough, how is me investing multitudes more of effort and hiring one or two female engineers at a small startup going to create role-models.

I believe in investing in the egg as you call it, by getting women interested in tech at a young age, we can have more candidates to choose from and then not have to jump through all the efforts and hoops this website want's me to do. I see no practical reason to reword all my job postings and hire a female-centric recruiter when I can just hop on angellist for an hour.
To save us from searching in the number space after 4.3-ish billionth slot, we could just store the sequences that we didn't find in that part of pi. I propose a bit used to indicate whether the current sequence is a pi-sequence or just raw data.
I'd like to see a quine resume.
Ask HN: Why are so few links posted as https?
I've been lurking for quite a while now and noticed that even though many of the sites linked support SSL connections, not many are posted as https.

In the comments too most people still post http. Ex: The Wikipedia links everyone seems to love.

Is this just because of old habits or do people use plugins that force https in the background?
Does anyone know who made this video?
So everyone "knew" it wasn't doing the job but they (at least in some banks) carried on using it anyway because...have hammer, use hammer. That or they were deliberately using it because of its deficiencies that let them take bigger risks than they knew were wise or at least would be allowed under other approaches.

The reduction of leverage, cascading down of asset prices is exactly the sort of correlated event that VaR doesn't cover at all and does happen every couple of decades. It isn't really some bizarre outlying event. The moment it matters (almost) all asset prices suddenly correlate.

If you use VaR as "the number that runs the bank" (I can't remember where but I'm sure I've heard it referred to as something like that possibly with respect to Lehman) then you are going to get into trouble.

The "shock" scenarios approach sounds useful provided the imagination is open to really shocking outcomes.
> the same way we learned the C++ STL back in the day

My school forbid you from using STL. You had to build all of your data structures in freshman/sophomore years and then use those same data structures you built in your sophomore/junior/senior projects. It was really crazy because if you never got your lists, trees, graphs, and hashes working you basically wouldn't make it through the CS program. It sucked at the time, but I'm grateful now.
There's more information about AWS Cognito beginning at the 1:03:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr6WirGn-6k
Not to mention the mocking most of us had to endure from the cool kids. I was systematically bullied, because of being a geek, who loved tech.
The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit