skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, this is a crucial point. Feminists have tunnel vision. They look in one direction and see that CEOs and politicians are mostly male. But they don't look the other way and see those in dirty and dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male too. And in prison. And living on the streets. 80% of people working more than 50 hours a week are male. 97% of people killed at work are male. I can't even recall a feminist calling for the retirement age of women to be increased to that of men, despite higher female life expectancy...

But this is why it's not called "equalism".
Those are often bad for salmon and other wildlife.
Sorry to be the bad guy here again, but though the story is interesting as a story, I don't get what was 'learned'. I did see a lot of the "a lot of bad shit happened to me when I was younger" text in there. Whenever I see that type of stuff, my whiner radar switches on.

It's unimportant what you overcame in the past. If this is important for you, then you still have not learned. A muscleman will not win a competition because he lifted a huge weight during training, he will win because he put his effort into lifting the weight in front of him right now, and did not think about all the weights he lifted in the past.
Gaussian vs. Mandelbrotian: The Great Intellectual Fraud
Underrepresentation matters to the extent that the differentiating factor shouldn't have any effect on one's desire to be in a given field, nor on their talent in that field. Maybe you don't care if some people aren't ending up in the careers that would make them the happiest, but some people do, and they investigate the causes to try to fix it.

If women, for instance, are genetically predisposed to liking engineering less or being less capable at engineering, then it's not an issue. If they avoid engineering because of other factors, don't you think that's something that should be fixed?
The first and most obvious problem is created by right-handed desks

I had a good laugh at your post thinking it was rather clever humor and was about to write something witty back about left handed shot glasses, nunchucks, and corkscrews, but then I Googled "left handed desk" just in case and.. crap, you're not kidding! What horrible bloody desks kids are subjected to in your country!
I often do the %w{rubygems sinatra etc}.each{|lib| require lib} trick. If I were more motivated, I would submit a patch that would allow require to take an array.
'Rational DB' would be perfect if the makers of ClearCase hadn't permanently poisoned that word
Not just uninformative, but misleading too: there are many relational query languages besides SQL (e.g. Tutorial D). Is the conference about non-relational database technologies, or any alternative to SQL?
True, but responding to feedback is a lot harder than being aware of it. And especially so in a larger organization. I'm not so sure that GM's problems stemmed from not being aware of the problems as not being able to respond for various structural, legal, and social reasons.
I'm with you, when I read "movement" I thought of "needless religion".

And the NoSQL is needlessly negative as well.
Um, OK, but that first timeline doesn't tell me where they started from. A map would be nice, too. Maybe some charts indicating how much time is spent on the ground vs. in the air.
Perhaps this is just an artifact of living in the Bay Area. Do others hear this same sentiment?

I think there's a crucial bit of context missing here. I live in Chile and I can tell you that most (but not all) of the places at which I've worked treat programmers as second-class employees.

Here are some extreme perceptions I've witnessed at some of my jobs: we are either incompetent or overpaid; we have to be monitored and managed correctly, otherwise we'll slack away and/or engage in miscellaneous mischief; we never get things done on time, within the budget or the way the users want them; in other words, we're just a sinkhole for money.

On the other hand, if you talk to a non-technical person outside the workplace context, they'll usually react the way you describe it. I think that, in the end, it all depends on the culture, both corporate and general.
I wonder if it's due to income skew. If there's a bunch of people at the bottom of the pyramid, providing services cheaply but getting paid very little, it makes everyone else seem far better off.
In Europe, however, you don't trip over the homeless and crazy as you do in San Francisco.

I think that you need to specify where in Europe you are talking about.

I've been to Europe and there are some places that are definitely have more than their fair share of homeless and crazies.
Hrm, not sure.

If I'm travelling somewhere for a short duration that requires a hotel/change of clothes, it's easy for me to just bring a carry on. 9 times out of 10, I have to bring my laptop anyway, so it's not a huge deal to carry a small travel pack with a laptop, change of clothes and a toiletries kit.

Any more than that and I want luggage, so the service is useless.

I'm not sure if I'm the idea target market, but I'm not sure I see any real value here.
At least in US presidential elections, more people vote against a candidate than for a candidate. They justify it by saying say "I'm voting for the lesser of the two evils", or "I don't particularly agree with everything my candidate stands for, but I sure hate the other guy". Examples in software also abound:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001246.html
Paying Amazon does not negate the need for a sysadmin!! Someone still needs to manage all of the software, os, networking and upgrade stuff. Only the hardware part is taken care of for you (which is a relatively small amount.)
Before you start learning Lisp...
In its vagueness it suggests knee-jerk criticism of RDBMSs, rather than any major advantage the alternatives have.

I went to a presentation about CouchDB recently, and afterward asked a couple questions about distribution, how views work, transactions, comparing its design and performance to RDBMSs, etc. It was immediately clear that the speaker didn't really understand the relational model at all (and he kept calling SQL "MySQL"). He couldn't answer several of my questions, but pointed out several times that the technology behind CouchDB is "way sexy". Now, I really like Postgres and SQLite, but I'm curious about the other systems because I'm a bit of a database nerd, and I was hoping he could explain what problems they solve, beyond some handwavey assertions about scaling and reassuring people with an aversion to SQL.

I'm not saying he's representative, but he comes to mind when I hear about a noSQL movement. People whose sole understanding of RDBMSs seems to have come from e.g. _PHP & MySQL For Dummies_, but keep hearing that SQL doesn't scale and noSQL databases are "the new hotness". Talk about the advantages of those systems compared to RDBMSs! And if you can't talk about any collective advantages they have, because they don't have much common ground (which is quite possible), then trying to present them collectively is just going to be confusing.
The entirety of all air travel combined amounts to approximately 3% of the World's total CO2 emissions. I doubt he's making much a dent. It's not like they'd be cancelling the flights if he weren't on them.
Batch processing jobs or other "spikey" workloads.
Full version of the chapter here: http://issuu.com/azureo/docs/the_black_swan/1?mode=a_p

Issuu doesn't have a deep-linking feature.
What's Wrong with this (Right-Hand Biased) School Desk?
Congrats raffi! (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raffi) This is totally awesome news.
It's not a perfect method of generating electricity, but probably the cleanest of mainstream electricity techniques, with technology like fish ladders mitigating the disruption to wildlife. I look forward to the increased adoption of cleaner alternatives.
Fractals, Chaos and Complex Dynamics
The mining town problem is not a matter of wealth disparity but rather a Monopsony on labour. Only one party owns the mines (usually) and that party rules the town. Redistribution is not going to help in this case; though, splitting the mine among several owners might.
Exactly. "Material Area" is only if you're creating a sticker or banner, which as of now have one background shape. Wall and Window Graphics can have many shapes (or objects).
Upvoted.

Thanks for sharing what I feel -- and I wrote it. It's got a lot of "poor me" in it.

The story would be very different if I told it from today's point of view. The purpose was to tell it the way I was feeling it at the time.

There were a lot of things learned, but like any real story in life, it's muddled. One of the things I learned, not mentioned, was that if you have a problem that you can't solve -- it's your responsibility to communicate it. And to keep communicating it until something is done about it.

But at the time it was very muddy, as I think you can tell. Can't help that -- that's the way it happened. Maybe there are other people in similar circumstances that this would speak to that wouldn't get the point if told differently. Also the story is more powerful by being told the way it is, in my opinion, of course.

Great point about living in the past. I think maybe you misunderstood the tone, however. I still feel very badly about the whole thing. It's not like I think of this as some kind of great feat that I performed. It was a total disaster. I was lucky to have skated through as well as I did.

I'm out of this conversation, as I'm way too biased to do a good job commenting. Thanks for the thoughts.
Wow. You packed a whole lot of yourself into a very short post. Thanks for this.

I love the paragraph that describes your reasons for running away, especially this: "Serious trouble was good: it meant that people would start taking options away from me and things would work out".

Beautiful. This is the proverbial cry for help, right? But the way you describe it makes it seem like a perfectly logical, albeit destructive, strategy for dealing with powerlessness. A lot of people do this "running away" thing all the time-- many of us do it daily-- often without realizing it. For the really unlucky ones, running away is built in to our reflexive psyche, so it corrupts every attempt at resolving conflict.

But then, like you say, sometimes it's possible that you have no better option. That's a hard one.
Aw that's upsetting! Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait until then. =]
Google And Apple Go To War
Long overdue.

Perhaps "#noIndexes" or "#noRightOuterJoins"
Not sure what you mean by lack of stable releases. Are you saying that the releases are not stable, or that the release schedule is not stable?

Both -- the releases were generally infrequent and tended to have issues that require running the latest versions from git to resolve.

We also do offer a clean installer. First, all of cappuccino works without installing anything. It's self contained in a single app folder. Second, the tools all come bundled in one installer, which puts files wherever you like, defaulting to /usr/local/share/objj. We ship the documentation with the same download.

My experiences trying to build from source (which was necessary as the releases fell considerably behind the development with requisite bug fixes) resulted in a bit of a mess in my home directory and the destination root (as well as interdependencies between), rather than just building cleanly in-place, but perhaps I was operating it incorrectly.

And as for the type-checking compiler part, we actually have an experimental type-checking runtime available on github. Improvements are, as always welcome. But not having a type-checking compiler is certainly par for the course in the JavaScript world, so I don't quite see how it counts against Cappuccino.

The primary count against Cappuccino vs straight JS is the difficulty in tracking down issues when they inevitably emerge. It sounds like things might have improved for Safari 4 users, however.

Not that I wouldn't mind type-checking for JS, too.

All that being said, yes it is young, yes it is a moving target, and yes there's a lot of work left to be done.

Absolutely. Please don't take my criticism as anything but friendly intent.
Sure, society has loads of examples of jobs being divided up along gender lines, and of unfairness against men too.

But does that mean we can't even talk about why our profession in particular attracts so few women, while lots of other "knowledge worker" professions are more balanced? Do we have to resolve all other fairness issues first, before we can even talk about it?

I think it's an interesting topic and that the hostility and derisiveness that usually surrounds these articles are unjustified.
For me, it just started to work naturally once my parents (finally) got a computer 9 years ago. I thought you just spend some time in front of a computer and it starts to happen...
There's some irony in your comment: I think you're coming at this from the perspective that programming is a desirable field, and that "feminists" want to be part of it, while not wanting to be part of the dirty or dangerous jobs that other men do (those greedy feminists!)

But what if the reason that women don't take part in CS is because it isn't desirable? What if women avoid the field because it's a glorified, white-collar version of ditch-digging, without career longevity or personal growth?
>> 3. Format decimals
>> money = 9.5
>> "%.2f" % money # => "9.50"

Seriously? IMHO These sorts of things are not nice. To read the code you have to know these special magic operators. It's not immediately obvious it's calling a function to do string formatting.

Readable code is so important :/
Hah, I threw LINQ in there figuring something like D would be too confusing/obscure. But your reminder sent me a-googling - wikipedia opens with:
"D is a set of requirements proposed by Christopher J. Date and Hugh Darwen in their book The Third Manifesto "

So maybe NoSQL people need a movement after all. The relational people are at _least_ on their third manifesto. Lot of catching up to do!
After the Deadline Acquired by Auttomatic
Huge congratulations to Raphael. I had the chance to see a preview of his presentation, and I was impressed right away. The market is obviously hugely competitive (who really wants to take on MS, google, etc?), and those were the biggest questions I had at the time.

But this is a perfect combination of tech and opportunity. Again, well done Raphael!
The investors lost money. They put their trust in bad (or simply imperfect or misguided) CEOs and careless boards. In the future, perhaps they will be more careful in their selection of managers. If not, they will continue to lose money. That's part of the market process.

The CEOs got to keep their money because the investors made poor choices; the investors could have negotiated a clawback in the compensation packages, for example. But in some sense, you might even say that the CEOs gave the investors exactly what they wanted. If the investors had wanted a more conservative corporate strategy, they could have always pulled their money out and invested in Berkshire Hathaway, or they could have uprooted management. Management set out on a strategy that didn't turn out well, but they weren't hiding anything from their investors.

It gets a little blurry at high levels, but remember that at the end of the day, the CEO is just an employee. The owners are ultimately responsible for the company.
Congrats! Does this mean we'll get to see the source?

edit: Any details on the financials?
What ? Is this a joke ? I think more that 80% of my comp-sci class were minorities (a university in Canada) and I know for sure it's the same situation in other universities.
As of now, it definitely is. If you're buying one bumper sticker, it's about $4.40. And if you're buying 1,000 bumper stickers, it's about $0.08 a sticker. Most places offer price breaks, but nothing like that. At Zazzle, for example, you can buy over 250 stickers, but the price is still $2.76 per sticker.

Our prices on Wall and Window Graphics are really great right now too. We're still testing, so these prices might have to increase in the future.
Congratulations! It takes cast-iron balls the size of cantaloupes to make a product that competes against companies with six orders of magnitude more funding... and succeed.
where are you hosted?

Also, at 8GiB each, I assume you are using single-socket servers. How come you aren't using dual-socket servers? my experience has been that it's cheaper per gigabyte ram, per watt power, and per core.
Ohm's blog on "Freedom to Tinker".

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul

I couldn't get SSRN to cooperate; the download buttons just kept returning me to the abstract. BTW, Ohm himself admits SSRN has problems, in the comments of the post where he announces the paper.

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/anonymization-fai...
If there is no value in it, why does it matter if it doesn't happen?
There is nothing wrong with an interesting story for the sake of a story.
Well, the first sentence of the article starts off with:

"Large segments of the U.S. population are not considering careers in IT"
Enterprise cloud computing coming of age
Yep, total old boys club; you only get in from reference counting. When will women be able to mark and sweep?
Because it's (relatively) easy to validate (if you're going to) a simple identifier (ignoring UTF-8 issues and that $ can be in an identifer, I'd almost consider it matching ^\w+$ to be enough), and it's increasingly harder to properly validate javascript expressions without actually having a javascript interpreter and parsing/executing it. More complexity means an incrase in the possibility of bugs and more divergent implementations.
I was surprised to follow this link and see a familiar face. I recognize Raphael Mudge from when I competed in the Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (http://neccdc09.nssa.rit.edu/) where he was a member of the red team. I didn't have much time to get to know him personally, but I do remember him being a nice guy. Congrats, Raphael!
LTLprints is a nice site, and I mentioned them in my introduction comment above. We were not aware of LTLprints until just before we launched, but when we did find them, the ability to sell your own designs was not yet activated. That piece has only been in place for a couple months, I believe.So until very recently, we thought we were the only ones who were serving as the "Cafe Press" of Wall Graphics.

In addition, we separate ourselves with our robust design center and our variety of products. LTLPrints looks to be essentially wall graphics, and we offer all kinds of different stickers, including clear window stickers, bumper stickers and vinyl banners.
It's not hostility or derisiveness, it's just pointing out that it's not just our particular profession that attracts so few women.

A lot of work in all professions is needed to solve this problem and we must devote all of our time to point that out equally.

Hookers for example is another problem area, most hookers are women. Where are all the male hookers?
I've seen a few people hand wave around the costs of sys admins and claim that since they have a bunch of cloud-based systems they don't have to worry about it. Then a few days later they complain about getting the APIs to work and their custom software they had to write to store things to S3 instead of local disk.

It's a hard trade off to make and I would suggest the following: Go where your strengths are and outsource where they aren't. You can generally save money by doing something yourself, all other things being equal, but you'll generally lose money if you don't know what you're doing and could have hired a professional.
But it can make it much faster. Video cards optimized for a lot of those video-related operations.
The Intubator: endless randomly chosen personal videos
What does the term "minority" mean in this context? Am I alone in assuming the article means african-americans and hispanics, and is excluding asian/indian americans?
Well, they're very welcome to join.
What an imbecilic name for a company
Really? This is just a standard printf-style format string, something which all programmers should be familiar with. Even the '%' syntax isn't unique to Ruby; Python uses it as well IIRC.
To be fair, "movement" was only used in the somewhat link-bait HN title. The conference website avoids any such rhetoric.
teh internet is serious business
Non-computer scientists are a minority in computer science.
The main savings people seem to get from cloud computing is by not paying for servers when you aren't using them. There are some economies of scale that the cloud vendors can take advantage of, but in general it seems like the administration costs of those are greater than the savings for constant work loads.
True, hardware support generally doesn't require ongoing effort like software does but when there are problems than can take a HUGE amount of time (as mechanical_fish highlighted).

The other advantage Amazon provides is the API which allows you to automate most deployment and configuration processes. You're then left with the stuff you can't automate and the occasional software bugs and other issues that crop up from time to time.
Many women may not be aware. I know that the feminists I know would not be surprised if you told them that and would agree that it is not fair for men.

The feminist fighting for greater rights than men is a stereotype that represents only a small (but extremely vocal) minority of feminists.
are you sure that renting a 8GiB single socket server would cost $400 a month? I wasn't able to rent any at half that price. Hell, I haven't been able to rent 8 core 32GiB ram servers for that much. http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Servers_of_opp... - not one bite at that price. (I've rented a bunch at high setup/low monthly deals... but I'm not doing that anymore. It makes more sense to split them up and sell them as virtual private servers)
But video transcoding can be faster by a factor of several, if done on a GPU. That's a big deal for those who do video transcoding all the time.

The irony is that GPU is a more powerful processor than CPU, just not as versatile and easy to use (only a small subset of programming tools can use it yet) but it changes.
I do not doubt the premise--that the vast majority of people who score well on that "quiz" will be male--but I do not see how that leads to the conclusion, namely that there's some sort of biological difference.

That strikes me as the reification of what's pretty clearly a social difference. More men than women know what a torque wrench is, because we teach boys about torque wrenches and let boys know that they ought to know what one is, while we teach girls about other things and let them know that it's okay to be ignorant about torque wrenches.

When I was a kid there was a common party game where the boys and girls would break up into separate teams, and the boys would attempt to come up with questions that they could all answer but would stump all the girls, and the girls would do the same to the boys. It was, at least that I ever saw, always much easier for the girls to come up with questions that would stump us guys than for us to come up with "common guy knowledge" that would stump all the girls. There were always more girls who knew "guy things" than guys who knew (or were willing to admit to knowing) "girl things."

I'm not sure that really proves anything except there was a wider diversity (at least within the relatively limited sample of kids I grew up with) of acceptable gender role behaviors for girls than for boys. Girls certainly can know "guy stuff" when they're exposed to it, that much was pretty obviously clear.

It may be that there's some biological difference between how men and women approach problems, or learn various skills. But I can guarantee you that those differences are, like differences associated with skin color, far less than the differences between individuals in the same group.
Can you expand on what you mean by this? It could mean a lot of different things...

Thanks.