skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have 15 year old daughter and would love to get her more interested in computer science. She is doing good in school getting A in math/science, etc.

Any suggestions from HN on how best to guide her interests?

Extra project? incentive?

For now, her interests are typical teenage - school clubs, facebook, youtube, tumblr, etc.
Not necessarily based on stereotypes, but rather what's more accepted by society.

Men are usually the outliers. (See % of male prisoners)

Note that he also said "Maybe just a total coincidence".
I agree, it is clear that the author seems to have a bit of a bias. (I guess you can also tell from his tone)

Although the "debunk" wasn't very clear. With some posters that also saying that their family members indeed obtained data entry degree in computer science

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2joexk/what...

Hard to make a judgement call, but I think the truth is probably not as clear cut as NPR suggests
Goes to credibility. When you're talking about a post with zero evidence presented, sometimes it really is more believable coming from Neil Degrasse Tyson versus the guy who believes in Timecube.
Find has an atrocious syntax. Nowadays, I seldom use any other feature of find rather than just enumerating files. Rather, I enumerate files, create commands on them (with things like xargs and sed), and pipe the output into sh. Generating code is a very flexible technique, and it's actually easier (and safer) that trying to muck with find options.
The segment mentions that most "tool toys" are marketed at boys. Specifically mentioned Tonka Trucks but think plastic saws, hammers, etc.

They couldn't find any data one way or another about if that marketing made sense.
Yep I didn't actually see a computer till I was in my early 20's.
It seems like a lot of CS programs focus more on filtering than teaching, which just intensifies the trend.
hood.ie or pouchdb might be what your helpful
True, that was a cheap shot - but my argument rests on the numbers.
GNUStep is frozen in Panther, last time I checked.

There is hardly any modern Mac application that you can compile with it.
In that case I'd probably vote for just giving them another email. If you're not certain, it's probably not worth the effort of a full advisory.
> Reprinted as NOT permitted by U.S. Department of the Army, but by we the citizenry who paid for it

That's certainly an attention grabber.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/17/tesla-motors-us-sales/

Decent article summarizing why Tesla can't sell directly.

TLDR: Because auto dealers don't want to have to compete directly with manufacturers.

Which makes no sense, seeing as how Tesla doesn't have any dealers that would compete with them, selling their own cars.

I like the guy I bought my car from on one level, but if it saves me money on my next car purchase, well, so long dealerships.
> Given that most published medical research findings are false, their scepticism is well founded.

Ugh. Another blanket statement that in no way reflects the actual paper in question.

From your own source he recommends larger studies, cross-team work clear pre-trial hypotheses, and study-registration.

Guess what?

This n=5,300 study was performed by researchers at UCSF, Stanford, Berkeley, and Michigan, they published their intention to run the study prior to running it with a hypothesis that was partially proved wrong (they expected shortened telomeres with noncarbonated SSBs as well as with sugary soda).

What exactly is your issue with this study? Or do you just reject science in general.
I've tried but they taste awful. Even if I get one of those sugary carmel chocolate starbucks things I can't get past the awful taste of the coffee. Ultimately I need to just quit caffeine but every time I end up back on the wagon.
I'm not sure where you're picking these numbers off and from which graph. The graph I linked has the following values(ish):

* Men: 27,500 - 17,500 -> 1.57 ~ 36% drop
* Women: 15,000 - 7,500 -> 2 ~ 50% drop

So yes, you're right that women did seem to drop off more but not as much as you say.
I'm not seeing any rebuttal in the comment I originally replied to.
>This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which Plato’s grand theories had no answer. “Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey,” Auden said. “He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who’s always wrong.” Only a genius could have devised Plato’s theory of the forms—the invisible, intangible “ideas” that give shape to every visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian politics has proved.

This reminds one of the "worse is better" notion.

Though, I would point that, just like with "worse is better", nothing of the short has been proved or "permanently settled".

It's a common cliche in american political thought to say that "every experiment in ideal, utopian politics" has failed etc, but the reality much more nuanced, and there's much ideology involved in the seemingly "non utopian" politics that's just transparent to their supporters.
I concur.

I got into programming because I couldn't complete a level in a game, and I resorted to cheat-codes and hacks.

First it was the missing-no hack in Pokemon, then getting the console for "sv_cheats 1/god/impulse 101/noclip" for Half-Life and then rules.ini for the Red Alert series.

Hand hacking rules.ini for Red-Alert made a massive impression, any of the game's dynamics could be altered, you could spew out units for $1, bolt a tesla-coil on a tank etc...

Cheats and trainers got me to look into the workings of a computer program, plus the midi music from trainers is addictive :)
Have a seemingly decent idea. Build a seemingly workable product. Know people / have a shiny thing on your resume.

Why the surprise at all this? Here in NYC I speak to funded startup founders and employees every other day who lack basic business, business management, and people management skills and experience. Investor actions (i.e. $$$$) seriously devalue these things now.

(But we have advisors!!!!!!!)

/jadedrant
>zero evidence presented,

He posted some evidence. Not a lot, but some. More than his detractors here have posted so far. There's also more in that reddit thread, it looks like.

I'm not saying he's right, but it does no one any favors to slam someone instead of refuting their argument.
Many people who get into programming, do so because they either want to make games, or like computers because of games. This was widely true among my CS class at WashU, and also many of the professionals I currently work with.
ReactJS and embedded SVG icon sets
http://nyan-mode.buildsomethingamazing.com/
Bootstrap and Angular? Why? I'm pretty sure the core idea of FireBase is being usable with any JavaScript client-side.
Any data on that? I tried searching for info on when the average programmer started, but couldn't find anything. I always figured most programmers started young, but that might just be because so many in my group started really young.
Increasingly, as a customer, I feel like there's been some sort of shift in Amazon's operating philosophy. There isn't any one big fault, but I feel like I'm getting less value - maybe it's just because of some small changes in their return policy or changes in how Prime is administered/priced, or the mix of first-party/third-party sales in the catalog. On the business side, you keep seeing hints of how employees at many levels aren't really in a good long-term working situation. I wonder if Amazon's quantitative focus has shifted from a strength to an obsession that's starting to hurt important non-quantified areas.

Whatever is actually going on, it all adds up for me personally to move Amazon out of a default, first-look shopping role to a more secondary option.
Among my friends I always thought I was the odd one out because I _didn't_ start programming as a child.
CMU does some of the most interesting work around with data from Twitter. Some of the same people responsible for this worked on predicting NFL games with Twitter data[0]

[0]https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/sinha+dyer+gimpel+smi...
>Day to day documentation need doesn't require that big set of features. Even core expectations don't get satisfied and always need support from third party plugins.

Those two statements are somewhat contradictory, assuming "core expectations" are something you need for your "day to day documentation needs".
For reference, I'm using a 2.3 GHz i5 Mac Mini (MacMini5,1). The new iPad Air 2 looks pretty comparable:

Single Core Multi Core
iPad Air 2 1812 4477
Mac Mini 1980 4254

Very impressive. A9 based MacBooks Airs?
Visually the blue buttons on the teal gradient doesn't go well, and your top menu links blend into the background image too much, also the gradient on your image "All those files" makes it unreadable.

Concept wise, I like the idea I just don't myself using it as a stand alone app. Would be more interesting if you could hook it into existing chat software to create interactive archives.
Guess what?

Given that all observational studies are essentially exercises in variable adjustment and little else, it seems reasonable to exercise extreme scepticism.

Some people you just can't reach, I guess. Believe what you will.
It really doesn't though.

Something tells me green-account "Scientist007", that you might not actually be a scientist.
I am pretty sure all computer hardware is deterministic? (unless we are talking about quantum computers?)
The "aren't interested" hypothesis would also need to explain why the physical sciences haven't had the same decline in involvement as computer science nor why there is a specific decline in participation in computer science but not in the other categories.

I don't think anyone is afraid to suggest that girls aren't interested in the field, it's just that it is a very unsatisfying answer and it doesn't really make sense to generalize about more than half the population.
That Commodore ad is brilliant. It features "Magic Desk" http://toastytech.com/guis/magdesk.html

> Notice the door, calculator, phone, card file, and dollar bill graphics. Trying to select these does absolutely, completely, and totally nothing. That's right, they don't do anything. At all. This leaves one to speculate if these were supposed to be features of "Magic Desk II", parallel release versions to the "Type and File" cart, or future disk based utilities.
How is competency evaluated, though?

This whole approach relies on testing of some kind that can reliably measure competency in a subject area that also needs to be well-defined.

If we had that -- if the material that all students should learn could actually be built into the "correct" curriculum, and tests could be made that would measure if the student had mastered each level -- then that would be great.

Students could learn in class, or sensibly test out of entire grades at a time. Teachers could be paid (or fired) based on how well their students mastered the curriculum, and school's funding could be dependent on their students hitting certain percentages.

Unfortunately that underlying foundation isn't real; defining that curriculum means cutting up knowledge into odd shapes that don't match well to useful practical knowledge, or how most people learn. Being good at passing standardized tests mostly identifies students with good test-taking skills. Teachers who will be evaluated based on this sole, shitty measure at the end of the year are obliged to spend their time training students for the test, and have to cut out the field trips, explorations, experiments -- basically, all of the things that make inspiring teachers inspiring is no longer considered valuable.

Citations required, to be sure (I don't have the spare time to dig around now) -- but some of this is common sense.

If you set up a rewards system, you have to be really smart about what, exactly, you're rewarding.

The most valuable educational experiences are not generally found in drilling for a standardized test, I think; so setting up a system where that's the only thing rewarded is going to be unhelpful.
My take on that missing piece: once computers went personal / homebrew / RadioShack they switched categories. The new category was "tinkering with electronics", which has a long established cultural perception of being a male activity (and those personal computers were therefore marketed to males)
"This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were and it created techie culture."

The facts seem to (rather) be that computers were no longer just toys, they were becoming serious tools. As such, "tool geeks" gravitated to computers. This hypothesis would explain the inevitable sexist outcome of the field with a simple explanation. It can also be verified objectively and orthogonally by looking at other "tool" drivem occuplations that seem to share a heavy gender bias. See, eg

http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-male-dominated-indus...

Playing with tools and machines is not so much sexist as it is anti-social more broadly speaking.

It's not clear the both genders share similar preferences in thus regard.

If you look at more "social" industries (or business functions) like in Media/publishing/advertising you tend to find a significant number of very successful/world class etc women in very high powered jobs.

The bigger question is when did coding become so anti-social? And is/was this anti-social nature somehow necessary or functional?
So Michigan could legislate that any business is not permitted to sell directly to consumers. Great state to live in.
I took Doxycycline which is the recommended antibiotic against Lyme disease. There is no empirical evidence that taking antibiotics for longer than two weeks helps against Lyme.

Citation needed... THERE, I finally found it http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/4/1107.long Okay, this was an extreme case. I was mistaken, the woman took the antibiotics for a longer time and intravenously. However, it's still true that the risk of fungal infection is increased by a substantial amount.

Here is another case displaying the dangerous effects of long-term administration of antibiotics which resulted in death http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/3/369.full (but not because of fungi)

This way of treating Lyme Disease literally kills people, I am not exaggerating.
It might take only 30 sec to tweet about it, but with open-sourcing comes a lot of stuff to deal with: once it goes open, there will be forks and pull requests and what not. Apple probably isn't yet ready to do fully open development (like they do with LLVM) of Swift.
My younger sister would've been more likely to enter tech if there was less barbie and more this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIGyVa5Xftw
I think that when CS was a newer field it was treated more like Math and less like engineering.
He posted a link to an n-gram search, which is like me posting a picture of a flower to prove that the sky is blue. The data cited is not germane to the quesiton.

To wit: one would expect that n-gram search to look the same whether or not data processing was a CS subdiscipline, because data processing dropped in relevance as digital systems became the primary source of truth. Therefore, it is not evidence either way for the claims the comment made.
It's neat! Where I work we are about to use Consul and this is great news for us as we were looking for something like Consul Template.

I really like that they are simple Go templates :)
Yes, that is a very interesting complication to the standard model.
When I graduated, we had to buy our compilers...
Launching Products and Snorting Cocaine
Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things to make things look right. If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. A very simple example is line breaks in equations: you don't know how much you can fit on a line until you render it, and LaTeX will run your equations off the page instead of wrapping them intelligently.

Don't get me wrong, LaTeX is still the best document processor I know of, and I use it all the time. I'm just saying that the "separation of domains" idea is a bit of a fantasy.
You may have the code, but there might still be a huge pile of problems. Such as:

How many application variables are hard-coded to your company's specific network and server configuration?

Have you fully documented the configuration of every related server, checked that in, and kept it up to date?

Are the required versions of every dependency well documented?

Does it use any third-party packages that you have modified, but never checked into your source control?

Is any part of it dependent on some massively expensive piece of software or data set that you happen to have easy access to for some reason?
> Hard to make a judgement call . . .

It is not hard for me to decide whether to trust Planet Money or anonymous Reddit commenters, at least one of which is a known MRA, especially on a topic relating to sexism. I guess that might just speak to our different priors, but it's a no brainer over here.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation, and a lot in any company. The successful ones produce enough value to make up for all the value being lost at various levels.

This company is a disaster on so many levels. It sounds like three employees low-paid are performing a critical service function and it's very easy to see them all walking out the door.
Has anyone seen Silicon Valley (the HBO series)

this is SO silicon valley
It's not plausible because insolvent / bankrupt companies have the option to walk away from onerous contracts if it is in the interests of the debtors not to honour them. In this case, the idea of open sourcing the software UPON bankrupcy could destroy any remaining value left in the business (value of IP) which would otherwise be realisable to distribute to debtors.
Sounds very much like my symptoms (intense knee pain/swelling and no rash), except that you don't mention low-grade fever and jaw pain (which I had). I was eventually on crutches and had an enormous amount of fluid (orange) removed from my knees. Cortisone helped a great deal.

For whatever reason they tested me for everything under the sun (rheumatoid arthritis, gout (!), etc) before testing for Lyme. I wish I knew then what I know now.

Know the symptoms, insist on the test.
This. A thousand times this. After going through the rounds of interviews at various companies as someone who's not particularly strong in the algorithm department, I've often felt frustrated. I think my strengths are in making good sensible design decisions for a given problem, and being able to manage the complexity of a system; but I've never been able to really show that in an interview. I've seen work from colleagues that solves a simple problem, but makes extensive use of obscure C++ template features. Maybe they were great at algorithms, maybe they weren't, but they certainly weren't capable of coming up with the simplest solution.

I've dedicated lots of time learning graph algorithms in order to get better at interviews: I've only had a graph problem come up once in the last 5 years of programming, and it wasn't particularly tricky (it came up at a time I knew nothing of graph problems, and kind of figured out a graph structure by myself).

When I'm at work, I find I have a knack for keeping things simple, and get a feeling for when certain solutions are a bad idea. For me, software engineering is really about the engineering (make things that meet requirements with the given resources), and from my experience is not so much about being able to implement and provide the time/space complexity of 10 different sorting algorithms (although knowing the basics is important).

It's genuinely a relief to see many other people relating to this kind of experience, sometimes it can feel like you're the only one!
"Recessions uncover what auditors do not."
Not to be a dick, but

"One thing we do want to make clear: Svpply is not going away. We’ll continue to bring our users new products each day"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7939934

And as dotBen posted, from their blog:

"One thing we do want to make clear: Svpply is not going away. We’ll continue to bring our users new products each day"

And if you follow the comments you'll see that some believe that these promises aren't even meant to be long term. So, simply, we would be stupid to bank on it.

Congratulations to the team, though! It shows a great and determined effort, something I greatly admire. And hopefully a means of maintaining trust will emerge.
That makes sense, thanks.

I agree that it is strange that the drop isn't as large as it is for women in STEM in general, but I don't think it disqualifies the hypothesis.

I guess from my perspective if you only have a handful of women even entering a CS department in university in the first place, then the first and most important problem to solve is why they don't seek to study the major, or participate in high school programming classes. I believe if you can answer that question and remove that factor, it will be the biggest first step.

Disclaimer: Was a CS major, dated a CS major woman who coached me through Calculus and who I collaborated with in software classes. I'm biased.
I agree with what is exposed on the article and I've actually added more details in how to apply this "principles" to shell scripting:

http://javier.io/blog/en/2014/10/21/hints-in-writing-unix-to...
It sounds amazingly similar to a satire about software start-ups that I think is truly brilliant - http://theanorexicstartup.com/. The sad part is that you can read the story and name at least one company that's actually that bad. This description of Handy-Book reads like a sequel.
I admire gall.
> it's a language 30 years behind Swift.

Interesting idea. Can you post a link that explains why that is?
We've spent the last 30-odd years electing people that stuff the books and court benches with laws and people that make sure that - by and large - attorneys and the victims they represent can't hold companies like this responsible or accountable - for almost anything, let alone misdeeds with needy victims. Go look up "forced arbitration"... these "service providers" probably have, at best, the right to a loser-pays "arbitrator" who is paid and picked by Handybook. The risk that any of them might opt for any quasi-legal proceeding (let alone the rigged arbitration system they are likely limited to) given that many of them most likely have some kind of liminal citizenship status is effectively nil. If I were doing the liabilities/risk business analysis for this, I would delete the row this was on just to clean up the spreadsheet a little bit.

The concept of companies being held responsible for things they do that hurt or exploit people is a humorous anachronism from a bygone era.
I'm pretty sure the time I spent searching for it was less than the time it took you to write this comment. I did one Google search and it was the top result.
I'm another that didn't start programming until one of my required courses as a physics undergraduate student. We did have an 8th grade programming class but everyone took that and obviously it didn't spur me into any interest in programming.