skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Woman software engineer here. This article, although maybe not totally on point for why the female team won an award, does hit home on gender issues in the tech.

As has been said in this thread multiple times, less women are in the field probably (and partially) because there is less interest. I believe a large part of that is how male-centric tech is portrayed while growing up. But once I displayed an interest in high school opportunities were thrown at me from left and right, to the point that I felt bad for guys who didn't get similar opportunities.

As expected, as a techie in college I was surrounded by mostly guys, which was fine 99% percent of the time. There were those special few who saw themselves superior and made sexist remarks. Guys who wanted to help with homework because they didn't think the female brain could figure it out. You just prove them wrong and move on.

There is a gender issue, but it is not all one sided. Talking to the ladies who let the gentlemen do their hw for them (and the swath of everything else)
IIS is marketted by MS as a VERY capable web server... typically out-performing other web servers by a large margin. The caching system for IIS has always been one of their crowning achievements, working better than most systems. Though, these days most will put a caching server(or cluster) in front of their operations servers. Just the same, it has worked pretty well. Though I predict this feature will be removed, or disabled by default in future versions.

I'm kind of surprised this issue wasn't discovered previously. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be an exploit beyond crashing the server yet (which is bad enough). (sigh, kind of glad I'm in the process of migrating everything away from IIS).
I really hope you forgot a smiley in your post.
Wow, that's disappointing. I'm happy to facilitate another conversation (including a technical staff member to walk through your architecture) and see if we can articulate this better. If you're interested, please reach out on twitter and we can exchange email addresses @sarahnovotny.
I find that people are rational actors. If you observe social behavior at scale that doesn't suit your theory, then the theory is wrong, not the facts.

Irrational behavior should show up as noise in the system, not the order-of-magnitude bias we're observing. That strongly suggests that the bias is the result of rational actors, not the irrationality of their behavior.
Any of the Foundation Books by Isaac Asimov.
It's really not, because I'm a career IT specialist, with a degree in software development and a ton of experience. For anyone outside of that, Google makes it very scary and very difficult to do.

Google's "openness" is what I refer to as "just enough rope to hang yourself with". They only are open insofar as they know you can't successfully compete with them.
Here is the Blog about it --https://orchestrate.io/blog/2014/04/08/explore-the-marvel-un... And here is the Source Code -- https://github.com/asamiller/marvelousdb
Ask HN: How do I get over my “programmer envy”?
I run a fairly successful digital marketing business that's growing fast and gives me considerable financial freedom.

I'm good at what I do and I enjoy my work.

However, every time I read come to this site (which is every day), I feel a very strong urge to give it all up and learn how to code.

I feel jealous of programmers, at their ability to create things and solve technical problems.

I played around a lot with code when I was younger. I built my first site when I was 13 and had a good handle on Javascript back when jQuery was still a pipe dream.

Somewhere along the way, I developed other interests (music, then writing) and ended up majoring in the humanities.

Perhaps it is my liberal arts background, but I feel a constant sense of inadequacy about my intellectual achievements every time I read a technical article. I feel like I haven't cracked a hard problem, and that bothers me.

So I ask: how do I get over this feeling? I know it's a very subjective question, but I'm hoping someone from HN can shed some light.

Should I just jump in and learn how to code, knowing that it will be years before I can learn enough to solve some real problems?

Or should I give up and focus on what I do best - marketing?

Apologies if this question is unsettling/offensive/irrelevant or just plain dumb.
Can't edit the top comment anymore :( but it has been found that indeed no rules are needed to exploit this (my previous answer is outdated and wrong!)

If you can't afford to reboot your servers right now to install the patch, at least you can add this to your web.config and deploy your websites ASAP :

<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<caching enableKernelCache="false"/>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
Spin-orbitronics could revolutionize the electronics industry
>I know you probably think you're being a skeptical and intelligent speaker of uncomfortable truths. But you're a lot more like a climate change denier. You're going with your gut and not the facts.

>You will probably now try to bury me with various quibbles, because you can argue against any statistic. but maybe you could try ASKING A WOMAN.

That's a heck of a lot of assumptions you're making about me, Neil. I can't understand how you came to the belief that this kind of gruff contributes to the conversation let alone to your point.

>Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home?

Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

There's seemingly more ways to make money than ever before. Just because sitting at home grinding out a rails app is an appealing way to make money to you, doesn't necessarily mean it is to others.

>There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate. Other scientific or mathematical fields do not have the same problem.

How many of their male counterparts drop out of the tech industry? Or move into non-tech roles within it?

On a second point, how much more socially acceptable is it for a woman to change careers or to become stay-at-home mothers than it is for men?

I've read studies about self-actualization that have concluded that more than twice as many women achieve self-actualization than their male counterparts, so maybe it's a case of more women realising how lacking in substance tech work really is and getting out of it, than their male counterparts who simply struggle on with it?

And by the way, Neil, I have talked to women about this. My own partner is a very successful female in a competitive, scientific area. I've worked with many female engineers over the years also.

I've also seen first hand, and have actively supported, many female engineers leaving the industry to do something they find more fulfilling.

This is a complex topic and we're not going to agree on everything. Building me up, even internally, as some demonic misogynist who has no contact with women isn't going to do or contribute much though.
Go read a copy of The Canterbury Tales in it's original english and tell if it follows those rules. Languages are not set in stone they evolve. Just because a lot of people do it is exactly what language "rules" are, nothing more.
These 4 people messed with SumoMe, see what happened
Or 3) the previous binary is overly simplistic.

Bear in mind that there are studies in apes demonstrating preferences in toys that mirror what is widely assumed to be purely cultural influences in humans.
That's an extreme position at one end of a spectrum. I'm sure you realize that it's an opinion held by some but not all.

Apple has built a really quite successful business around limiting user freedom for user experience. There is a market for it. There are a lot of people who find it to be a good thing.

In short, "choice paralysis" is real. ;)
The article was an individual's blog post, not the mainstream media.
Negotiation shows that you believe you are worth more than the company believes you are worth. Your job is to convince them to make a transaction that, until you prove your worth, is a bad transaction for them.

The ability to successfully negotiate that is similar to a sales pitch. The product you are selling is yourself. Business is about selling an idea, product, or service. If you are incapable of selling yourself - you are not as good an asset for business. Even if hiring into a technical field - what if you make your way to management? What if you end up having to deal with clients directly?

The person who shows they can negotiate is better equipped for those scenarios. They are a better company asset. They are worth more to the company because they offer a skill that is useful for business: negotiation skills.
Throwing together some CSS is hacker news worthy these days, I guess.
Well, let me back up from that and make this analogy. In a perfect world, there'd be no need for police because there'd be no criminals. There are good cops and bad cops but we can all agree that, in a perfect world, the job wouldn't need to exist.

In practice, police can't do the job so well that they're no longer needed because the world is so big. There are always new criminals, and there are many sources of crime, and that's not the cops' fault.

With management, whether that is true depends on the size and competency of the organization. With a small team, a good manager can get everyone aligned and then step back. With hundreds of people, maybe not. There will always be conflicts to resolve and problem employees to watch.

A manager's job is "protect, direct, eject". The strong employees need to be steered away from and shielded from ("protect") the political messes that earnest high performers often fall into, and from the resentment that being good at their jobs (and being rewarded for it) may attract. They also need to be able to take risks and spread their wings. The average ones need to be kept on track ("direct"), and the incorrigible problem employees need to be fired ("eject").

If you do the job well, you won't have many problem employees (the "eject" category) because the corrigible or previously-unlucky ones you can fix, and the rare incorrigible ones you should fire. The mediocre employees (the "direct" category) will be mentored until they're good, and therefore in to the "protect" category, as well. So two of the three jobs (direct and eject) are finite and temporary (except for when the team acquires more people). As for "protect", who do high-talent employees need to be protected from? Executives and other managers; basically, anyone else who can hurt them. So, yes, in an ideal world there wouldn't be the "manager" job. In practice, it's different and you actually need them.

Too many managers fall in love with the "direct" part of the job. They like telling people what to do. They ignore the "protect" part of it (because it can put them at personal risk, and because it's hard to do) and no one (except for a psychopath) enjoys the "eject" aspect. They get good at that one aspect and develop an approach that works reasonably well for middle-of-the-road employees but (a) doesn't handle the extremes, and (b) doesn't really allow for growth or progress (as in Scrum, where there's no allowance that one might graduate out of having to justify small amounts of one's own working time).
And http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/ , the end-user friendlier frontend.
The French socialists are a right-wing party.
Introducing the Dropbox bug bounty program
People said the same about Saville and Glitter and Max Clifford and Rolf Harris and DLT and etc etc.
That's fair, but my point is that it's easy to talk about "oh, the market should be more competitive", but it turns out finding ways to do that is incredibly difficult without also hobbling the original thing to the point that it becomes simply not a good product.

It's also perfectly possible to propose solutions of our own for the purposes of discussion :)

edit:

> Debating details can be useful, but that is the previously proposed idea

it's also worth pointing out that the cycling vertical shopping search site links proposal was apparently rejected not because it was flawed but because those vertical shopping sites didn't think it went far enough.
The plan to divest Motorola existed before they closed the deal to buy it.
Yeah, I searched for "Nimrod" and got nothing but a few other characters who reference encounters with him. He's in Marvel Universe, so clearly they're just picking and choosing who gets in here. This database is sorely lacking, and the search function is meh... Not a knock on the Node.js code, more of a knock on the Marvel API.

I know we're not supposed to be negative on here, but this is a cut and dry Comic Book Guy situation....

clears throat

"Worst..... database..... ever...."
> future 'dark matter' is gonna look a lot like 'epicycles'.

It wasn't until Kepler proposed elliptical orbits at the beginning of the 17th century that heliocentrism actually made good mathematical sense though - Copernicus' perfectly circular orbits still made use of epicycles to explain deviations between calculation an observation.

From the mid 15th century when Copernicus first proposed heliocentrism, to the mid 17th century when Kepler's theories became widely accepted is a long time though.

I want to believe society has advanced past needing centuries to advance from a possibly superior model that still has some issues, to an obviously superior model, but the way seemingly intelligent people cling dogmatically to things like Pluto being a planet, and defining a kilobyte as 1024 bytes because kibibytes 'looks dumb' gives me pause though.
Your assumption built into your last sentence is sort of one of the big problems in a nutshell:

"I hope [they] would meet me in the middle ... by evaulating their overreaction"

It's your assumption that what they're doing is overreacting, that's the problem.
Visualizing JavaScript as a Solar System
That NPR story has been discussed previously on HN. A comment there led me to look into the study used for that chart, and it turned out that "data processing" and "data processing technician" were counted as computer science fields back in that peak era for women. As those fields faded, so did the number of women.

Now, that's not iron-clad explanation for the chart, but it's very much worthy of consideration as an explanation.

It's entirely possible that women were never that high a percentage of what we now classify as computer science.

In other words, maybe it's more a change in classification than anything else.
I haven't, but I have tracked Nim since announcement. It might be a great language, but I don't think it will ever be appropriate for my use case, which is reasonably performant mid-size codebases that junior/journeyman developers can be productive in almost immediately.

If you read the "Why Nim" posts, they are highly salient points for a 'journeyman' or better developer that wishes to be highly productive on a small project; I read the list of 'better than Go' stuff with that hat on, and it's very appealing.

But, there's too much rope to hang oneself in Nim for my use case. Getting a language stripped down just enough that team productivity over years is maximized is a very, very hard thing to do. I think the go folks have the best take on it right now, and it's run by courteous and responsive grownups who do what they say they'll do. That's a total win in my book.

Add in go fmt, a very good (not without warts) module import system, reasonable testing and a multi processor programming model that's easy to reason about, and it is a very, very good solution for my needs.
then those people would already have been efficiency'd out

If free market theory claimed that bad employees can't exist, that would be a pretty strong blow against free market theory ;-)
>This is what happens when you attack meritocracy in the name of making people feel good. It is what happens when you create an unrelenting narrative that continually assaults an industry over how many or few people with a penis or vagina they have in it. It is what happens when you've an industry surrounded by "journalists" who've never spent an actual day in it, ready to fire out articles shaming you for your lack of, or apparent abundance of, penises or vaginas in your company.

Almost. This is what happens when things are as you say and you care what the newspapers say.

HN doesn't allow you to write that in bended blinking neon so I will have to settle for repeating it:

You can only be shamed by those you care about.

As it happens I spend some part of my thursdays teaching school kids to code - boys, girls and those in between. I haven't seen any press attack us for not doing enough to bring more girls in yet, but assuming it comes I don't intend to change anything.
HERE engineer here (yes, I also sometimes hate the noticeable amount of redundancy of our corporate brand). One important point that analysts haven't stressed enough while evaluating potential buyers, is the role our top customers play in all this dance.

By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys hate Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing.

Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO.
What Intuit lobbies against is allowing the IRS to provide pre-filled tax forms to citizens. They don't lobby to keep the tax code complicated.

I post this not to defend Intuit, but to clarify why the tax code is complicated. It's not because Intuit goes to Congress and says "please make this thing complicated." It's because millions of people and companies each go to Congress for their pet issue.

Norquist objects to pre-filled tax forms because he wants people to think hard about their taxes at least once a year. The theory is that if paying taxes is easy and automatic, it will be harder to argue for simplification. No one will care if things are complicated if they can just push one button and forget about it.

It's part of a larger ongoing debate: if government services work so well that citizens don't have to think about them, will that have the side effect of reducing citizen engagement?

It's not so different from the tech concerns about Apple's iOS ecosystem. Will the super easy, super controlled experience of the iPhone result in fewer kids thinking about programming?
And when that limited freedom controls 80% of the mobile industry?
I like it. I agree that there are limits to what can be accomplished in such a short timeframe, but there's plenty of work that could fall within those constraints. I'm often asked for opinions that don't involve code at all, just an overview of the tech that's out there that could be applied to a given problem. That sort of thing could easily fall in to a couple hour time frame. It could be the twitter of freelancing. :)
Well, I know you can remove all fobs from a system with that same method listed above, so then only the physical key will open it.

But that sucks there are so few codes they can all be scanned.
Spoken like Richard Stallman, which is why GNU/Linux desktop took over the world right?

If you're so interested in freedom, why aren't you picketing Apple Campus too?

The practical effect of your viewpoint is hundreds of millions of unpatchable Android ROMs, exposing vast quantities of devices to viruses, and HARMING actual people.
I just had a conversation with a friend about this. He was leaving a country where haggling is the norm, and he wanted to buy some gifts in a hurry, on the way to the airport. So, he tried to say: "I don't have time to haggle; this is my offer; take it or leave it." The TL;DR: it didn't work. He paid more than he wanted and wasted more time. What we figured is that, as with salary, the negotiation is important so everyone feels like they won. Your worth to your employer is only half of the equation. The other half is what you require. Neither are simple, and the point of the negotiation is to find an amount that makes you both happy.
GAO Warns of Cyber Risks In-Flight
Black and Latino representation could simply be due to the fact that the cost of entry into tech related fields is pretty high and a lot of minorities live in poverty.
To me that looks like evidence to the contrary.
> Also: if what they wrote was right, what does it matter what their gender is? Right is right, wrong is wrong.

This depends greatly on who the commentator is. Meredith's recent piece touched on this - https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

To some, you do not get to have a voice unless you comply with certain identity requirements. How right or wrong you are is irrelevant unless you have the identity that says you get to speak.

To others, such as us, this is madness and truth is no respecter of identities.
Benchmark: why you shouldn't access the DOM directly
Anecdotal data to agree with type annotations:

We have a fairly large Python codebase here. I've been wanting to move away from Python for a whole host of reasons, a top one being that it's dynamically typed. However, when mypy was released, that was enough of a reason to port from Python2 to Python3. Now we have a mostly-annotated codebase, and I'm a lot happier.

We'll probably move away from Python eventually (I still don't think it's an especially good language, and type checking with it will never be as useful as with a language where it's built in and required), but it's not as pressing of a concern.

I think type checking turns Python into a bearable language.
Oh, and to veer back to being on-topic, I'd likely use it and I don't know of another service like it.
If you right click a search field you can "Add a Keyword for this Search". Create a keyword and you can automatically add "bangs" to the search bar in Chrome and Firefox.

I don't understand the point of extensions that bloat the browser when perfectly fine and usable native methods exist. Best thing being that you can create your own and not deal with clutter of ones you may never use.
Show HN: Community of Service Providers
Explore businesses providing the service you are seeking, choose the right offering, and share your experience with others.
If you want linux to run in places where hardware is less frequently updated, yes.
Courts generally hear actual and not hypothetical controversies. If the competition can't yet show harm, there isn't a crime yet.
> I'd be curious how much the people for whom those events/groups are intended generally feel.

I don't know about you, but I'm not at all interested in how the intended audience feels. I'm strongly interested in how their behaviors change with these programs.

Programs that make people feel good but don't change behavior (i.e., don't get more women into tech) are not of value.
Counterpoint: women may not be as interested in technology as men are. This would explain quite a few other things as well (such as more women becomes nurses than men).

Either way the gender bias shows up way earlier than CS starts, let alone the industry. So don't blame the industry, blame HS.