Of Geeks and Girls - <AUTHOR> http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html

<comment><USER2> I'd like to play devil's advocate[1] for a second: why is the lack of women in CS a problem? Whatever the merit of all these explanations -- it's perceived as dorky, low status, overly masculine, etc... -- the one thing I _don't_ see is a strong desire amongst women to be in the field. It'd be one thing if there were barriers like overt sexism (and perhaps there are), or if you often heard the refrain, "you know, I'd really like to be a computer programmer, but I can't because of XYZ..." AFAICT, the real culprit here appears to be self- selection.

Assuming that's the case, who cares? Why all the hand wringing? One downside I see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff either works or it doesn't. The other is a lack of interest in the field overall, but it seems a constant source of debate (see any H1B visa thread) as to whether we have a shortage or a glut of qualified workers.

[1] This shouldn't be read as a position I'm strongly committed to.

EDIT: Criticisms of this post thus far are mostly along the lines of a) a woman's perspective matters more than I give it credit for and b) "works or doesn't" is too simplistic. Fair enough. I admit my argument wasn't particularly nuanced (purposefully), hence the "devil's advocate" label. Questions I would ask are: wrt point a), is this something we can empirically validate? Or should we just assume any gender imbalance is inherently problematic? I'm not necessarily against the latter view, but I'd like to see it addressed explicitly.

<comment><USER3> The lack of women in CS is a problem because the CS field is missing out. There are a whole lot of intelligent women that could make important breakthroughs. The field is slowed because half the population is discouraged from joining it.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but there's a second half that people need to consider. CS is missing out on women, but are women missing out on CS?

To paraphrase Phil Greenspun (from the "women in science" essay), we need to ask if CS "is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it?"

CS at a reputable university is hard. Seriously, seriously hard. I have no doubt that people who can handle this can also handle the academic rigor of a bio major followed by med school, and they sure as hell can handle an econ major followed by an MBA, or sociology major followed by law school.

So I'd start by asking: what are the women who are able to do CS doing instead, and would it be in their better interest to stop doing that and study CS?

<comment><USER5> >but are women missing out on CS?

This, I think is the central problem. It seems that most of the really really intelligent women I know have gone into other fields than CS because that's where their interests lie. CS simply wasn't a fulfillment of their interests not some more nefarious discrimination problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gah! The article contains yet another misrepresentation of what Lawrence Summers said:

> _former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested that men are > hard-wired to be more analytical than women_

What he said was that there was more variance in IQ in males than in females, thus there are both more stupid males and more intelligent males - there are more males at either ends of the spectrum. Given a filter for extra-high IQ, you would then expect that there would be more males in that sample.

<comment><USER7> Minor nit: what Larry Summers said is that there _might be_ more variance and it was worthy of study. He never drew any conclusion.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. In fact, I wasn't convinced that he actually considered it anything more than speculation, but brought the point up in a very academic, even devil's advocate, way.

<comment><USER9> Given the evidence that already exists, I would be surprised if he considered the idea _just_ speculation.

The fact that men have a greater variance in ability than women has been repeatedly confirmed. Depending on which characteristic of intelligence is being measured, the variance among men is generally 1.07 to 1.17 times as great as the variance among women. Vocabulary is an extreme, there the variance is 1.4 times greater among men than women. See [http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3238/version/1/files/...](http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3238/version/1/files/npre20093238-1.pdf) for verification of that.

The open and difficult question is how much of the over-representation of men at the top echelons of society can be attributed to this variation of ability versus sexism. While the question is going to offend and be controversial, I agree with Summers that the principle of academic freedom says that academics should be free to ask it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm very surprised to see feminists studying the 'Roissy' [1] theory of female career choices.

In short, the theory is that women are extremely intolerant of low status men and try to avoid working in fields where they are prevalent, and particularly in fields where they are respected. It actually has a reasonable amount of predictive power, certainly more than the sexism theory.

I'll be blown away, however, if we actually follow the theory to it's logical conclusion...

[1] Roissy in DC is an extremely sexist, but insightful blogger. He didn't state this theory, but I've heard it described as the 'Roissy' theory since it follows his line of thinking.

<comment><USER10> That theory is not the one explored in the studies described. The theory was that the women perceived the environment to be unwelcoming.

<comment><USER7> They found that women are turned off by an environment which suggests "nerdy, techie, stay up late coding, energy drinks, no social life.… They don't frequently take showers."

 _...if she had asked them to describe any other group, like black people or women, they would have refused to answer. "But describe computer science majors? No problem!" she says with a laugh_

The article is caged in PC language, but it's describing nothing but intolerance of a certain group of people.

You'll note that the theory of the unwelcoming environment is easy to debunk; if true, then law and medicine should also have very few women (they were historically unwelcoming to women). Yet somehow, those fields (full of high status men) are now about 50% women.

<comment><USER10> Law and medicine also have large monetary and status incentives. I can imagine walking into certain kinds of offices and feeling like I would not want to work there. I do not consider that intolerance.

<comment><USER7> Good point; a complementary theory would be that women wish to obtain high status for themselves, and the perception that CS is low status turns them off. I don't see how we could distinguish between your theory and the 'Roissy theory', so it is equally valid.

As for intolerance, I'm not sure how we could consider your unwillingness to tolerate certain kinds of offices as anything other than intolerance.

<comment><USER10> Scratch off women and just say: "some people wish to obtain high status for themselves." Some people aren't as concerned with status - it's not that they don't care, but they're not willing to put up with as much crap to gain it. (Doctors and lawyers certainly put up with a lot of crap for their perceived status.) If we further assume there is an occupation with middle status, but has nontrivial social barriers to a certain group, then there's not much incentive for that group to break in when there are plenty of other occupations with the same status.

The differences between what I said and what you said: mine could apply to any group, not just women, and I'm assuming that only a smaller subset of most people are willing to pursue high social status despite the extra burdens; most people are fine with middle status.

Also, intolerance of an environment is different than intolerance of a group of people.

<comment><USER7> The article suggests that women are turned off by the perception of low status to a greater extent than men.

Regarding middle status jobs, there are plenty of formerly male-dominated middle status jobs which women have successfully broken into, e.g. advertising (c.f. Mad Men).

Any explanation of why women do not enter math/phys/CS must come up with something that distinguishes math/phys/CS from those other fields. Being a "middle status job" doesn't do it, nor does initial unfriendliness. I'd suggest that one possible explanation is that "geeky" pursuits are actually _lower status_ than most comparable office jobs, and more women than men are turned off by low status.

<comment><USER10> I guess we'll just have to disagree; I saw no indications of status in the article. All I saw were perceptions of the environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's some anecdotal info that bothered me when I saw it. I've graded several CS 1 courses and found that out of the class of 20-30, there might be 2 or 3 women, tops. Fine and good, since my school's engineering dept is 87% male and the CS dept is 92% male. However, the thing I noticed was that too many of these girls did poorly in the first few weeks and frequently dropped the course altogether; I'm not sure what they did then, since you can't really do any CS/IT/SE/CE degree without CS 1. Of the guys, maybe 1 or 2 would drop.

Why does this happen? My school _is_ trying hard to get more women in CS and engineering fields, which may mean poorly-qualified girls are being accepted and pushed into these degrees; are we just a statistical anomaly? The numbers in the article would seem to indicate otherwise. Anyone else have insights from their own grading/teaching experiences?

Oh, and regarding pair programming, it's the best possible way to make sure you won't want to see your friend's face for another week, because half the time one of you will want to do something the other one just doesn't "get", so you sit there and explain it repeatedly when you could have just implemented it by yourself, all the while watching your teammate type with a speed and error frequency generally associated with senile chimpanzees.

<comment><AUTHOR> The comment above you (well right now) indicates that women are less experienced coming into introductory classes. It makes sense that they'll have a higher failure rate, as it's difficult to compete against people who know more than you.

<comment><USER12> In my experience, they're not only less experienced, but they're continuously falling further behind in experience, at least for the first couple of years. They try to approach the first couple of years of CS the same way you treat the first couple of years of any other major, like math or biology: read the assigned reading, master the concepts, do the homework, and study for the tests. Take a lot of other interesting courses, and spend the first year (or two) deciding whether to major in CS or History or maybe Religion with a pre- law emphasis. Then, as a junior, start thinking about a substantial senior project that will introduce you to practical work. Just like any other college kid.

But that just doesn't work in CS, not at most schools. The curriculum is designed for the average (or slightly below average) student, who already has some programming experience and OS knowledge and who is actively engaged in acquiring more experience and more savoir faire. An intelligent person with no experience can catch up, but only by focusing hard on CS and putting in a lot of extra work to catch up with the other students.

Is there any point in accommodating anyone else besides the lifelong hobby hackers and the focused enthusiasts? I think this is an important question. From a competitive standpoint, there's clearly no point. There are plenty of hard-core geeks, and it seems intuitively obvious that the curriculum can be more advanced and interesting if you take the students' strengths for granted. Washing out everyone else means you can produce graduates who are more deeply knowledgeable about computing and who are better equipped to be productive in typical industry jobs.

On the other hand, it homogenizes the field and bakes in the personal peculiarities -- positive and negative -- of the kinds of people who get deeply interested in computers as teenagers.

Obviously the PC answer (as well as the "big picture, good of society" answer) is to accommodate as wide a range of people as possible. At selective universities that is probably feasible, and if feasible, is the right answer. However, I got my degree in a non-CS field and only took CS classes when I was unemployed for a while early in my career. I took those classes at a community college and at a night extension of a crappy state school. In those classes, it was clear that some of the the geek/hobbyist students had a chance of being decently productive at industry jobs, but the students who had not done any hobby programming, whose only knowledge came from the curriculum, were completely hopeless. It was obvious they would never be competent enough to contribute in any industry job unless their primary competence was something other than computer science. For vocational training, I think it's unrealistic to encourage these "lightweights" to pursue a degree in computer science, because they'll never achieve a useful level of competence. You might as well wash them out and focus on the lifelong geeks, who at least can become competent coders or QA guys.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly the reason why most folks will never program; not because they don't have the capability to be competent, but because we have this odd culture _around_ programming. There's this belief that CS is something that you have to start when you're young and be obsessed with your whole life to even do.

In any field- math, bio, art, music, the people who are _best_ at it are those types- the start-early would-do-it-for-free types. But there's a whole lot of people milling around who could be second best. In other fields, being second best or not that into it is acceptable.

In computer science it's not. And more importantly, because programming and computer science are often equated, this prevents a whole lot of people from programming.

And who needs to program? I'd argue that the time is past where only computer scientists need to program. Everyone needs to program; biologists, mathematicians, linguists, social scientists... (maybe not the English majors, but w/e) and this idea that programming can only be done by people that started when they were 5 year old boys is a huge loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem I have with this sort of research is that I think it makes too much of the "because your female you dont like that sort of stuff" myth.

Im a guy, I love all things tech (and am a bit geeky about it). However I never liked Star Trek and whilst I read Science Fiction / Fantasy the whole D&D and more mainstream Warhammer type stuff makes me squirm. I imagine that same room would put me off too; unless it had something cool in it (for example a complex lego "star trek" model) that appealed to the engineer in me.

I know a fair few CS majors - most are men. But there are easily as many women as hardcore star trek style geeks. Some of the most hardcore geeks are women.

I really think this is a lot more complex than star trek :)

<comment><USER14> I find it odd that you are appealing to your anecdotal experience, when they had studies where the actually subjected actual women to these environments and observed their reactions. Also, they quote some of the hardcore geek women or which you speak, so I do not understand where you find yourself disagreeing with the research or the article.

<comment><USER13> Firstly I cant see any information about who was tested etc. and how many. To really refute it I would need to see that.

My main point was r.e. the Star Trek thing. I agree entirely that it might put women off (as I said, it even puts me off) but I am not sure it is good evidence that this is how women [or anyone] perceive cs (and so puts them off). The test doesn't cover that issue at all.

It's like saying "we did a study where we found all men were unable to breast feed babies. As a result we conclude only women can get pregnant" :)

<comment><USER15> Realise it's completely off-topic - but did you know that men actually can breastfeed? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article misrepresent's Samuel Gosling's research. It says that Gosling's experiments show that people can make "surprisingly accurate" assessments of strangers by looking at their personal space. In fact Gosling's research shows that people can form a more accurate assessment from a first impression (even a still photo) than they can from looking at someone's personal space (such as a bedroom or cubicle), and in fact people get many things wrong by looking at someone's personal space. If you want to know exactly what you can and can't tell about someone's personality from looking at their personal space, get his book.

<comment><USER17> You seem to be referencing this: [http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/scal...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/scales_we.htm#Personal%20Living%20Space%20Cue%20Inventory)

Is that correct?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the article: "No matter what we do to that room, even if we make it all female, women just don't feel like they belong there."

Could it be that is is just computer science that many women don't feel attracted to? The statement above seems to contradict her own research, and she fails to see it. The stereotypes seem _really_ outdated, too.

Or maybe women just tend to be intolerant... _ducks_

<comment><USER19> How does it contradict the research? By 'no matter what we do', it doesn't mean she's swapping out the geeky material for the magazines (which makes women more comfortable, apparently), it means she's doing everything without changing the requirement that the room needs to be filled with nerdy/geeky material. The second part of the sentence reinforces the fact that even if it's made clear that it will be an all-female room/team, they still feel uncomfortable.

<comment><USER20> It's a poorly worded sentence. I felt it contradicted the research on first- read as well. Since they specifically placed objects rated with high masculinity in the room, the "even if we make it all female" sounds as if doing the opposite doesn't help.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I understood it like that - even if the decor is "female" women won't like it. So I guess I misread it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does the heavy-equipment industry have similar discussions?

"Hey, how come there aren't more wimmin running our Caterpillar D9s in the Brazilian rainforest?"

Oh yeah, Philip Greenspun points out science is a dead end job for any ambitious woman: <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

<comment><USER22> You mean, like this?

<http://www.sistersinthebuildingtrades.org/>

If you go to the "About Us" → "Our Supporters" menu item, you see a list of donations, and the majority of donors are labor unions.

<comment><USER21> Donations for 2009 under $4k ; donations for 2008 under $15K ... sorry this is not a significant organization.

<comment><USER22> It's not the only group of people interested in the subject of getting more women involved in the traditionally-male building trades occupations. If you want to find more on the subject, you can Google for it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like this article because it points out women are also geeky and that it's OK to be geeky. Women just may tend to have a slightly different way of expressing that geekiness.

You want girls to feel comfortable because you want the girls who are good at CS to go into CS. This is independent of how many women go in total. But since we're at it, let's talk about the biology arguments:

[http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/17/how-does-biology- explain-...](http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/17/how-does-biology-explain-the- low-numbers-of-women-in-somputer-science-hint-it-doesnt/)

<http://www.mun.ca/cwse/Cannon,Elizabeth.pdf>

according to the above study, undergraduate women in engineering showed comparatively a higher interest in math than men though slightly lower interest in engineering and yet lower interest in physics.

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/>

Through additional work CMU increased their percentage of women in CS from 8% to 1995 to 42% in 2000. One thing I recall is that women were not as experienced when they first got into CS and had to work harder. However they believed they had caught up by junior year.

<comment><USER24> _But since we're at it, let's talk about the biology arguments_

The geekfeminism link addresses the almost-strawman argument that women don't have the math or analytical skills needed for CS. It doesn't address the possibility that there are biological reasons for differing levels of interest in the field.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the first link addresses a strawman but I bring it up because other people still bring it up.

The second link discusses interests and influences for female undergrads majoring in some kind of engineering, not CS, though I still think it is somewhat relevant. I find the influence on family members to be the most interesting.

The third link has papers specifically related to interest. One is titled "The Anatomy of Interest." It discusses why women who started college enthusiastic about CS ended up leaving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _"I said, 'Where's my phone right now? It's over there, in my purse.' I basically said, 'You're not designing your phones for women."'_

It startles me just how pervasive some stereotypes are.

The quoted assertion appears to depend on two generalizations. The first is that women use purses instead of pockets , and the second is that they leave purses "over there." The implied converse generalization is that men don't leave their phone or its container "over there."

It makes me wonder if the inclusion of this quote was intentional foreshadowing on the part of the author.

<comment><USER26> I've seen guys leave their phones in jacket pockets on the backs of chairs, but that's way rarer than women not having a phone within arm's reach. To generalise, of course, but pretty much every other woman I know uses a handbag (purse) of some sort and won't always have it glued to their arm. Even I do, occasionally -- skirts don't have pockets, y'know, and it's more comfortable not having a giant iPhone in a tiny pocket. I used to be considered 'blokeish' for not having a bag and keeping my cash/phone/keys in my jeans or coat pocket. It's a fair enough generalisation in my experience.

<comment><USER27> Bonus points for using the term 'blokeish'.

<comment><USER26> Er, at least in certain contexts, calling a woman blokeish is implying she's a butch lesbian. I used to be a female computer scientist with a buzzcut (and the pockets thing). Everyone thought I was gay.

(I'm not.)

<comment><USER27> Certainly not implying that, just appreciating diverse vocabulary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The overall lesson to learn from the article is "Both men and women decide if they belong in an environment based off cues from the environment itself."

That seems clear enough, but I started to think about how the lessons learned here might be applied elsewhere. Namely, how could this lesson be applied to help us, my fellow geek friends, out with the ladies?

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want women to feel comfortable around you and in your surrounding (ie home or office), then you have to provide some cues to make them feel like they belong - barring that, at least remove the cues that make them feel like they definitely don't.

I'm not saying redecorate your apartment with pink unicorns everywhere, but maybe just start off small:

\- Replace the 1-foot-tall Yoda replica with a potted plant

\- Replace the wall of empty Mountain Dew cans with a bottle of water on your desk

Like I said, just simple things to make any potential women that might see your environment avoid the feeling that they "simply don't belong here."

I know the article isn't really about how to improve your odds with the ladies, but I see no reasons not to apply the lessons they are learning with actual research to other areas of our lives - especially one that our demographic has historically had difficulty with.

For once we are getting info on how to make women feel more comfortable that is backed by actual research as opposed to mere speculation and guesswork. Why wouldn't we try to make use of that information in as many ways as possible?

</comment><comment><USER29> Heres some anecdotes for you. Im a guy, i gave up on programming for a while because i perceived it as both boring and dry. I didn't want to work in a cubicle, so i decided that maybe some of my other hobbies, like photography, drawing or writing could become my career.

I knew i was a techie, I've grown up with dissembling stuff and figuring out how stuff works and making stuff, its just that i didn't see programming the same way i saw drawing in my notebook. I do now.

If there are women reading this, and you LOVE making stuff, don't let stereotypes get in your way. If you don't like assholes don't work with them, if you don't like cubicles don't work in them, if you don't like smelly apartments with star trek posters on the wall, don't work there. Build your own environment, find like minded individuals and MAKE THINGS. I don't know if being a woman makes this harder, it probably does. Me, i can handle asshole nerds and their smelly apartments(i am one), but i avoid dry and sterile offices and bureaucracy as much as i can. Perhaps the extra effort isn't worth it, if i couldn't work in an environment of my taste, i probably wouldn't be a programmer, and be an artist instead, even though i SUCK as an artist a lot more than i suck as a programmer, and i don't find it as much fun as i used to when i sat bored in a classroom in high school.

</comment><comment><USER30> There aren't very many women in CS because there aren't very many women in CS.

It's a "social norm" issue. How many girls deciding on college can look to a woman in the field? How many of their friends are going on to major in CS? Or will even tell them that it's a good idea?

It's similar to another question: Why aren't there more African-American backpackers? The number I see tossed around a lot is that only 4% of backpackers are African-American.

</comment><comment><USER31> quote: "She interviewed at Motorola, a cell phone company, and Adobe, a graphic design company." - The person who wrote this article didn't even bother researching the companies. Motorola does a heck of a lot more than just cell phones. And saying Adobe is a graphic design company is like saying GE is a refrigerator company.

</comment><comment><USER32> Since when does science have anything to do with anyone feeling "accepted"? I just spent 12 minutes reading the dialog here and perhaps this post is a result of an emotional response but seriously, most people I know involved in computer science (that are any good) got there by persevering enormous social discomfort. If you have a love and a passion for this work you will do it and no amount of messy labs and Star Wars posters is going to change that.

Maybe I'm missing the point and correct me if I'm wrong, but allot of computer science has already been created/invented/defined by women (the first compiler, arguably the first programming language, etc.).

So if you have something to contribute, pull up a keyboard and start hacking; computer science is one of the few arts/professions where today you need little more than a computer and an internet connection to become as good as your talent, creativity and willingness to invest the time will allow.

 _"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."_ <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison>

</comment><comment><USER33> I would like to see a study that shows if the increase in women in other science and engineering fields can be attributed to anything those fields specifically did to attract more women or if it can be attributed to something else entirely.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm actually rather surprised that the researchers had as much luck as they did (with either gender) in the "dentist office waiting room"-like environment. I personally cringe every time I have to go to my dentist office, precisely because I have to look at his horribly generic, lifeless waiting room. At least the nerdy-gamer room had some personality.

Perhaps my feelings about generic, lifeless rooms are just atypical.

<comment><USER35> They were expecting a class to be taught in it, so it wasn't the vile pit of hour-long silent pastel neutrality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The obvious followup is to try to figure out what it is about the Star Wars posters and messy environment that makes women uncomfortable.

My guess is that women feel like they are biologically different than men, and geek paraphernalia is seen as a signal that the environment will be dominated by men who don't understand women. Any women here want to agree/disagree?

<comment><USER37> I had a pretty immediate negative reaction when I just read about the room described. Now, I'm trying to figure out why I had this reaction.

I think the room communicates an environment of obsessive and messy people, and that really isn't the kind of people I'd like to be around. I would have felt better if it wasn't just Star Trek, but various posters of stereotypically nerdy things. If it had been all posters of Harry Potter, I'd still feel uncomfortable. Also, a life-size bust? Really? I would think a life-size bust of anything to be weird, even if it was Zachary Quinto or George Washington.

A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you uncomfortable?) The article described a mess of discarded computer parts. At a past company that I worked for, I got to visit the IT room, which had neat piles of spare computer parts organized in the middle of the floor. Although I did think it was weird that the stuff was just lying on the floor, I did have to resist an urge to crawl along the floor and check out everything (I totally would've done it if the HR people weren't watching me). If it had been a disorganized pile of discards, I wouldn't have given it a second glance.

> My guess is that women feel like they are biologically different than men

Um yes. I do feel that I am biologically different than men.

> and geek paraphernalia is seen as a signal that the environment will be > dominated by men who don't understand women

Hmm, I think the closest place of "geek paraphernalia" that I've been exposed to is my school's linux lounge. The place has a bunch of working computers and some old computers to be stripped for parts, bookcases of CS textbooks, posters of the Linux penguin, signs made of the reflective side of compact discs, but there's nothing about this environment that turns me off. If the room had instead been covered with something I had zero interest in (like Star Trek) then yes, I would be a little put off.

<comment><USER38> _A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you uncomfortable?)_

A messy environment does not make me uncomfortable.

I wonder how much people's dislike for disorder relates to the amount of time they look for things. It seems like the people that keep the most ordered desks spend the most time looking for things. However, I rarely need to find physical stuff in my environment so it's just not that important to me.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but this isn't your mess, this is someone else's mess.

<comment><USER38> I am generalizing that your willingness to tolerate disorder in your personal environment relates to your tolerance for a generic messy environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A question for all the male programmers here. Do you really think that the single most important fact about you is your sex? I'm going to guess, no.

So why are we trying to lump 50% of the population together into one bucket? There is no single unifying thing for every single woman out there. If there is, it will be either:

a) something all (most) humans want, such as the desire to be respected, or

b) something the woman herself considers relatively insignificant

Guess what, CS will never appeal to "the generic woman", just like it won't appeal to "the generic man". This is simply because they don't exist. This may come as a surprise, but not all women like the color pink, or cooking. And I personally don't understand the appeal of watching football on TV. Both my wife and I enjoy our video game nights together though.

So, in conclusion, don't market CS "for girls". Market "CS for smart people who want to make things". This is what's relevant, not gender.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a problem I've personally never understood well. Of all fields, the CS (I mean "software") field seems particularly eager to have female representation. Women generally score well in math and logic tests, perform well in school, etc. Anecdotally some of the better students in my CS undergrad coursework were female. In some industries (e.g. gaming), getting women into the development side of things would revolutionize the industries by opening the market to 50% of the population by producing products that cater to that demographic.

It just seems that fewer women enjoy doing the kinds of things you have to do to be successful in this particular field than in some other.

That's not to say there aren't women who participate in the field, but I've found, anecdotally, that they tend to view it as paycheck instead of passion (and maybe not insignificantly, the lions share appear to come from Asian countries with those country's concepts of work ethics and good jobs fueling most of those women). I think there are far more males who, for whatever reason, feel passionate about learning to build software.

Related, I've found anecdotally that _most_ "geek girls" I've met are not as much into the substance of geekdom as they are into the image of geekdom. I've met lots of women with Pac Man t-shirts and binary watches at Anime festivals who couldn't give a rats ass about clock cycle counts for MOV operations on different revisions of the 80486 chips, but I've met lots of guys in the same clothing who owned aged dog-eared copies of Intel's multi-thousand page CPU Guidebooks (and read them for escapism).

For guys, seeing another guy dressed out of the ThinkGeek catalogue is a powerful signal of relevant knowledge, an ice-breaker of sorts as to how to relate. While there certainly are real geek women, their cultural appearance doesn't necessarily provide the same signaling. So when a geek chick shows up, the conversation switches basically to something less geeked out (at least in my experience) out of politeness.

I suppose this has two sides to it, the geek chick isn't then immersed into the kinds of topical discussions about xyz algorithm so she doesn't learn about it which cascades into never really getting as good as the boys, but to the boys, they learned about this on their own, in isolation, because they enjoyed it, and can't understand why anybody has to really be "coached" into becoming a geek.

 _full disclosure, I met my wife in a programming course, and she most definitely looks at it as paycheck_

</comment><comment><USER40> I think a major problem is that much of computer science is not interesting. And indeed, almost all jobs that you get after graduation are not interesting either.

It's too much like a "pen science" -- focusing too much on implementation and not enough on application. Imagine a science where students learn to write as quickly as possible with a pen and to fill the page with as much writing as possible. Who would want to get a "pen degree"?

The fact that many men want to major in CS reflects poorly on men.

The CS curriculum needs to be redesigned to be more applications-oriented and the major needs to be renamed to reflect that change.

<comment><USER41> i haven't RTFA yet, but i'd be interested in seeing whether the same gender gap exists in other countries; from talking with friends who grew up in places like Eastern Europe, it seems like it wasn't as 'nerdy' for women to like engineering, math, or computers, so more talented women got into the field in college and as a career

<comment><USER42> Malaysia has much higher proportions of women in Computer Science (~50%). It's almost as if it's purely a cultural and social issue...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Where do these uber nerdy programmers with poor hygiene habits work? I've worked at a large corporation and a small start up in Silicon Valley, and I'm hard pressed to think of any. Is this a minority that's somehow become the stereotype for everybody?

</comment><comment><USER44> In other words, once again we are told that men are responsible for women's problems.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. I was all prepared to wince at this article when I read the title. However, the researchers go out of their way to say that some middle ground should be found that welcomes women without rejecting current geek culture. They made a point of quoting geek women who embraced computer science in least in part because of its geekiness.

Ah, having typed this far, now I notice the obvioustroll username. Trolled, indeed. :)</comment></comment>


Twitter's Moment - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2015/twitters-moment/ <comment><USER2> Twitter lost a decent chunk of its ecosystem and its users when imposing ridiculous API limits for 3rd party clients and killing them off.

Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning _their_ image embeds, which pissed off even more users.

Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out). I'm fairly capable of reading an entire day worth of backlog (though, again, provided it is not more than 800 tweets, once again a pointless API limit).

Getting new users all right, do whatever the fuck you want, but do not drive away even more of the most hardcore users unless you want to have a Twitter filled with brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.

<comment><USER3> > Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't > get default (or if it does, make it opt out).

This is actually the first thing they've added that really bothers me. Not the feature itself (I'm sure this is incredibly useful for many people), but that there's no way to disable it for people (like you and me) that don't find it the least bit helpful.

Most people (I think) follow very many accounts (many of which are quite "noisy") and probably miss most of the tweets of those they follow - but I don't follow many accounts (and only a handful that tweet more than say a few times a day) so whenever I open Twitter (several times a day) I scroll down to where I left off and read up.

<comment><USER4> If you click the X in the top right and say no to "did you find this helpful" it disappears forever.

<comment><USER5> If by forever you mean "until the next time you open the app".

<comment><USER4> It's possible we're on opposite sides of an A/B test, but it hasn't shown up for me since dismissing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much as I respect Thompson's insights (his Stratechery newsletter is worth subscribing to), I think that he's off base with this analysis. Moments seems to be one of those products that media-watchers like, but that actual users don't really care for. I wrote a post on the reasons why I think Moments will fail (or at least not contribute meaningfully to user acquisition) [1], the main points being that Twitter users are not interested in curation, they are interested in sharing real-time information; and the tweet format is not good for curation -- it's designed for real-time information, not for the past. Curation implies context, and there's little context in 140 characters. In defending Moments others have said it's like Circa. The only problem with that argument is that Circa failed. Twitter needs to concentrate on product extensions that work with the real-time nature of the content.

[1] [http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of- reason/](http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/)

<comment><USER7> I agree. Curation isn't going to be that interesting to a large portion of users, I think. At least, it's not interesting to me.

It might be more interesting if users are permitted to create and share their own curation "playlists" with others.

Thompson's comments towards the end about how they should fix conversations and embedding are spot-on, though. I don't know why they didn't fix these things many years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It isn't just Moments, Twitter is failing on a lot of fronts.

* Spam bots that are way obviously spam still make it through, and some days constitute the majority of my new followers. (These are not subtle spam bots, but rather accounts that come in groups of 4 or 5 all using the same strange URL shortener.)

* Moments seems to be what was previously codenamed "Lightning" if that's the case, I'm super disappointed. Not even close to the "game-changer" I had heard about.

* The direct message limit was raised, thankfully, but honestly a little late. I've actually had DMs like "Hey let's switch to GChat" because it was just to communicate and use their site for more than anything tiny.

* People in this thread are already talking about stale content on Moments. The last few times I've logged into Vine, it still highlights the VMAs—which happened in August.

* I used to be OK with the Ads in my Twitter feed, but they've gotten to be too often and too out of touch

Put another way, Paul Graham once mentioned that a mark of something great was when you can't imagine the world without it anymore. The example he gave was with HelloFax. If Twitter went away tomorrow, I'd say, "meh," and move on.

</comment><comment><USER9> On the day Moments was released, I followed the "Moment" of the Astros-Royals Wild Card (baseball) game. I loved it - it pulled relevant tweets into my timeline and let me follow the game with people doing the same thing around the world. When the game was over, those tweets (and users) were gone from my feed. It was perfect.

Then, the next night, I wanted to do the same thing for the Cubs-Pirates Wild Card (baseball) game, only it was never a "live" moment on Twitter.

Right now, the Blue Jays are playing the Rangers in a "win or go home" situation, but again it's not even a live event for me to follow.

I love Moments from a product perspective, but I can't help but think this was rushed out too soon - right now, there are only two "live" moments. And because it's been rushed out, I can't help but think it's going to cause the same problem Twitter has been trying to fix - that users are going to try it, not get it, and never come back.

Moments should be about _live_ content. It seems focused on things that were a moment earlier in the day or week.

</comment><comment><USER10> I knew Moments was doomed when I opened it for the first time and the top card was Astros beat Yankees. I don't think I've ever tweeted about sports, why on earth would you show me this?

<comment><USER11> That + I have no idea what it's even supposed to provide me with. I mean, can't you just search a hashtag and you get the same info?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure I get why "Moments" are any different than putting a hashtag into the search box and hitting "Live". The only difference I can tell is there are a bunch of auto-looping 3 second video thumbnails when I view "Moments" on Twitter.com

So for me, it's another swing and miss. I'm in the Android beta so I get early access to new stuff and the past 2-3 new features haven't interested me at all: the "While you were away" just gets in my way as I try to scroll, the weird lockscreen "Highlights" tweets are poorly done and unwanted.

The only new thing I've liked is that one twitter account that you follow and it DMs you when a bunch of people you follow all share a tweet or follow a new account; that is actually okay and feels like I'm being summoned to check something out that I'll actually care about.

</comment><comment><USER13> So far "Moments" has only served to remind me how much I miss the "Discover" section. That at least tended to serve up some interesting stuff. "Monents" is filled with nothing but the sort of generic stories I don't really need to see a bunch of tweets about.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm sceptical about Moments, but maybe if they start tailoring it per-user it could work.

What I _would_ like to see is a relaxation of the 140-character limit and the addition of threaded replies. This would make it actually reasonable to have discussions on Twitter and would surely greatly increase engagement.

Another useful change would be the addition of tweet categories for each account. For instance, I might be interested in someone's tweets about science, but not like or care about their tweets on sport or politics. If users could categorize their tweets, other users could choose which category or categories of tweets they want to follow. This would not only be good for followers but also good for tweeters, since tweeters would no longer need to worry about alienating followers by posting many tweets that most of their followers aren't interested in.

</comment><comment><USER15> > That diminished stock price undoes rather nicely the golden handcuffs that > are vesting stock grants, [when VCs are] circling Twitter looking to poach > the employees most capable of turning Twitter around

There are widespread well publicized rumors from the press that Twitter will be announcing layoffs[0]. That can't help with keeping people around that they'll need. I actually was scheduled to interview at Twitter a few years ago and cancelled when I got another job instead. I'm kind of glad now. :O

[0] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2015/10/11/twitters...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2015/10/11/twitters- coming-layoffs-if-rumors-are-realized/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not the biggest fan of Moments from a product perspective. It feels too much like Facebook Paper; while I'm sure there are people who want to use their social networks as a general news aggregation feed, I'm not one of them.

Still, it does give me faith that Twitter is focusing more on the "What matters?" side of their product, rather than the "What's happening?" side -- a dichotomy brought up by Thompson two years ago in a post worth reading as a companion piece to this one:

[https://stratechery.com/2013/might-twitter-maximize- potentia...](https://stratechery.com/2013/might-twitter-maximize-potential/)

</comment><comment><USER17> >As far as I can tell, the primary reason none of this has been implemented is that no one at Twitter has had the authority to tamper with the sacred 140-character limit

This is a very perceptive comment and reminds me of Steve Huffman recently making the kind of changes at Reddit that only a founder would have the guts to do.

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/reddit- founder-...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/reddit-founder- steve-huffman.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Count me as a Twitter-believer.

I don't have facebook; too many social pressures & awkwardness with friends/family would occur if I did. Twitter is the place to be for me. I've always liked it and I like moments. But, in general, I like knowing what people are up to outside of the tech-world. I find moments, especially the videos, to be really good and drawing me into whatever is happening. I've also heavily used Twitter's Periscope app to follow HedKandi's Ocean Beach Ibiza event this past summer and it was great.

I think Twitter's services are fantastic, it's just too bad nobody has figured out the profitability angle. I mean, clearly twitter is providing something a lot of people like and use daily. Now, just how do you get money from them, directly or indirectly? =/ I dunno, but I really hope someone solves that puzzle.

</comment><comment><USER19> i think it's funny seeing analyses of twitter that act like the problem is that the product needs tuning. the problem is they need to make money, and as- is there's basically not much good reason to pay them for advertising over facebook, who offer much better targeting.

<comment><USER20> I agree with Ben Thompson's previous sentiment about Twitter although I take it perhaps slightly further than he would which in my own words is this:

At one point years ago, perhaps for the first time in history, a single company (Twitter) had the opportunity for it's privately owned HTTP API to become a ubiquitous defacto Internet Protocol for a particular type of global communication (the notification message) potentially replacing email. (tweet + privmsg could have threatened email)

If they would have stepped into this _integrative_ role, by keeping the API access open and available as a building block for third party developers then I think this may be precipitated quite naturally.

Just as a small example of what I mean by procotol.. the entire "Internet of things" could likely be running on top of Twitter with the twitter @name serving as the defacto way for your refrigerator to claim it's unique global identity and to route messages to your toaster.

       In addition to kitchen appliances Twitter could largely be serving as the messaging backbone for hundreds of the most popular apps and games if it had opted to embrace the Open Web.  Sure serving as a messaging backbone for the whole world would have put additional burden on their server infrastructure, and it would have allowed third parties to monetize tweets, but it also widens Twitter's on-boarding funnel dramatically because it locks myriad diverse products, games, and services into their API.

More importantly I think Twitter would have become the defacto Internet Protocol for both notifications and Identity / Reputation. It would have meant that new systems wouldn't have been able to afford to not integrate with Twitter which contrasts greatly with today's situation where none of them can integrate with because of the onerous legal restrictions outlined in the terms.

      Instead Twitter chose to lock down their API and focus instead on monetizing what traffic they had already captured.  They turned it into an content discovery portal when it could have been a content discovery portal *and* the defacto Internet architecture primitive powering diverse social communities and integrated into just about every network-enabled device on Earth.  After all even the TV news networks were embracing both the @name and the #hashtag.  But then the executives at Twitter somehow decided to dig a moat around the platform, and then a swamp, and then fill it with alligators I mean lawyers, and now in 2015 Twitter has of all things a growth problem.

      I believe that the true hidden potential of the platform lies in Twitter's potential role as the world's ubiquitous identity and reputation broker.. In other words the @name was more valuable than the tweet.

     I think that if somehow the iron fist is relaxed so that the tweets flow open and free then the world at large would learn to embrace the @name as their preferred way to establish digital identity & reputation in place of the fragmented email+linkedin+website that people use today.

I believe that in order to achieve this Twitter should optimize for SCALE rather than revenue. Restrictive terms are massive friction for scale because they dramatically limit the number of vectors through which any individual can discover the product and engage with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn"

No buddy it's not. It's darkest at midnight not before dawn. Try again...

<comment><USER22> You do know that Schrute Facts like [http://www.quickmeme.com/img/72/725fc27cb2efcb89cbde96955e32...](http://www.quickmeme.com/img/72/725fc27cb2efcb89cbde96955e3216afa50ab41598c7ee6203dc1c6877e84be9.jpg) are a joke, right?</comment></comment>


David Maurer, the Dean of Criminal Language - <AUTHOR> https://crimereads.com/david-maurer-the-dean-of-criminal-language/ <comment><USER2> > A "speed ball" was a "shot in the arm" into the "main line," describing > drugs injected into a primary vein.

Huh? A "speed ball" is specifically cocaine or methamphetamine, plus morphine or heroin.

<comment><USER3> Today yes, in the past no. Language changes over time.</comment></comment>


Anyvite: Event Creation Made Easy (YC Summer 08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/anyvite-event-creation-sending-invites-easy/

<comment><USER2> I was invited to a wedding recently. The logistics were rather complicated as it took place in a somewhat remote location that few guests had known before. People were travelling there from far afield using all kinds of transport, some of which had to be chartered just for the event. Also, the whole thing didn't take place in one single location. We were actually moving between at least three locations and a lot of other coordination intensive stuff was going on.

Now when I think back what the invitations looked like, it was nothing like what these invitation sites offer. There were maps and train/bus schedules and reservations and bad wheather provisions and different cases for different groups of people and a lot of real time coordination until very late. Of course there were people who were not in the digital age at all, so everything had to be printed and mailed as well.

I don't know whether it makes sense for sites like Anyvite to cater to these kinds of complicated events and include event organisation features on top of invitations. These events are of course much less frequent (I personally remember only three comparably complicated events). Organisers could certainly use help with that, on other hand rare complicated processes in the consumer space are dangerous for software makers as people don't like to learn stuff if they need it only once every few years. It would have to be simple AND powerful and integrate a lot of communication channels and information sources. It's difficult to get right I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of anything that can displace Evite, but when organizing events, I found I consistently fall back to Evite. Anyvite adds nice-to-haves like RSS, mobile support, and a much cleaner/streamlined UI, but none of these are MUST-haves. If I use anything but Evite I risk people not recognizing the email as an invitation and deleting it. Plus, I have to put up with all the "Why didn't you just use Evite?" jokes. As cool as AnyVite (and Renkoo and Socializer and mypunchbowl and Google Calendar) is, I'd rather spend the extra 10 minutes muddling through Evite. I guess that's sad.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious as to what would you consider a must-have feature to be in an invitation creation site? With more and more people relying on mobile Internet access while on the go, I would think that a mobile interface to view and manage your invitations would be a bit more than a nice-to-have feature. The other issues that you present are definitely hurdles to overcome when attempting to take on a product with a well known brand in the space, but are not insurmountable, as we've seen continued user adoption of Anyvite. Hopefully, in the future, we'll have the product to the point where you wont even consider spending an extra ten minutes on Evite when organizing an event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been using Anyvite to schedule our weekly poker games. In general, it's a great experience. My only wish is that I could copy an event to a new day and/or make a recurring event.

<comment><USER4> We'll be pushing out that feature in the very near future.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I want Anyvite widgets.

<comment><USER4> Soon my friend...very very soon.</comment></comment>


A man patented Uber[Taxi] 29 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/patents?id=khoDAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA6&dq=dial+a+ride+problem&hl=en&ei=EvgOTqCCE9HDtAbu7-zMDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false <comment><USER2> It doesn't matter since the patent expired in 2001.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I have tried to say with this post is that it is execution that matters - maybe this patent had a brilliant idea in it, but it was never implemented.

<comment><USER3> Tech matters too; the necessary IT infrastructure to pull this off was theoretically technologically feasible, but not economically feasible. You couldn't have run a profitable service that could have serviced those costs until you were very, very large already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Uber would not be in violation of this patent. It is based upon the concept of drivers offering rides, which is not how Uber works.

Disclosure: I am not a Lawyer, I work for Uber, and I have been known to hate on software patents.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm shocked, just shocked that at the height of demand-responsive transportation system research that someone would have patented one!

</comment><comment><USER6> Not surprising. It isn't a difficult concept.</comment>


Stack stats - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/13.html <comment><USER2> Here is another possible explanation for the correlation between reputation and CV upload:

Higher reputation --> more time on the web to answer questions --> likely unemployed --> more desire to upload CV.

<comment><USER3> That's a nice theory... I don't have any way to test it, but I've seen a LOT of StackOverflow CVs and have NEVER seen someone who was unemployed.

More likely that they're UNDERemployed, bored at a dead-end, stupid job, so they have time to answer questions.

That said, the typical high achiever on Stack Overflow is also a high achiever at work. I know for a fact that Jon Skeet's employer loves him despite the fact that he has the highest reputation on the site.

<comment><USER4> So one guy == typical?

<comment><USER3> Look at <http://stackoverflow.com/users>, those are all famous Netizens, you should be able to figure out if they're high achievers or just basement StackOverflow nerds

<comment><USER5> I recognize Jon Skeet, Quassnoi, Alex Martelli and cletus... but I know them all from Stack Overflow. I wouldn't say all of those people are famous anywhere in particular other than there?

<comment><USER6> Alex Martelli I recognise; he's a python guru (behind the Python Cookbook, among other things) now working at google. There's a couple of excellent tech- talks on (mostly) advanced python by him that are well worth watching if you use python at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually impressed that they get away with running a site with so much traffic on such minimal hardware. Almost an argument against the cloud/NoSQL/scale-out trends :)

<comment><USER3> Everybody wants to believe their site is going to be The Next Twitter, and as good engineers, they believe that they should build it super-duper-scalable from the beginning so they don't have to re-architect it if it really does take off.

Pragmatically, 99.99% of startups don't become Twitter and will manage fine with one DB server and one web server, especially if you use a compiled language and a commercial-grade database and nice hardware. And even if you become Twitter, well, they had terrible scaling problems, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them one bit.

<comment><USER8> Are you guys still in BizSpark, btw?

<comment><USER9> I heard in a Podcast that they are; and it is valid for a duration of 3 years.

So, they still would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there any examples of domain specific jobs sites that have been very successful?

<comment><USER11> Craiglist's old "Erotic Services" page :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You have to pay $30 to upload your CV?! Why would anyone ever pay to get a job?

<comment><USER3> You're not paying to get a job, you're paying to have your CV seen by employers, which is a heck of a lot less :-)

Having a small barrier to listing a CV ensures that most CVs in the system represent people who are genuinely interested in finding a job and actually have the confidence that they are moderately qualified.

If you've ever been on the employer side, and looked at the resumes you get when you put an open job listing on a high traffic site like monster.com, you get enormous piles of junk, people that are completely unqualified. Our theory is that having 5 qualified candidates is better than having, say, 10 qualified candidates in a pile of 300, both for the employer AND for the employee who would rather be in the smaller pile.

In any case, $29 is a tiny amount. You'll spend a lot more than that on the haircut you get the day before your interview.

<comment><USER13> I spent $14 for a haircut a few days before my last interview a few weeks ago. It didn't help. I should have spent that money playing craps ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't plan on ever submitting my resume to stack overflow careers. I'm pretty confident in the content, but i feel my lack of participating on the site (no reputation) will work against me, thus making the site useless.

of course I haven't looked for a new job since the economy tanked, for all I know dice may not work any more :)

<comment><USER3> It depends on where you are and who you're competing against. In smaller markets, or if you have unique skills, employers searching will be finding a small number of employees, and won't care about Stack Overflow participation. So for example if you know lisp and want a job in Austin, you're competing against exactly one person, who only has 424 reputation, so you're pretty likely to get a call anyway even without StackOverflow reputation.

If you are competing against more people, say, if you're looking for a Java job in the Bay Area, it may work against you, but I doubt if it will make the site useless. In my own recruiting using Stack Overflow careers I found plenty of good people who didn't even use Stack Overflow and I still contacted them because their CVs were great.

<comment><USER3> PS when I search StackOverflow I look for lisp, OCaml, ML, Smalltalk, etc., not because we need them, but because we like to hire people who know them.

<comment><USER15> Joel, on a slight tangent...we've been seeing all sorts of Jeff and Joel bashing posts lately, which personally I don't get why people get so worked up.

If I had to take a guess though, it would be that as you guys get more and more successful there's a fear that you will succeed in creating the number one method in the world for getting a programming job and it will end up discriminating against people who don't answer questions on StackOverflow or fit your model of a programmer.

That somehow you guys end up being the gatekeepers for defining what a good programmer is and how they get hired.

I was wondering what your thoughts are on this?

<comment><USER3> That's crazy fantasy extrapolation, almost too absurd to address, but I will anyway since you asked :)

There are 1492 CVs on StackOverflow right now, and maybe 9,000,000 programmers in the world. Even if we're monumentally successful we're still going to be only a tiny fraction of the hiring of programmers that goes on in the world... a TINY fraction.

I should also add that in the bizarre scenario that StackOverflow actually became a common way of getting programming jobs, it would be a metric ton better than the current system of Monster and Dice and emailing around Word resumes which are scanned in by stupid software that looks at keywords.

<comment><USER16> I think this post is on the money. You have to bear in mind that right now the "gatekeepers" you're referring to are mostly completely non-technical HR people who might as well be using an Ouija board for all their proclivity finding good programmers. One can argue the merits and demerits of judging someone based on their Stack Overflow participation, but it can't be worse than the current reality.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to write a Bloom filter in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://blog.michaelschmatz.com/2016/04/11/how-to-write-a-bloom-filter-cpp/ <comment><USER2> I feel the use of vector<bool> is an iffy choice.

The Bitcoin codebase has a simple Bloom filter implementation you can take a look at that has been in use for some time

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.h](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.h)

[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.cpp](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/bloom.cpp)

<comment><USER3> std::bitset is also a good choice if the number of desired bits is known at compile time

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this would probably be the best choice after templating the filter

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This example works well for raw data but not for complex types. You could make the filter a template, taking the key and a "hasher" function as template args.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion; I wasn't sure the idiomatic way to template this, thanks for letting me know!

<comment><USER4> Probably something like this:

template< class Key, class Hash = std::hash<Key> > class BloomFilter;

<comment><USER5> I don't use c++ so I'm not sure how std:hash works or gets implemented, but the way that guava (Google's java library) does it is by passing in a key and a funnel object. The funnel object is essentially responsible for decomposing the object into a byte stream. The advantage of doing it this way rather than making the caller specify his own hash is that you can use murmurhash3 which you thought had the best properties for the bloom filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Learned something today. Thanks for the article.

Minor nit: it will save readers time if you call out that "p is the false positive error rate". (You reference the error rate, but don't attach a variable name to it.) I had to go to an external reference to figure that out, which meant I learned something else of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion, thanks! I've updated the article accordingly :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or in C[0] or in Go[1]...

[0] - [https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom](https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom) [1] - [https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom-c](https://github.com/EricLagergren/bloom-c)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a standard implementation "everybody uses"? Bloomd seems popular as a bloom filter server.

[https://github.com/armon/bloomd](https://github.com/armon/bloomd)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have also experiments about Bloom Filter in python [https://github.com/erenyagdiran/BloomFilter](https://github.com/erenyagdiran/BloomFilter)

</comment><comment><USER10> How is your laptop spec ? please

<comment><AUTHOR> Intel Core i7-4980HQ

<comment><USER10> SSD, RAM ? I think maybe it affects performance

<comment><AUTHOR> RAM is 1600MHz DDR3. I do have an SSD, but as the memory usage of the program was ~32MB, so I doubt it would have an effect haha</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Useful hack: drinking tonic water (with quinine) reduced my breathing difficulty - <AUTHOR> I used to work with some virus researchers at UCSF, so I saw this pandemic coming early and wrote my friends to warn them on Jan 28.  A few friends of mine and I started to isolate ourselves way before it was required by law where we live, the San Francisco Bay Area.  Despite being very careful, I still seem to have gotten the COVID-19 virus anyway.
The night before the shelter-in-place order was to go into effect at midnight, I went to return a library book and fill my gas tank (despite getting an amazing thing: an email from the library asking me not to return my library book on time).  I think I got it from a gas station pump handle.  I used hand sanitizer right after pumping the gas, but I think I missed some of the virus.  When I got home, I felt a tickle in my right lymph node under my right jaw.  The next day the same lymph node was sore to the touch and stayed that way for 2 days and I had a slight sore throat.  The doctor on my phone consult said it did not sound like COVID-19.
After that, day before yesterday, I started getting a dry cough and I started having difficulty feeling like I could get a full deep breath, but no fever.  The only other time I have felt like I could not get a full deep breath was when I (likely) had the H1N1 flu years ago.  I did not feel like I was going to not get enough air, but it did not feel very comfortable.
Yesterday it was worse.  On the second phone consult with a doctor, said she could not get a test for me because the tests were too scarce.  She said they would not even test a pregnant woman who thought she had it unless she was about to deliver.  I doubted she would prescribe any quinine for me, so I did not even bother to ask.
(continued in comments due to length restrictions) <comment><AUTHOR> (continuation)

I talked a few friends of mine into hunting down some sugar-free tonic water for me. One of my friends brought me 2 liters, dropping them and running away when I opened the door :-). I started drinking it, not really thinking it would help. I drank a liter over a few hours while reading about the world coming to and end and watching serene videos of the earth from the space station set to calming music. A few hours later, still noodling around on the web, I suddenly noticed that my breathing difficulty was almost completely gone, as well as my desire to cough.

Today it is still better and I am on my second liter of tonic, so drinking tonic water when you get COVID-19 seems to be a useful hack. I am only one data point, so we cannot be sure this works. If it works for someone else, we will have a trick. If it works for lots of people, we will have a well- established technique :-). NOTE: you can poison yourself with quinine, so do not drink liter after liter of it: [https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism- found...](https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism-foundation- warns-of-dangers-from-use-of-antimalarial-quinolines-against- covid-19-1029017948)

<comment><AUTHOR> (continuation)

NOTE: you can poison yourself with quinine, so do not drink liter after liter of it: [https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism- found...](https://www.finanzen.ch/nachrichten/aktien/the-quinism-foundation- warns-of-dangers-from-use-of-antimalarial-quinolines-against- covid-19-1029017948)

____

Dr. Nevin noted his concern that members of the public may even attempt to obtain therapeutic quantities of quinine through questionable channels. "Tonic water, whose bitter taste is produced by the addition of quinine or related naturally-occurring quinolines, is limited by U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations to 83 mg per liter of quinine and related cinchona alkaloids," said Dr. Nevin. "However, drinking several bottles of tonic water will result in consuming pharmaceutical quantities, and therefore potentially harmful, amounts of these drugs", said Dr. Nevin. "Tonic water is a prescription medication masquerading as a cocktail mixer."

Dr. Nevin emphasized the importance of recognizing and properly reporting adverse effects from these medications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "While it may be tempting to attribute anxiety, depression, paranoia, or other mental health symptoms to the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, " said Dr. Nevin, "these symptoms may be an early warning sign of idiosyncratic neurotoxicity, and must be taken seriously."

Dr. Nevin noted that adverse effects from chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, mefloquine, quinine, and even tonic water may be reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's MedWatch program, at [https://www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch-fda-safety- information-a...](https://www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch-fda-safety-information- and-adverse-event-reporting-program).

____

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Hope you feel better, but you definitely don't have covid19!

A. Covid takes at least a week or two before being symptomatic. 2 hrs is way too fast.

B. 2L of Tonic water has just 150mg (max) of Quinine. That's not a therapeutic dose in any shape or form.

You would need to drink about 5L a day for 7 days for a therapeutic dose - safe to say that's not realistic.

Hope you feel better - this is either cold or seasonal allergy / flu.

<comment><AUTHOR> The symptoms that people typically notice and report for COVID-19, dry cough and shortness of breath, did not start until about 3 days later, and, further, I am not sure that the gas pump was how I got it, so your conclusion that I do not have COVID-19 is not a sound argument.

If you have the symptoms, you have evidence of the virus. The sore throat may be a red-herring, but I never get symptoms like this from normal flu or a cold, except the H1N1 flu years ago, so that is definitely not it. I am very familiar with how my body get sick.

Again, as I pointed out, the notion of a "therapeutic dose" is not discrete: it is not the case that a small amount does absolutely nothing and then suddenly when you get to the "therapeutic dose" suddenly it does something. Drugs and the body generally do not work like that. If your body is hurting for a molecule and you give it the amount biomedical researchers have concluded will have an effect, it will likely have an effect, but if you give it a bit less, it still might help. Think of any time you have needed anything: even getting one thing was a lot more than getting zero. If you listen to how doctors talk, they say such things all the time: they basically guess how much to give you and then they move the amount up and down by factors of like 2 depending on the results they get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3>
       When I got home, I felt a tickle in my right lymph node under my right jaw

You are saying you went from first contact with the virus to infected within a few hours?

<comment><AUTHOR> The feeling in my lymph node could simply be something else, so that could be a red-herring. However I am familiar with how a cold and flu feel to me, and the only other time I have had shortness of breath was during the H1N1 flu season. It is a very unusual symptom for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems good to know... right up until some people do the usual silliness and overdose themselves out of their meat suit. Especially those taking meds they don't fully understand.

Should be an interesting year ahead of us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I made sure to post the warning of the fact that you can overdose even on tonic water just to make sure people keep that in mind. I find it interesting that there is no such warning on the bottle. It must just be an historic artifact that quinine water is for sale in a grocery store at all. Would it really be approved for sale today, especially without a warning?

<comment><USER4> A lot of things for sale can kill you. People need to take responsibility for decisions rather than live in a bubble of ignorance.

Simply drinking too much water can kill you. From drowning if I recall. The real issue is common sense is now uncommon.

As a doctor friend said to me years ago, everything can kill you given the wrong dose. Tonic water could have a warning if thats a real concern but honestly if you're drinking huge bottles of it you're likely trying to qualify for a Darwin award after some point. I've heard anecdotes of people drinking _litres_ of the stuff. Multiple bottles.

Be aware that a lot of the coronavirus tests are questionable anyway due to them being faulty or worse don't work. Yet another vector for uncertainty.

Good luck with your journey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keep us up to date, would be interesting to hear if you eventually get tested if this was indeed covid.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tests seem to be very scarce right now, but in the future I will definitely want to know if I _did_ have COVID-19. So hopefully antibody tests will become available so at least people who become immune will at least know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got back from a big conference in SF on March 28. Came down with a sore throat on the 30th. A huge percentage of the people I know who attended the conference plus two of my three kids in SF all came down with the same thing at the same time. In other words there is a _much_ more virulent epidemic going on in SF. R0 is probably something like 10.</comment>


Tell HN: A few hours on Hacker News gave us better conversion than TechCrunch - <AUTHOR> We launched http://justmigrate.com to help folks move from Posterous to Tumblr in few clicks (freemium). Our target were people who can't do much with their Posterous backup file and are stuck manually uploading their data into another blogging platform.
We shared the link on Hacker news on Saturday night and picked up some activity on Twitter, by Monday morning we got featured on TechCrunch. Phew a hockey stick, J curve or what ever you want to call it, it was beautiful, soon more websites covered us, our migration signup was designed to think less & do click click click, concluding with a tweet. All this gave us lot of love on twitter, thank you guys. However we were surprised by the payment conversions.
Hacker news - Highest & fastest conversion even though we were in front page for only few hours. Our expectation was very low from tech juggernauts as we thought they would be more comfortable moving to WP using the Posterous backup. They paid without thinking much, and this was amazing. Thank you guys, you are saving our startup.
TechCrunch - Surprisingly faired much lower than hackernews both in terms of conversion & inbound traffic, but they helped us spread across the internet through reblogs & tweets. Conversions took some time from TC users compared to HN. Tweets exploded from 5 tweets in 1min to 30+ per min. The whole conversion effect lasted only 3 days.
Engadget Spain - We got lot of inbound traffic from here but the real conversion spike happened next day, possibly they were evaluating our service. It was fun interacting with them on twitter in Spanish.
Life hacker - They covered us next day, conversions were slow to start with but towards the end of the week they helped us get more stable inbound traffic, ie above average facebook users. Also they score better on SEO.
Hope to get more insights from you all. Lot of users still don't know about Posterous announcement. <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing (and of course, for the product).

It's not just a matter of HN vs TechCrunch, it was that HN _led_ to TechCrunch and other outlets, as they obviously check (or their friends do) HN to see what the community is talking about.

But it's not surprising HN would have more conversions. More people on HN have Posterous blogs than I imagine in other crowds, and probably moreso compared to the average TechCrunch reader.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks you, really appreciate it. Sorry I did not clear myself before, by conversions I meant paid plans. Free plans say a different story.

We had some good number of users trying out the free migration plan but the paid plan conversion was higher for HN when compared to TC, in fact very few HN users even tried free plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this entire service just migrating from posterous to tumblr? How long could such a thing last? April?

</comment><comment><USER4> Any particular reason why you picked Saturday night?

<comment><AUTHOR> We were building this since Jan after hours. On Saturday morning Posterous announced they were shutting down, so we had to launch the same day.

We were actually stoned late Saturday night, yet managed some good customer support and bug fixing.

<comment><USER4> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Microplastics Are Blowing in the Wind - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microplastics-are-blowing-in-the-wind/ <comment><USER2> Well, you can forget about worrying about whether microplastics are harmful to the environment, because they are out there now, all over the damn place and there's no going back. Plastic is literally and figuratively the 20th century turning itself to dust and getting sucked up in Earth's massive recycling systems. It's in everything from seawater to freshwater to salt ([https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/micro...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/microplastics- found-90-percent-table-salt-sea-salt/)) to the air we breathe. It's in the entire food web--our food, our food's food, our food's food's food, and our feces of course ([https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news- plastics-microplastics-human-feces/)). And it's bad for everybody ([https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to- huma...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-humans-a- microplastic-invasion-may-be-taking-a-toll/)). It will be in sediment for aeons, a permanent part of Earth's story, forever. There is absolutely zero chance of ever cleaning it all up.

Good job, 20th century. And right on, 21st century! We really doubled down on money-making at the expense of the environment!

After sifting through the dust, if they ever figured out that it was our _refuse_ , future intelligent beings might well refer to us, quite aptly, as _trash monkeys_.

<comment><USER3> Leaving aside the environmental damage, which is obvious albeit somewhat sensationalized in this comment, how is said plastic actually harming human health today?

The article from Scientific America in the comment refers to the harm plastic can have in other animals in words such as "may", "might", "could". Has there been any study on how it is, now and actually, harming our health? Any measurements, case studies, or collective data from people suffering from any sort of disease related to plastic pollution?

<comment><USER4> > words such as "may", "might", "could".

It's Earth, not a deployment you can rollback, we don't get to play that game.

We're talking hundreds or thousands of years before we'll know how bad we fucked up. Almost every life forms on the planet are linked one way or another, every changes has an impact.

Remember when DDT, asbestos and lead plumbing were harmless to humans ? Then they were classified as "could" be dangerous or "may" be harmful. Now they're straight up banned everywhere.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918521/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918521/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780651/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780651/)

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to- huma...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-fish-to-humans-a- microplastic-invasion-may-be-taking-a-toll/)

[https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-dangerous-are- mic...](https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-dangerous-are- microplastics-to-your-health)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor)

[https://environmentjournal.online/articles/microplastic- poll...](https://environmentjournal.online/articles/microplastic-pollution- number-one-threat-to-humankind/)

<comment><USER5> >It's Earth, not deployment you can rollback, we don't get to play that game.

>We're talking hundreds or thousands of years before we'll know how bad we fucked up. Almost every life forms on the planet are linked one way or another, every changes has an impact.

>Remember when DDT, asbestos and lead plumbing were harmless to humans ? Then they were classified as "could" be dangerous or "may" be harmful. Now they're straight up banned everywhere.

This is exactly the kind of emotional appeals the GP is complaining about. There are tons of different substances you come into contact with on a day to day basis. Most of them will not be harmful in any reasonable quantity. If paper or cotton clothing was invented today the parchment and wool industries would be talking up how it's not proven to not be harmful. Yes, some plastics are probably bad even in small concentrations. Just from a common sense point of view it's highly unlikely that all plastics are bad in all concentrations. No you shouldn't ingest it intentionally. Yes, I'd like to see less plastics in the world. No I don't think it's going to be a massive future problem. If it really does turn out to be a serious problem we'll find a way to solve it. Remember when CFCs were going to deplete the ozone and give us all skin cancer?

<comment><USER4> I hate to be that guy but, did you read any of the links I provided ? It's not as if a weird hippie guy was predicting the end of the world. It's scientifically proven, measurable, it's right here, right now. And it's just the beginning of a very long process.

<comment><USER5> I read the first few and skimmed the rest. Yes plastics are a problem, the same way that smog in cities (mostly solved in developed nations) and CFCs were problems. None of them present an existential crisis to humanity. Sure we might spend a fraction of a percentage of global wealth dealing with the trade-offs of spewing plastic everywhere but we'll be fine in the long run.

<comment><USER4> > the same way that smog in cities (mostly solved in developed nations) and > CFCs were problems.

"were" ?

Unless you live in the country side it _is_ an immediate problem to your health and a time bomb for the planet.

[https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/)

> mostly solved in developed nations

That's exactly the type of thinking that will destroy us. It's always China, or Russia, or developing countries, or your neighbours, or the damn democrats/republicans. Nobody wants to take responsibility. Let's continue to act like 8 years old while our home is slowly burning.

<comment><USER6> I think their point was that technological advancements have 'solved' the problem of smog in the cities that have the legal and physical infrastructure (i.e. developed) to implement the solutions. They did not seem to be saying that pollution is someone else's fault.

<comment><USER7> I live it one of these cities. In California. Beautiful landscape. Fields and mountains and ocean. My car is always covered in filth from the air. As is my balcony. I often stand atop a mountain and look out over the thick, visible layer of smog that tops the city - a city that has made vast progress in the last 4 decades. That progress has gotten us from nearly inhabitable to simply disgusting and unhealthy. Where are these solutions, exactly?

<comment><USER6> I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.

<comment><USER8> You could argue that @dsfu404ed's reply was actually way "nastier", as nonchalant as their attitude was, in the sense that it downplays the effects of "nasty" pollution in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just to point out that for decades there has been asbestos flying around in the air many of us breathe, yet asbestos-related diseases not related to habitual exposure are incredibly rare.

<comment><USER10> Add smoke from wood fires, pollen and microbes from flora, Cross infection from living in close proximity to livestock, and balance that all out against better hygiene standards, better nutrition etc. Micro plastics don't seem like a great thing, but we're probably going to be OK with it in the environment.

<comment><USER11> Plastic is a lot more ubiquitous and less biodegradable though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here we are on a forum with highly educated ppl. talking about what's happening. But what should we do to effect change? It seems to me that some way for us to unite our efforts in some modern internet/technology/mass- communication kinda way might help us break through the barriers to actually making progress. I honestly don't know what that looks like, but I believe if even the ppl. on this thread were able to band together effectively to work on this problem that is whatever-it-is-our-worlds-become I would have hope. I don't know what this "solution" looks like though. A website? A forum? A technology of some form? Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else knows either :(

<comment><USER13> There are groups all over the world with intimate knowledge of every thematic and regional issue working their brains & hearts out trying to effect change. Reinventing wheels is a luxury our living planet doesn't have the time for right now. If you feel strongly about one of the many ways our 'civilisation' is killing our common home, join up with a group you find congenial. The best action is one you can maintain over time, so find something you think you'll enjoy.

Tech isn't a cheap & easy shortcut unfortunately. It's already used with some sophistication all over the world. Attention is in short supply, and grabbing it tends to be expensive or risky. Personally I think Extinction Rebellion is on to something - they've done their empirical homework and are willing to take the necessary risks. But only time will tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We all might be dead before it pays off, but on the upside this could lead organisms the world over to figure out how to deal with our plastics problem.

<comment><USER15> It feels like this development will eventually force us to "help evolution" in this regard and heavily invest in engineering plastic eating organisms that can sustainably live in the environment.

<comment><USER16> We might not need to engineer them, they already evolved, and they might succeed us.

<comment><USER17> Wikipedia suggests the first man-made plastics were made around 1856. I'm not sure 163 years is enough time for evolution to do it's thing.

<comment><USER18> For microorganisms it's plenty of time. Things with very short reproductive cycles can evolve quicker than humans. In [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long- term_evolution_ex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long- term_evolution_experiment) they state that the e. coli went through 66,000 generations in 28 years. That allows for a very large amount of genetic differences to respond to environmental pressures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know of any water filters for home use that absolutely 100% filter out microplastics? Brita has no mention of it on their website, and I'm guessing if they don't, competitors most likely don't either.

<comment><USER20> I'd look at ceramic water filters. Seems like microplastics would slowly work their way through sediment-based filters.

EDIT: quick google search also points at 'carbon block' and reverse osmosis filters

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How dangerous are microplastics?

<comment><USER16> We'll see in a few years. We just don't know the long-term effects yet. And even if we stopped using plastic today, we probably haven't reached peak microplastic yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> i can imagine this stuff works miracles for our lungs too

<comment> 0-_-0 It's likely to be negligible relative to everything else that gets into our lungs</comment></comment>