Twilio looks better from afar - <AUTHOR> http://www.diggz.org/index.php/2012/10/16/twilio-is-like-the-worst-girlfriend/

<comment><USER2> Yet another terrible assassination piece by Johnny Diggz, the CEO of Tropo, a quickly failing Twilio competitor. He has been a real dick since the early days and spreads lies and rumors about Twilio.

<comment><USER3> They're not all lies per se. Tropo/Voxeo also isn't failing :/, they just won Deutsche Telekom's Euro business.

Voxeo doesn't always have the best marketing team, but they do have a lot of technical expertise. Their CTO Jose is one of the funniest people I've ever seen on a panel and he's a delight to converse with.

I don't think any of the metaphors at play here hit the nail on the head.

Voxeo is a large, lumbering enterprise fighting its way into the Carrier world by virtue of erosion. Twilio is the nimble web-focused startup burning the candle at both ends trying to fight the night away.

It's not yet clear which strategy will prevail, but I don't think the mudslinging is the right course either.

Disclaimer: I'm the community manager at 2600hz, which is innovating on the application switching layer of voice communications. We're also full open- source.

<comment><USER2> I say "Tropo is failing" and I mean that their adoption rate is much lower then Twilio is. I'm sure Voxeo has tons of money to throw at Tropo until they run out.

I haven't heard of 2600hz before, great name. I'll check it out!

<comment><USER4> I am curious here. Is there any place to check Twilio or Tropo adoption rate? I'd love to get some numbers.

<comment><USER3> Twilio has like ~150,000 devs in ~4 years, Tropo has like ~300,000 devs in ~16 years. Those are the numbers I hear thrown out, but I'd love to get some harder details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello,

So I have a slightly different take on this. (Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for 2600hz).

I've always thought Twilio was trying to get acquired (their deals with AT&T and Microsoft seemed to imply a conversation was happening in this regard at the very least) but for a valuation north of $1B. My personal feeling is that you can't get a $1B valuation without Mobile and Twilio doesn't really do mobile in the same way 2600hz doesn't really do mobile (at least not yet).

The walled Garden that is Carrier-land prevents native dialing (dialing through the handset dialer instead of a native app/web app/plugin). Becoming an MVNO is super risky, but I was really encouraged by Twilio's announcement with AT&T and even more so by Voxeo's announcement with Deutsche.

This is a big world and the clear winner of the voice API war will be crowned in the mid 20-teen's not now. If your argument is that Twilio will burn out before their acquired, my reply is: Maybe. That's the risk they took, and it's similar to the risk Square took (see this leaked chart: <http://i.imgur.com/b1Sm9.png>).

I admire Twilio because they're the best developer evangelism team I've ever seen. Yes they spend a ton on marketing and they might be the Groupon of Voice APIs, but the fact is that they're doing it, and if they get acquired all of the Voice API companies will benefit from their success.

In short, Twilio doing well actually benefits Voxeo and so I don't understand the worst girlfriend analogy. I'm by no means in love with Twilio, but you have to admire them for what they do: they're hands-down the best evangelists for any platform out there. Their developer engagement is nothing short of awesome.

Cheers,

Joshua

<comment><USER5> Is that chart leaked? Looks like just an outside estimate by Business Insider:

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-06/research/3112...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-06/research/31125966_1_credit- card-specific-merchants-payments-networks)

<comment><USER3> That's what I get for assuming blogs are correct. Thank you for posting the original article, I'll edit my post above to reflect this.

Thanks!!

Oops, too late to edit, guess my mistake has to rest in stone :/.

<comment><USER5> No problem, I only found the original because I was googling around trying to find some interesting commentary on the "leak". In particular, why do transaction costs grow so much faster than revenue? That almost implies that they're going to be processing many more transactions at lower average cost per transaction, so they'll end up paying a higher percentage of the total in fees?

<comment><USER3> My theory is that the additional distribution from their deals with Visa and Starbucks didn't come with the same business terms they're able to negotiate independently.

One small biz negotiating with Square versus the gigantic morass that is Visa. Chances are Visa will have a more dominant negotiating position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Still waiting to find the connection in the article about how Twilio is like the worst girlfriend you've ever had. Just seems like a jaded bias article from a competitor. :-/

<comment><USER7> Even if you take out the competitor factor the article was really about their opinion on Twilio's status as a company.

I expected an article talking about supposedly bad cancelation or privacy policies, something like that. Pretty bad headline.

<comment><USER6> I see he changed the headline. Pretty funny. Not sure how this person has any insight on Twilio financials. It'd be interesting to get this person's own background posted on this space. I think it would pull back the veil of ignorance displayed in his blog post.

<comment><USER3> I don't think anyone would try to argue that Twilio is profitable. They spend a lot of money and while they're going to move 500M minutes this year, those minutes are not free.

The author makes several valid points but undermines the overall critical nature with what appear to be non-sequiturs. If this article was a frank accounting of Twilio's position with some postulative math about their sustainability, I don't think anyone would've objected. The issue was the accusations, most of the content is factually correct (Twilio did raise a lot of money and continues to spend a lot of money).

What we have are two different world views, and it's not clear yet who is correct.

<comment><USER6> Don't get me wrong I think every company has it's issues. Some of the companies you would think are the most stable are some of the most chaotic. However, there aren't too many instances where an article is taken seriously when it's written by a competitor. The fact that Johnny is writing this article while still working at a competitor means this article is meaningless. It holds no water. It comes off as someone who just wants to slam his competitor. If he wants to legitimize this article, talk about the challenges they face. Talk about the problems they've had in the past. Without it, it's a puff piece. He might as well have published this in the Sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cached version at [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.di...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.diggz.org/index.php/2012/10/16/twilio- is-like-the-worst-girlfriend/&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Twiliots" Really?

Voxeo Prophecy is really nice (except for configuration which can be a bit of a quagmire) and their service is good but Twilio is very, very easy to use. This piece reminds me that I need to look at Twilio for more than SMS.

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting (if painful) space. I've played with the Twilio API and for what we wanted (SMS to any phone, ability to dial/talk to a phone and take a response) it seems to be fine.

That my 'phone' service doesn't offer this as part of the package is what I find actually broken. For years and years the answer the question "How can I use my phone?" was "Pick it up, dial, talk." which was fine when it was a person to person communication device. But when it become a 'computer to person' communication device it needed a computer friendly API. Had the phone companies provided that, folks like Voxeo and Twilio and eFax wouldn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER11> I friggin hate Twilio, and I kick myself for ever getting suckered into using it. I'm down to a single account and a single line in, but I need to port it off, and Google doesn't care to port Twilio numbers off to GV. If Twilio could do something other than drop calls to PSTN (I mean here, make a fuggin VoIP call), I'd be singing a totally different song, but it's a one-trick pony.

<comment><USER12> You hate Twilio because you tried to use it for something that it isn't? I don't see what you're saying here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm looking at Twillio for a possible future project and this just prompted me to look at Voxeo which I hadn't heard of. The Voxeo website just doesn't work for me like the Twilio one does, it lacks an pricing information (that I could find quickly) and even the developer section is mostly buzzword filled non- information. The Twilio site gives you pricing information up front and the developer pages show you the APIs and give some examples so that you can really see what can be done with it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Twilio will survive or not have to raise prices but they make me want to use it more than Voxeo even if it has the same capabilities.

I really do hate sites that hide the pricing and documentation or require registration to get them although maybe A-B testing shows that gives better results.

<comment><USER14> Were you looking at voxeo.com or tropo.com? tropo.com is the site for the developer API similar to Twilio, and has a documentation and pricing page linked right on the front page.

<comment><USER13> That looks much more like it! Will look further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The gist of the post is that Twilio is losing money, losing talent, and getting desperate. I don't see why the author couldn't have just said that instead of picking a sexist blog post title -- he didn't even use the girlfriend metaphor beyond the headline.

Edit: They've changed the title. Cool!

<comment><USER16> What was the title?

<comment><USER15> "Why Twilio is like like your worst girlfriend" or something along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really want to like twilio but it's MADNESS that you can't terminate calls over the internet. So you're saying EVERYONE in the company has to have skype numbers just so we can terminate calls?! I would love it if twilio client actually worked but the sound quality makes it worthless. Hopefully WebRTC will fix that but who knows how many more years that will be. Please please, just bite the bullet and build a desktop app that has decent sound quality, supports multiple accounts and can punch through firewalls. It's stunning to me that Google Voice, Skype, and Twilio are so poor at serving business customers.

<comment><USER18> We also just launched WebRTC in beta. Sign up here: <http://www.twilio.com/beta/webrtc> or ping me - my email is in my profile.

If you haven't tried Twilio Client in a while I would encourage you to try again - the call quality has improved dramatically over the past nine months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I don't 100% agree with the piece, our team just stopped using Twilio and is migrating over to MoGreet beacuse of their MMS capabilities. We already miss Twilio's strong community, but MoGreet has been incredibly responsive and supportive.

<comment><USER3> Seen them before. What made you go with them? Their lack of disclosed pricing threw me off... I couldn't seem to find any info on their cost structures.

<comment><USER19> They are a much smaller operation, which means you'll get the personal touch. On the minus side the API is less robust and there is little to no documentation when you need it, I'd give it a stab if I were you, they made it very easy to migrate over!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We know it's a terribly devastating "assassination piece by Johnny Diggz". That's why I fucking wrote it, asshat!</comment>


How to Manage TLS Certificates for 1,000+ Domains - <AUTHOR> https://blog.backplane.io/how-to-manage-tls-certificates-for-1-000-domains-6a6c4c84891a <comment><USER2> Uh, so the suggested management solution is to "hand it off to backplane"?

Would have been nice to have some technical details about the challenges and solutions instead.</comment>


Christopher Domas – The Ring 0 Facade Awakening the Processors Inner Demons - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0F9r0siTI <comment><AUTHOR> [https://infocon.org/cons/DEF%20CON/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%...](https://infocon.org/cons/DEF%20CON/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20presentations/Christopher%20Domas/DEFCON-26-Christopher- Domas-The-Ring-0-Facade-Updated.pdf)

Excerpt: "So, we're in the clear?

Sadly, no.

Instruction grep through firmware databases reveals previously unknown passwords:

Hundreds of firmwares, variety of vendors

Windows kernel

Likely: unlocks processor I did not have."

</comment><comment><USER2> Unfortunately, it seems as thought the scanning tool that Christopher developed is yet to be published on GitHub.</comment>


Google, HTC Respond to Apple Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/22951/Google_HTC_Respond_to_Apple_Lawsuit

<comment><USER2>
          Google: We are not a party to this lawsuit.
         However, we stand behind our Android operating
         system and the partners who have helped us to
         develop it

There is nothing else in the article that hasn't already been covered.

<comment><USER3> And HTC appears to be saying "we have patents too". Apple seems to have convinced themselves that they invented the mobile phone. Seems like a slightly different portrayal of the case.</comment></comment>


Collection of Terence Tao's blog posts - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/spending-symmetry/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the PDF: <http://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/blog- book.pdf>

Older collections:

1\. <http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/whats-new-2007/>

2\. [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/poincares-legacies- cours...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/poincares-legacies-course-notes- expository-articles-and-lecture-series-from-a-mathematical-blog/)

3\. [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/an-epsilon-of-room- pages...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/an-epsilon-of-room-pages-from- year-three-of-a-mathematical-blog/)

4\. [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/compactness-and- contradi...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/compactness-and- contradiction/)

5\. [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/hilberts-fifth- problem-a...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/books/hilberts-fifth-problem-and- related-topics/)

The downloadable versions are labelled "drafts" but are of very high quality.</comment>


Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World - <AUTHOR> https://formareview.substack.com/p/maryanne-wolfs-positive-way-forward <comment><USER2> I've struggled with reading recently (past 5 or 10 years). I used to read so much and for so long, and now I hardly read at all - maybe one or two books a month. Some months, sadly, none.

Part of me thinks it is all the modern tech that has shattered my attention span. I'm too used to seeing something new, refreshing a page, opening a new tab, browsing my twitter feed, etc, that focusing for too long is difficult. This is covered in the article as the first reason, and I think it is the most compelling.

Lately though, I've started rereading some of my old favorite books and I've been pleasantly surprised to find my attention holding up better. As I have less time to dedicate to reading now, I think it's more important to focus on finding good books - and one way to know you've found them is that it isn't a struggle to read them, but rather a struggle to stop.

What success I have with continuing to read has been rereading old favorites to build the momentum and focus back up, and sampling lots of books, finding good recommendations, and not hesitating to give books up if I don't like them or if I think I already understand the point. If I have limited time to spend reading, I'm not going to waste it reading stuff I don't like.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: _Novelty bias_ entices you back to buzz media, _cognitive patience_ is necessary to stick with long form content, and _recursive dimensionality_ of progress through physical pages makes print reading a whole body experience with a sense of place in the material. Author suggests these establish different brain pathways that can be independently developed or maintained.

</comment><comment><USER4> Major 'Anna Karenina' spoiler in this book review...</comment>


Ask HN: Can AGI Be Achieved Through Modular Neural Networks? - <AUTHOR> Neural architecture is largely modular in many higher order organisms, like most mammals. I think Modular Neural nets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_neural_network, with some sort of dynamic topological intermediary will probably be a better approach to more complex, hierarchical problems, and might be a decent shot at AGI, what do you think? Does anyone have further reading about this? I also read Professor Hinton's work about Capsnets and neural module nets, which are somewhat related.<p>I'm working on using them for disease outbreak forecasting. <comment><USER2> I don't know for sure, and I doubt anybody does... but I suspect something like this will play a key role in developing AGI. I've been really inspired by Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" theory[1] as well as Multi-Agent Systems[2] and the old Blackboard Architecture[3] approach, and have been doing some experimenting with that stuff. And like you, I'm really intrigued by Hinton's CapsuleNets work. I'm really looking forward to digging deeper into that.

The other component I think is going to be important, is the idea of a Semantic Network[4].

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- agent_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system)

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

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah very cool, thank you I'll look into it! I think even before AGI, these architectures could be very useful at predicting and forecasting large, complex problems. I'm actually applying to startup school hoping to apply them towards disease prediction

<comment><USER2> Cool. If you ever want to bounce ideas around or something, feel free to drop me an email. email@example.com

I'm also fairly active on /r/artificial on Reddit and on ai.stackexchange.com, as well as #ai, ##machinelearning and ##AGI on Freenode IRC.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the karma milestones on HN? - <AUTHOR>

It seems if you've got less than 100 karma you cannot delete your posts/comments. I think I read that if you have more than 500 karma you can downvote. Are there other karma milestones and corresponding privileges? <comment><USER2> A question from me too. what is the karma required to post links? I have been trying for weeks but for no avail.

<comment><USER3> I believe you need 2 karma to post links (to avoid bots probably). I've upvoted your comment so I think you'll be able to post links now.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I acan post links now.</comment></comment></comment>


Covid-19 restrictions by Gov. Wolf, Dr. Levine 'unconstitutional,' judge rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/covid-19-restrictions-by-gov-wolf-dr-levine-unconstitutional-judge-rules/NZUQCAHNUFHUZAKD7ZRH7GOC54/ <comment><AUTHOR> "There is no question that this country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort," Stickman wrote. "But the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The constitution cannot accept the concept of a 'new normal' where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures"

</comment><comment> just-juan-post People need to actively speak out against lockdowns and lifestyle restrictions. Just sitting here and being quiet won't do anything. Governors and corporations will continue to make arbitrary, rules until they are voted out of office.

Anyone who knows human nature know what people need "permission" to do this. The media, the governors who are pretending to lead, the loud mouths on social media and everyone else needs to spread the word that it's ok to go out and that this isn't going to kill you.

So long as we spread fear people will remain fearful. If we want to get back to normal we need to tell people it's ok to go back to normal.

Those groups and individuals need to stop the daily fearmongering and start spreading the message that you don't need a mask and don't need to be afraid of your fellow human beings.</comment>


Fabric (YC S16) Is a Home for All Your Memories - <AUTHOR> http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/fabric/ <comment><USER2> The internet of post-web-2.0 is forgetting things very fast, sometimes through information overload (like my Gmail archive or my smartphone photo cloud) and sometimes simply because services die, APIs change and become incompatible, company A buying company B which had all your data, etc.

Thus if you make a home for all my memories it is not just important to connect all the data points, but to provide a solution that will exist for me, even if you as a company won't exist anymore. It must be a priority 1 topic for you to make me care about your product.

That being said, having a searchable, connected history of all my data points is really neat. Wish you all the luck in the world!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I believe both Facebook and Twitter have the options to export your data.

That's definitely something we would like to make available at some later point for the content you generate within Fabric. Realistically though, because of just keeping something like the current thing between a team of 2 is a massive challenge, it would be later down the line.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, well the way FB handles it is glueing on features later. I'm thinking more of something like Github or Dropbox. See, if Dropbox or Github dies I still have my data in a readily usable form on at least 3 machines. It's inherent to the tools, not a feature that is glued on later. People are too lazy to regularly export their Facebook.

Btw I know it's quite hard to make as an inherent feature for that kind of service, but it's still part of what I understand as the promise of "home for my memories".

If you have to do it the export way. Please make it an API, and put your data in open formats like odt, email, what ever open street map uses for map files, etc.

And don't forget. If you make a cool business that only runs for 2 years, you may make 6 or 7 digits of money. But if you provide a real solution for people's problems you make a living, even if the first business around it dies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is kinda weird, it feels a little uncanny. So instead of doing the _human_ thing, like remembering something, I'm going to store them in an electronic device. And instead of doing the _human_ thing of quietly reflecting on memories, I'm going to grab my phone and have it dictate the memories back to me. I haven't used the app, but it just sounds unauthentic. What problem is it solving?

I read the blurb about where the idea came from, and I have to criticize a little bit; Without Fabric, learning about your father has become a wonderful journey, where you have to visit and talk with people to connect and learn about your father. If you had Fabric, you'd just flip through a couple of his pages while taking your morning dump.

<comment><USER5> There is also the "archival" use-case that I can see (and appreciate). A single window into what I was doing this day 5 years back? People would pay for that.

<comment><USER6> Kind of useful for business purposes too. I was in this city, I took some cabs and photographed the receipts, I met with these people, I wrote these entries in my notebook (and snapped a picture of the pages) etc. Recap a business trip or even a busy week, get your expenses in order, associate handwritten notes both spatially and temporally with people and projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does Fabric plan to make money?

(I can't believe the #1 most important question about a new _business_ is the one that's totally glossed over, but hey this is HN so maybe I can.)

<comment><USER8> Same way Facebook does, advertising. Except they have every piece of your location data in addition to everything Facebook has, which means better targeted ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some company should just back up someone's facebook, insta, gmail, etc etc etc... and sell them back their own information upon request. It would probably take a while to make money but I've heard this era called a digital "black hole" because all of the data that's going to be stored and lost because individuals don't have data retention plans.

</comment><comment><USER10> Google Maps has Your Timeline. Google Photos already groups and searches by location, as well as automatically creating photo stories based on your vacations.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey all! Arun from Fabric here. Nikolay and I are here to answer any questions you guys might have.

Hope you enjoy Fabric!

<comment><USER12> This seems really cool! I installed it yesterday to try it out - I really want something like this.

Your on-boarding is really good. However, when it comes time to create an account, I need to create a username and password. Can't I just create the account with facebook? I already gave you access?

I found it very hard to see what's actually going on. The images on the cities are so big that they obscure the context. The "history bar" is confusing (I figured it out eventually), but I thought it was some glitching, and it made it look unprofessional.

I feel lots of data is missing: you pulled from FB but I didnt see evidence of my facebook history.

My use case is to have "reminders" of my life. I'd love if you can pull data from lots of places, in particular my email. The email headers in my gmail probably include where I was at all times over the last decade. Can you include that in some way? If you can pull the photos from my dropbox account, you'd probably have a complete look at my life for the last 10 years at least, but my phone only goes to 2012. (Everalbum does a good job with this).

Anyway, awesome idea, looking forward to trying it again.

<comment><USER3> Hey, thanks for your thoughts. The other team member here.

1\. Onboarding: thanks, we thought really hard about what to do there.

2\. Images on the cities too big--can you clarify that one, you mean on the intro map you will see an image that is not necessarily representative of your entire time there as you'd like?

3\. FB data missing--is that still the case? It's possible you looked while it was still importing where you were expecting content. Basically everywhere you go in the app, Days (when you posted), Cities, Places, People should have data from Facebook if the intro map indicated that the import was working. Feel free to send us a message to firstname.lastname@example.com to follow up if that still looks broken.

4\. Reminders: Great ideas, noted. We have also noticed that when we're missing Fabric, the best ways to remember what we were up to are our calendars, emails, and messaging.

Thanks again!</comment></comment></comment>


We wrote Shifty, the testing robot that randomly swaps cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/sideshift-ai/meet-shifty-the-robot-that-randomly-tests-sideshift-ai-8c8336b89d4f <comment><USER2> Wow super cool! A bot that tests crypto trades automatically and randomly? awesome!</comment>


A "Lucky" Building in Palo Alto for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/technology/14landlord.html?ex=1347508800&en=9103aea64cfcff99&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

<comment><USER2> This is like one of those arbitrage opportunities that disappear as soon as they become public knowledge. Now that the owners think of the building as a "kingmaker," they'll demand such an exorbitant price (in stock) from startups that want to rent it that only a desperate one would take the deal. So paradoxically the one thing you can be sure of is that the next Google won't be coming out of this building.

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard these people are wannabe jokes. They're iranian carpet dealers that deal with tech startups like they're in a middle-east bazaar.</comment>


How to lose $5B - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21678794-united-states-postal-service-has-more-troubles-long-queues-how-lose-5-billion <comment><USER2> The only reason for have providing a postal service be a Constitutional power of government is because having one in place and operational was viewed as having a public, externalized benefit. As such, one shouldn't expect it to be profitable -- not that its bad if it is, but as long as the magnitude of the net expenditure is less than the externalized benefit, its worthwhile.

Clearly, the unsubsidized-but-government-controlled model doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either from the "it is a public benefit and should be a public service" perspective or the "it is not a public benefit and should be provided in the private market" perspective.

<comment><USER3> One of the reasons it doesn't work is there are congressional rules and laws limiting it to only "not working". Things like - requiring full pre-funding of all benefits, limits to what it can carry that come from congress, etc. Many of these rules seem to exist only to make the post office look bad.

<comment><USER4> With the serious presence of corporate money in American policy making, I wonder if that is the result of lobbying from FedEx and UPS. They stand to profit from a weakened USPS.

<comment><USER5> They stand to profit regardless. USPS actually makes their lives easier. UPS/FedEx would be taking on a huge expense trying to properly service remote (rural) areas to the level of the USPS. If they can sit on top of it via partnerships (FedEx, at least, already makes use of USPS for last-mile delivery on some delivery tiers), they can focus on their high population density and global logistics business instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a consumer who ships packages every now and then, I'm impressed with how usable USPS's web site is compared to UPS or Fedex.

<comment><USER7> As a consumer that often buys many small low value items (electronics, often from china) I find their level of service and rates to be phenomenal as well. I don't understand why the TSA can be an open and shameless jobs program but the postal service gets shit on?

The website is excellent as well, you can link your online package tracking account with your physical mailbox so that incoming packages addressed to you will often appear in the dashboard without any input from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How to tell if an article about the USPS is hackery: check and see if it mentions that Congress requires the Postal Service to fund its pension obligations for 75 years.

<comment><USER9> Other fun fact with that nugget is that mandate was originally written and lobbied for by UPS and Fedex. USPS's financial woes were manufactured by the public competition..

Funny also how quickly perception of USPS changed. Prior to that many considered them a model of an anti-red tape beaurucratic government entity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's take a slightly more factual article:

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/13/postal-service- tallies-51b-lo...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/13/postal-service- tallies-51b-loss-in-2015-budget-year.html)

USPS made $1.2 billion in operating profit in the last fiscal year. The USPS has been an independent, revenue-neutral agency since 1971.

<comment><USER11> But your link also says it had a $5.1 billion loss, and doesn't explain the discrepancy. So which is it? Did the postal service gain or lose money this year?

<comment><USER12> There is no discrepancy to explain. "Operating profit" is not "net profit". Specifically, operating profit consists of only line items generated from operations, so mainly revenues less operating expenses. It does not include things like funding liabilities, interest, taxes, etc.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for explaining the discrepancy to me (though I'm not sure why you started by denying its existence). It would have been nice if the article had included that info.

<comment><USER12> I denied its existence because there is no discrepancy. A discrepancy is a mismatch between two data sets. This is not a discrepancy, because the two numbers -- operating profit and net profit -- are not the same data set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the relevant data:

 _[The USPS 's] unfunded liability grew 76% between 2007 and 2015, to $125.2 billion. The Tax Foundation, a think-tank, doubts it can ever repay this money. The service has done much to improve its financial state—hours have been cut at rural branches and it has reduced work hours by 420m since 2002, saving some $17 billion annually. It has shrunk its staff by nearly 300,000, but it still has staggering labour costs. About 80% of its budget goes to its workers. Under a law of 2006, the service has to pre-fund 75 years' worth of health benefits for retired workers, something no other company, much less a government agency, is required to do._

Privatization isn't looking too bad. I'm all for strong employee benefits and organized labor, but 75 years' pre-funded benefits for retired workers seems excessive. We might end up losing a few of the more rural branches, but the employee/employer negotiations and business model would be much more sane under a private for-profit structure.

<comment><USER14> I think it's the opposite: any org (private or public) should be required to pre-fund _infinite_ years of benefits. That is, if you're compensating the employee with benefit X, you should book (the ROR-discounted present value of) that full liability now, irrespective of when you would have to eventually pay it. That one extra month of employee work earned them $100, 80 years from now? Great, that should be $0.71 less you have to spend. No 75-year cutoff. (Or 50, or 40, or 25).

Any other arrangement is forcing the employee to become an investor, in which case the usual protections should attach.

No company should be able to play the game of "oh, man, we totally thought we'd be making bank 40 years on, bummer we can't pay the rest of our worker's employment compensation, tough s---." And then you have situations like GM, Bethlehem Steel, etc.

Why is anyone cool with "don't worry, we'll be profitable _later_ " when it comes to worker's wages? Why do people like gambling with workers' promised benefits?

<comment><USER15> I don't see why this logic does not equally apply to debt and financing, which are the structural foundation of capitalism.

<comment><USER3> I think there is an aweful lot of handwaving that goes on...

Largely the justification for owners of equity get rewarded for taking a risk, and the employees get wages less than the full value of their output because they take no risk. If they are taking no risk, then any pension plan should also be risk free, not a hidden tie-in to the risk used to justify their pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if these USPS losses have anything to do with the fact that I can order something from China for $2 with free shipping.

<comment><USER17> Shipping is _never_ free (and it's often more expensive than most would assume). It just means the retailer/manufacturer has baked into the product price, enough headroom to pay for shipping. In reality, you are still paying the shipping, you just don't realize it.

Would you prefer to purchase a $60 product with $15 of shipping, or purchase a $75 product with free shipping? Obviously it's the same, but psychologically, most people gravitate towards the latter because it "feels" like it's less. Paying shipping fees, for most people, often feels like a rip-off, so the lure of "Free shipping" is very powerful.

In addition, it's common for some of a retailer's products to lose them money (due to having to subsidize and/or pay for shipping out of the total invoice price), while they make very healthy profits from other products (meaning it averages out to a net profit in the end).

USPS' losses are purely due to being very inefficient. My company ships UPS, FedEX, and USPS. USPS loses the most number of packages on any given week, many of which they have to pay a partial re-reimbursement for (the retailer's cost).

<comment><USER18> I think her/his point was that shipping is cheap enough that there's even room to bake it in on a $2 product - I can't imagine that being viable were you skipping exclusively with USPS. There are stores on aliexpress that sell nothing but sub-$2 products, so I don't believe that those are all loss- leaders.

<comment><USER17> > so I don't believe that those are all loss-leaders

Probably not. If the products are from over-seas, it's likely a great many are being shipped at the same time (a pallet of various products, etc... which cuts down dramatically on shipping fees), then broken out into individual packages once arriving at port.

The cheapest way USPS will ship a regular package is "USPS First Class Flats", which offers no tracking information and is restricted to light-weight and mostly small/flat packaging. It's $0.98 usually (anywhere in the US).

So, if you purchase a $2.00 item with includes "Free shipping", it's safe to assume about $1.00 of the price is for packaging materials and shipping fees. Perhaps another $0.50 is product cost, leaving less than $0.50 in profit after labor is paid for. Seems like very little, but if you ship a large volume every day...

<comment><USER19> You probably haven't ordered a sub $2 product with free shipping from aliexpress recently, have you?

They are not shipped together and broken out at port, they get separate tracking numbers in a separate package. There is no fulfillment middleman on the US side.

Looking at USPS's domestic rate table to understand how most aliexpress shippers get their products to the US isn't likely to be that enlightening. Read up on epacket, which is one program between Hong Kong post and USPS that is used pretty frequently.

<comment><USER17> Just because they have individual tracking numbers certainty doesn't mean they don't come over in a container together. For a domestic example, check into UPS Mail Innovations (FedEx has a similar service).

Regardless, epacket appears to be a subsidy-like system setup by USPS (yet another reason they are losing money), and masks the true shipping cost.

<comment><USER19> If you've ever looked at the packaging and the documents around it, it's very clear that what you're saying just isn't the case. They are individual parcels. I'm sure the post offices involved stuff a bunch of them into the same container (it goes by air not by sea, by the way. So we're talking air mail containers, not 40ft shipping containers.) when they send it, but that's true of _any_ package.

I understand why you would speculate these things are true, but all the evidence seems to indicate that none of those speculations are correct.

And yes, USPS may be losing money on those packages, but that doesn't really matter to the shipper and certainly doesn't show up in the product pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The bigger question, obviously one could contract out mail delivery to FedEx, DSL, etc..why has not the move been made yet? One could do areas to each one like say Alcohol is done..and the public would still get the public benefit

<comment><USER21> This is the end goal. Congress is pushing to destroy USPS so they can claim it failed and justify selling it's profitable services off to a private company who will then raise prices by a factor of 10.

Congress literally decided to tell USPS owed $125B one day [1], knowing full- and-well that it would take USPS like 60 years to pay that much money. Figuring that the population will grow tired of USPS running a billion dollar (artificial) deficit for decades.

[1] [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/z?c109:H.R.6407](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/z?c109:H.R.6407):

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. 125bln USD is half of greek GDP and just under a third of its debt.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord The Postal Clause and the Private Express Statutes are looking heavily anachronistic by now. If only Lysander Spooner's ALMC had prevailed.</comment>


Pentagon Rolls Out Major Cyber, AI Strategies This Summer - <AUTHOR> https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/pentagon-rolls-out-major-cyber-ai-strategies-this-summer/ <comment><USER2> Exciting to hear this kind of pragmatic rhetoric from the DoD: "Michelli emphasized that the Defense Department needs to take a new attitude towards risk, one that focuses on understanding and managing it, but still taking some, rather than a bureaucratic effort to eliminate risk all together."

Also, scary.</comment>


Cold Turkey on Traditional Media - <AUTHOR> http://owenmahoney.com/wp/?p=40

<comment><USER2> So you're not really going cold turkey at all. You're just shucking traditional forms (ie, TV and print) and getting your news second-hand from blogs (well, depending on the blogs you read, anyway).</comment>


Why There Are No Women on Twitter's Board, and So Few in Technology - <AUTHOR> http://mikaschiller.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/why-there-are-no-women-on-twitters-board-and-so-few-in-technology/ <comment><USER3> Just positing that these things _might_ be true and should be investigated was a key factor in Larry Summers getting drummed out of his position as President of Harvard.

The world at large isn't ready to hear these statistics, and overall that is probably a good thing. We shouldn't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in line.

Over the course of history, far more bad has been wrought by assuming differences were innate than assuming they were the result of bias. Given that, we should assume and act as though differences are due to bias long after the differences are well proven to be natural. It is a case where being wrong in one direction is not very costly, but being wrong in the other direction (and thus institutionalizing bias) is disastrous.

Tldr: we should err on the side of caution.

<comment><USER4> > _The world at large isn 't ready to hear these statistics_

Not the "world at large". Just (provincial) middle/upper class America.

> _We shouldn 't accept these disparities as driven by natural forces until > we've tried everything we can imagine to try to bring the differences in > line._

Shouldn't we in fact try to understand what's going on, instead of trying to change it because of a priori notion that there shouldn't be disparities (which, if disparities exist due to natural forces will be unatural and unjust).

Disparity (e.g less women in Tech) is NOT a problem in itself.

Obstacles to access is a problem (e.g a woman not being let to work Tech -- eg not being hired because she is a woman).

Also, why is IT somewhat different? I don't see much push for more female fishermen or male nurses, to name two random professions with similar disparities.

<comment><USER5> IT's white-collar whereas the jobs you're talking about aren't. Apparently there's never been a huge amount of feminist interest in getting women into male-dominated blue-collar jobs or in working-class women in general; it's an old and fairly well documented issue.

<comment><USER6> It's money more than status. In the early 1990s, programming was still white collar but paid about the same as accounting, and nobody cared how few women were doing it.

<comment><USER7> There were also actually more women in computing back then...

[http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files/u28/women2.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's one really, incredibly glaring flaw in this argument right near the start. He argues that it takes men to come up with sites like Twitter and Facebook because most venture-capital-backed startups are created by men. Except, of course, venture capitalists _openly admit_ they choose startups to back not just on their merits, but "pattern matching" the founders to what they expect a startup founder to look like - and everyone expects startup founders to be male. Even if women were just as good at founding successful startups, we'd expect them to be less common than male founders simply because VCs go with what they're used to.

He is essentially arguing that women are inherently worse at founding tech companies because they're under-represented in an area where people discriminate against them based on the belief they're inherently worse at founding tech companies.

<comment><USER8> And your argument doesn't explain why venture capitalists would have got that impression in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with his argument is not the statistics, which are sound, but the fact that he begs the question and also ignores some obvious implications of the very data he presents.

First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.

Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is _totally determinative_ , and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5\. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).

With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk- taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?

The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization.

<comment><USER10> It could be the butterfly effect. It starts with children. Better at math -> more interested in math -> better at math -> ... by they time young adults start seeking jobs, a small initial bias has turned into a large gap.

Personally, I don't think that's the whole story (according to my observations, it's also upbringing, girls socialize more than boys, who are more likely to keep to themselves, and differences in topics of interest, which I have no idea what they come from).

<comment><USER9> First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude. Second, regardless, the 2:1 ratio for perfect scores on the SAT Math manifests at 16-18, so when people are already mostly developed.

<comment><USER11> > First, it's probably not the case that interest and practice can have any > impact on your underlying mathematical aptitude.

What?! How did you arrive to that conclusion? This is a really bad myth. Math abilities for the most part have very little to do with genes, and almost all to do with hard word, motivation, and practice. See [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the- myt...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myth-of-im- bad-at-math/280914/) for more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The history of standardized testing and the history of statistics 'proving' that minorities are innately different in some way are inextricably linked. The original intelligence tests 'proved' to the American populace that Italian and Irish immigrants were intellectually inferior to Anglo Saxons because of their lower IQ scores. Magically, as those populations integrated, their IQ scores normalized. Oops.

This article reads like those (thankfully) classic evolutionary biology texts. Statistics bookend arguments that draw wild inferences. I feel sorry for the numbers, they're crying out, "Wait a second, I'm just a standardized test score, I can't tell you that it's because men always fashioned weapons! Weapons didn't even factor into my study!" How does it follow that standardized test scores can prove anything about nature vs. nurture, especially when they have a history of not doing so?

It's a hallmark of that area of modern evolutionary biology to say, "I'm saying what everyone else is afraid to." Well, people are afraid to say it because they're afraid to say wrong things! One should not ignore statistics that show differences between populations, but one should certainly not use them to confirm one's own essentialist beliefs.

Especially in this environment. The burden of proof should be squarely and severely on the one arguing that differences are innate, not on those arguing that differences are malleable/cultural. Why? Because once society has concluded that differences are innate, then glass ceilings turn into concrete ceilings, and discrimination becomes institutionalized.

<comment><USER13> _This article reads like those (thankfully) classic evolutionary biology texts._

Or those unthankfully modern evolutionary psychology texts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds like it was written for a 12th grade research assignment and makes several incorrect inferences without a basis of fact, i.e. the male hunting equating to math reasoning.

I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue.

All in all, women are catching up fast to men in mathematics as well. They account for the fastest growing percentage of graduate degrees in the sciences and I, personally, work in a high-tech field dominated still by male developers, but also women managers who supervise them and do a fantastic job at it.

It's not biological, it's history. Until recently those spatial learning and building toys for children were all male-focused, but that is changing.

I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the future because attitudes have changed for the better.

<comment><USER10> > I firmly believe that women will easily overtake men in technology in the > future because attitudes have changed for the better.

Do you have any reason for this belief?

Also, if you really believe that is true, wouldn't it be proper to start promoting technology amongst boys?

<comment><USER8> Women in my country have already overtaken men for final scores on mathematics degrees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of your research is from 20 years ago. Cultural norms play a huge part in this and norms have been changing (compare what you'd read about the roles of women in the 1950's vs today).

My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned 18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.

I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab. At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US, kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the product of my work.

<comment><USER16> While I agree that a lot of it is cultural based, I do agree that there is some biological basis also. As a woman also, I can see myself in the points the author makes. While I had good grades (was in high school math club) I avoided risks in school and in career (went for 'easy' degree of history first). Only recently did I go back and get a degree in programming, requiring me having to learn differently than before. I tell my boss I don't a managerial position because I don't want the responsibility (no matter how much he throws it at me). I've also had everyone around me supporting me to do what I want be it STEM or not. In many ways I see the cultural changes are allowing women to use their biological strengths better (running a business isn't too different from running a household of a large family). EDIT:typo.

<comment><USER15> Culturally, do you see the same demands placed on you as are placed on a male peer/brother of yours? I bet when you start seeing those you will start seeing similar behavior (because I have seen it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I invited three women to be on the board of my corporation. All of them turned me down. All of the men I invited onto my board accepted.

<comment><USER18> Why?

Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add anything useful. Knowing _why_ would be much more interesting, although still an anecdote.

<comment><USER19> Because board meetings are, by design, a contentious environment?

<comment><USER17> I discovered that this is not the case. In general, Board meetings don't work like hollywood says they do. Usually my board meetings are pretty uncontentious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As commented:

This post could only come from someone sitting comfortably in a position of considerable privilege and unawareness.

If you're going to completely ignore issues of societal pressures, open misogyny in technology industries and a thousand other subtle (and not so subtle) ways that a fundamentally patriarchal society maintains the status quo, then you gain no insight at all. A thousand studies will tell you the outcome of this system of oppression – but you'll interpret is "gender differences" because you are blind to oppression that you have never been subject too.

The sad thing is that you've now added another nail, unaware of the damage that you do to the humans around you. Congratulations, you've helped to solidify your position on top of the heap.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I wonder why nobody has brought up the fact when most women are starting to climb the corporate ladder, or just come into their career, they start having babies, starting their families and are less interested in ruling the corporate world as they are being with their families and raising their kids.

And who can blame them really?

<comment><USER21> I wondered why the author didn't bring that up either. Just talking about how women are nurturing / expected to be nurturing isn't the whole story. These expectations translate into the idea that women have to be the primary caretakers of their kids, but men do not unless they really want to and decide to go against the grain. And lots of women feel guilty if they are a "bad mother"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is pretty lazy thinking. It's hard to even call it a rationalization when it makes no sense:

"Males around the world on average tend to be better at doing [math] than females; likely due to the need to fashion weapons and objects for warfare, hunting, and competing throughout evolutionary history."

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a pretty shallow article - especially irritating because it's referenced with a bunch of things that have no relevance. I love in particular:

 _There are a lot of stupid guys out there. And when you mix stupidity and risky behavior, you often get death. In the United States, men make up about 92% of workplace deaths_

Exercise for the reader to think about why that might be the case…

And another:

 _A study of attrition of women in engineering and science programs found that frequently cited barriers were isolation, lack of self-confidence, and lack of interest in the subject matter (Brainard & Carlin, 1998). That's hardly the stuff of societal discrimination._

That is _exactly_ the stuff of societal (and social) discrimination. Not because people are saying "You're a woman, and you'll be rubbish at this," but because the extant lack of gender balance in these fields perpetuates itself; if women don't want to be scientists and engineers, it becomes harder for those women who do. There's a tipping point.

From a statistical point of view, there are ultimately psychological differences between men and women. That fact has as near as possible no relevance to this discussion - obviously so, because it's patently obvious that men are not - what, ten times better at running tech businesses? Twenty times better? And we can conclude from this that there is an obvious bias in terms of the people who end up running them.

Mika points out that there has been decades of work put into encouraging girls into STEM. That's true, kind of, but this is something which _does_ take decades to achieve. Kids' career preferences can often start at a very early age, and the only way to improve the proportion of women in tech is by making the field open and accessible to young girls, and to promote that option to them.

Hamfisted "women are just different and we shouldn't worry about it" articles are probably not helping.

</comment><comment><USER24> Let me posit another question, why are there no visible minorities on Twitter's board?

And why aren't people getting up and arms over that?

</comment><comment><USER25> One consequence is that many people don't understand just how hateful the WWW is for some other people.

Sure, anyone can be the victim of really unpleasant attacks from others on the Internet, and it's been going on for years. But try creating different online characters. Give one a male name, give the other a female name. And make that the only difference. Now see the different ways people interact with you.

Having more diverse workforce can help you understand the problems of not having good blocking tools or reporting tools or privacy controls.

But then again, Google has a ton of women working for them and they've fucked up real names and G+ integration. So maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER26> I don't entirely buy this. Everyone can improve themselves by mingling with their peers and listening to the pros, so if women were so easily dissuaded by negativity on the internet, you'd expect them to do worse at everything, which is clearly not true. I think a missing nuance is that _everyone_ is mean on the internet, but people are much more likely to take meanness in stride when it comes from members of their own gender.

The visual arts are very close to having gender parity (47.4% female in the US, according to [1]). A quick look around a site like Deviantart reinforces this. If you've spent any time around such communities, you'll know that young female artists are just as mean and obsessed with petty drama as young male computer geeks are with trying to look smarter than everyone else. Yet, the amount of professional female artists that emerge from those conditions is roughly equal to the amount of males that do.

This suggests that "guys being jerks to girls" is only a symptom of a different problem; for cultural, historical, or perhaps, as the article suggests but doesn't really back up, biological reasons, girls just aren't as interested in computers as guys are. If we had gender parity in tech, little Susan would probably be calling Anna a bitch for copying her code, and they'd both get by somehow.

As an aside, I've noticed that artists are much better about giving and receiving criticism than supposedly objective and "meritocratic" programmers are.

[1] [http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf](http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/96.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >It turns out that being in technology demands a very masculine set of mental qualities.

I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and lawyers 80 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER28> Many valid points, which are often either ignored, or deflected with the argument that "men might be better at X, or women better at Y, but that's only because the way society educates little boys vs little girls".

However, I think the real reason there are fewer women in tech is simply that it can be a boring, solitary, highly detail-oriented and even a socially confrontational job, ideal for "loners" perhaps.

People seem attracted to and revere other people who demonstrate leadership, charisma, social grace, and so on, and actual tech jobs aren't a place where those qualities are most highly valued or the best environment to nurture them.

Aside from the exciting and highly social "Startup, VC, Marketing" side of the industry, and of course the good salaries currently enjoyed by engineers, tech has a fairly low social status.

I say this as a programmer myself, but I acknowledge it's still considered (and in some ways, is) a job for unsociable loners. For whatever reason, women seem to be more socially inclined, or at least very much more attuned to the sociability aspect of social status, and tech is therefore not generally an attractive proposition.

</comment><comment><USER29> Girls worse at math? In US yes, in Sweden no.

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning- brain/20121...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-learning- brain/201212/why-us-girls-underperform-in-math-swedish-girls-dont)

If you think the cause of girls being bad at math is biological you must conclude that swedish girls are more biologically different from US girls than from boys.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology.

I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.

<comment><USER31> No, but people would argue that mostly men are truck drivers due to rigid gender roles and strict gender policing of the patriarchy.

<comment><USER10> Do you have any statistics/reasoning that support this argument?

I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.

<comment><USER31> But why do they get such jobs? Because of rigid gender roles that force them to be a certain way.

What's your alternative explanation?

<comment><USER10> Because there aren't any other jobs.

The real question is, though, why don't the women get/take such jobs. I think the answer is a mixture of the following: (1) they are worse at such jobs than men (physically weaker and menstruating, which I assume might matter for a job like truck-driving), (2) (I assume) women get more government help, because they are more often (single) mothers and (3) women can play on other qualities (more social, better caregivers, more attractive, less dangerous) that allows them to get other jobs (nanny, waitress, secretary, ...).

<comment><USER31> And this power imbalance between workers and employers is terrible. Yeah, all pretty standard socialist stuff I'm a huge fanboy of. It's of course not only gender roles that play a role here.

You reasons are pretty bullshitty, so I don't think I ever want to talk to you again. Bye!

<comment><USER10> Don't shoot the messenger :) These are more guesses than opinions, so if you have any better ideas, shoot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm sure black people just aren't genetically apt for STEM either?

Just because there's evidence for a correlation between gender and math scores doesn't mean there's a genetic reason for the disparity.

<comment><USER33> If I understand correctly, the idea here is that IQ is measurable (even if the measurement is noisy) and real (has predictive power, doesn't change). This is accomplished by studies that look to test individuals at different points in life. Secondly, IQ is mostly genetic. This is evidenced mostly by twin studies. Thirdly, math tests are okay IQ tests.

Note that I'm not saying that things are one way or another, or that the reason there are so few women in tech is genetic. Just explaining how the ideas go together. It COULD be that way.

<comment><USER21> But IQ is not that important when we're talking about being successful, making money, or building a good tech tool. Otherwise people with genius IQs would be the only ones ruling our society...but that's definitely not the case.

<comment><USER34> Some IQ advantage tends to help in these situations, but more isn't always better.

In other words, you're likely to do better if you're a little better than average (e.g. 1 SD or 115).

On the other hand, if you're one of those bizarro 180 IQ outliers who can't connect socially and emotionally (to say nothing of _intellectually_ ) with average people, you aren't likely to be able to be successful in a way that incorporates and leverages the contributions of other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "If you look at the profiles of Twitter's board members, you'll notice that all of them either have educational backgrounds in Computer Science and/or have spent decades in the Silicon Valley tech trenches, clearly developing a deep understanding of technology."

I looked at all of the board members, and only 1 out of 7 has a CS background. 4 out of 7 have B.As/MBAs from elite schools, and immediately stepped into executive positions. I guess that's called "the trenches" these days. Their background literally screams "Old Boy's network." Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have no education information mentioned and I don't think they did much coding on their way up.

So whatever the merits of this article, I don't see how the argument that the cause of this is in any way that not enough women go into STEM fields is a valid one.

</comment><comment><USER36> One other reason(apart from gender stereo typing) is the women who could go into traditionally male stem fields look at the poor pay and status and rationally decide that whist probably still facing a glass ceiling and sexism at lest they get paid better as Dr, Lawyer or Banker.

</comment><comment><USER37> What truth there is in this article amounts to a (significantly outdated) survey of the state of women in society. All it presents is correlations. It's a mathematical fact that you can know _nothing_ of causal effects between correlated results based solely on such statistics.

In other words, what this article is saying is:

1\. Women are demonstrably less represented in STEM fields.

2\. Women do demonstrably less well in certain metrics we associate with STEM fields.

3\. This is because women are biologically less interested/able/adept at STEM.

Every bit of evidence in the article supports 1 and 2 (at least as of 20 years ago). The only support 3 gets is repeated statements that 2 is the natural, inevitable order of things.

There is no reason to believe a word of it.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe the construct of a "management board" isn't appealing to the mentality of women (huge generalization admittedly). Imagine a history of humanity dominated by females as much as our human history was dominated by males to this point. Would the female dominated society create something like a management board? Would they create something different?

</comment><comment><USER39> This is utter baloney. For you who think systematic oppression of groups of people isn't a real thing, think again. Take, for instance, the poor literacy rate in the middle east. averaging 17%, now, are we to say "People of Arab decent obviously have a biological disadvantage when it comes to reading and writing, statistically it's clear!" um... no. How about Africans? Do we say "They had a biological tendency to become slaves and not slave owners, because, like 95% of slaves are from Africa, it's obvious"?

You can keep going back in history. How about those lowborn people during the dark ages? they must have been real dunces.

The advancement of people has been a long slow march that builds achievement upon achievement, with each achievement advancement can accelerate, but set- backs can and do happen.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you'd have anywhere near the mental ability you do today if it wasn't for all the work people did before you and the society you were raised in and given encouragement, opportunities and protections to pursue your goals. There are millions of techniques you use and benefit from that other people worked out before you. If you didn't have them, you'd be groveling in the dirt or likely gravely suffering or dead.

Women, it hasn't even been a hundred years since they've had the right to vote in the U.S. Religious and cultural attitudes have kept them oppressed and discouraged. Christian men(among others) have been encouraged to keep their wives in line with physical abuse and the women pressured to accept it.

As a society, we've figured out ways to encourage and protect things to let them advance and grow, things that wouldn't have gotten there without it and we know it. Let's call it systematic freedom. People have fought and died and worked their asses off for it. We do this. Let us(Society(men, women and institutions)) do this for women. protect, defend, encourage. We are all humans.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't understand the competition argument. Technology is competitive? Somehow I've missed that throughout my career.

I'm also not sure about the maths argument. Anyone got the stats for accountants? There are more women, I think?

When I started in this industry, almost all the IT specialists had come straight from the accounting department. And the sexes were split 50/50\. But even then it was very obvious that the next, university trained, generation were predominantly male.

This post has failed to convince me that the issue is anything other than cultural - from the earliest age. By the time we're thinking about careers, there are so many barriers against women that the effect seen is inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER41> These studies just show that there is a difference. It doesn't say it's mainly caused by innate biological differences between the sexes. These differences could for all we know be the effect of the different social conditioning that we all get from birth. In reality it's probably somewhere in-between - <USER2> social conditioning and innate biological differences play a role but if I was to guess I'd say that the social conditioning is the largest factor of the two. But neither has been shown in these studies.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just because the author cites studies doesn't mean those studies are not biased, or that their limited scope is not distorting our ideas of people's motivations or actions in the real world. Psychological and sociological studies try to put people in situations that are meant to be "representative" of how they react on a large scale in the real world, but the situations themselves are small-scale, simple, and usually involved test subjects who are educated, middle-to-upper class, white college students.

The entire section about men being competitive and how boys act on the playground just demonstrates how little the author understands about social dynamics between women. Women try to do pro-social actions because egotistical actions get them ostracized very, very quickly. If a woman was so transparently cocky, she would have absolutely no friends and an endless gossip mill from jealous and/or insecure peers. We're also in a society where women who are 20 years old or older have still grown up in a society where-- as much as they were told they could do any job a man could-- they still mostly wanted to marry a guy who made more money than them, and knew that their success was not as critical to their social status as their beauty, kindness, or ability to do traditionally female activities well. Personally, as much as I have loved math all of my life and programming for the past few years, I have also been keenly aware that having a good sense of style, being able to cook, being good at dance and art, and being friendly and outgoing have been extremely helpful in my socialization as a female. Could I have neglected all of those things to be even better at math and programming? Of course. Would I have as much social status or friends? Definitely not. Additionally, male success attracts attractive women, while female success does not do the same. You have to be in a city or career or educational environment with "the right kinds of guys" in order for them to respect you MORE because of your intellect and accomplishments, not less. But for a man, being successful will aid him in attracting women who he finds "up to par" even if he is not in an environment full of other smart & accomplished people. The easiest way to see an example of this is by comparing the romantic and sexual experiences of smart males vs. smart females in high school. The boys have gone on more dates and had more sexual experiences, while many girls-- even pretty ones-- have not had such experiences.

Girls are fine interacting with machines, but please take a look at all the bazillions of articles written about Goldie Blox, and that great comic- [http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic) -you can't just say "well there are toys for kids made to be unisex" because most things that are unisex (ask a woman how awkward and uncomfortable "unisex" t-shirts are) are really just made for guys. I loved design as a kid. I thought it was arts & crafts, because that's what everyone calls it when you're a young girl, but it was really design. If I had toys that encouraged me to design webpages and programs, there's no doubt in my mind that I would have loved them, but boys toys involved rudimentary programming and engineering, while girl's toys were all about playing house, hosting tea parties, and dressing up dolls. The most mechanical they got were dolls who peed or said stupid phrases.

Business is very people-oriented! You are making products for PEOPLE. There is no way the author can argue that business in general, and tech businesses in particular, do not have aspects that appeal to both kinds of stereotypical interests from each gender. Tech businesses are creative and involve selling and designing things. Would this sexist author say that talking to a lot of people and designing something beautiful are traditionally male functions?

Isolation and lack of self-confidence are EXTREMELY societal. How can isolation be the fault of an individual? I DO feel very uncomfortable when I'm the only woman in a room full of men. Who wouldn't feel uncomfortable walking into a room and being the "only" of anything, especially anything REALLY obvious-- like gender or race, which you display on your body and can't hide.

These caveman arguments are also stupid. Who is to say that the women who would have to keep track of complex timing schedules for feeding their children, who had to ensure that they had enough food to feed everyone in their family or community, who counted and kept track of the objects stored at home, etc. did not also develop mathematical skills in an evolutionary manner? The author's reasoning is stupid.

Ever think those "sex" differences in spatial and mechanical thinking are because boys are building little cars and rockets or tossing around a football as a toddler, but girls are drawing and imagining and telling stories? Even if kids gravitate towards those and it's not entirely the fault of toy companies and clueless parents/educators, surely these years of practice can not be discounted or called "natural".

In conclusion, I went into this with a semi-open mind because I'm always waiting for an argument I will actually respect. But I was disappointed yet again. [http://xkcd.com/385/](http://xkcd.com/385/)

</comment><comment><USER42> fact: there are less red heads with black eyes as ceo than women. or blacks. or asians. or native americans.

non aryan gingers are the true minority!

</comment><comment><USER43> I enjoyed this rebuttal.

[http://ulobw.tumblr.com/](http://ulobw.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> whilst this may be accurate i advocate the safer approach, but equally valid argument that women don't want to enter technology.

this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments... and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.

having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free and liberal society with strong rights for women.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wow, this a perfect example of the dangerous thinking, the "facts", that got us to this point in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER46> Mandatory related non-xkcd comic: www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

</comment><comment><USER47> Weak shit.

There _might_ be very slight natural differences in _variance_ of ability, which would explain why more men come out at the top and bottom. I don't think there's value into coming in to that argument on either side. At any rate, the evidence seems to indicate that the gender disparity (at the relevant IQ level) is at most 2:1.

Going 100 steps further and justifying the good-ole-boy network that has taken over VC and Silicon Valley is another matter entirely.

</comment><comment><USER48> Hahahaha

[http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.ne...](http://thumbs.newschoolers.com/index.php?src=http://media.newschoolers.com/uploads/images/17/00/42/13/91/421391.jpeg&size=600x564)

<comment><USER42> nsfw.</comment></comment>


Digital Authentication Guideline: Public Preview - <AUTHOR> https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> Github page/RFQ (Request for Comments) soliciting feedback: [https://github.com/usnistgov/800-63-3](https://github.com/usnistgov/800-63-3)</comment>


Old English Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://ang.wikipedia.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> They also feature a page with an overview of the Old English dialect they've chosen to use: [https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C7%A3dia:Tutorial_on_Ol...](https://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C7%A3dia:Tutorial_on_Old_English)</comment>


A bunch of decent domains, does any one have a good use for one? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/B5ifzhwj If you're interested in any of them for a side project you are working, just shoot me an email, they are all available.
Email is on the bottom of the page.
http://pastebin.com/B5ifzhwj <comment><USER2> list them on <http://hntrades.com/></comment>


George "Geohot" Hotz announces a self driving car kit [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl6DIxvnzM <comment><USER2> This guy fucks</comment>


Ask HN: Best Practices For MongoDB with Amazon EC2+EBS? - <AUTHOR>

So I am a happy MongoDB user -- with a web app that is about to go public (which means I can't predict the actual load yet and my application would have to change fast and soon). I have been doing my back up etc. Although reading all these scary MongoDB related articles have not had much impact on my architecture , I do wonder what could I be doing to prevent things from going wrong. (I can't afford  paid support just yet)
Is  there a set of MongoDB best practices for EC2+ EBS ? For the setup  configuration and deployment architecture ? Best patterns for usage of  API ?  Are there any MongoDB recommended AMIs I should be using ?
I want to reiterate that I have  faith  in MongoDB  and my application architecture.I find MongoDB to be well documented and well supported. I am merely seeking all this information in one place. <comment><USER2> We try to keep documentation on EC2 best practices here: <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Amazon+EC2>

<comment><AUTHOR> I am aware of that page and it is a great starting point but is not enough. Please take a look a this document from IBM [http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/data/bestpractices/DB2...](http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/data/bestpractices/DB2BP_Workload_Management_1111.pdf)

I was hoping for something along these lines .</comment></comment>


Newly Discovered Quasar Defies Age of Universe - <AUTHOR> http://techzwn.com/2011/06/distant-quasar-marks-the-brightest-object-ever-found-video/

<comment><USER2> <http://www.szot.eu/>

tl;dr Big bangs are fueled by annihilation. Matter-antimatter asymmetry is local. Most of the matter always existed as blackholes. Existence, space and time didn't start at Big Bang. Observable universe is extremely small part of whole space.

Awaiting to have a crackpot index assigned. ;-)

<comment><USER3> Nah, you are no crackpot. That is as good as any other theory I have heard. :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Now to the hard part: Design an experiment. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The quasar was found after five years of searching through databases containing images of millions of objects."

sounds intriguing... How available is the survey data? Last time i checked for example - the GRB observatory in South America - that one publishes only small percent of the data.

<comment><USER5> It's mostly public. The data used for this discovery was taken from UKIDSS, an IR sky survey (you can get data here: <http://surveys.roe.ac.uk:8080/wsa/SQL_form.jsp>) and SDSS, an optical survey (you can get data here: <http://www.sdss3.org/dr8/data_access.php>). All SDSS data is available to the public. UKIDSS data can only be accessed by ESO member countries for the first year, but after that becomes public. (I worked on a similar project to discover a high-z quasar as a summer research project in college, though unfortunately with less success.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why does this defy the age of the universe?

<comment><USER7> It doesn't necessarily. It is an object that due to current models of quasar formation should not exist at that point in time. This means that there is something wrong with those or current estimations of the age of the universe. The latter is less likely.

<comment><USER8> Are we sure that these large objects aren't being "lensed" into looking further than they are?

Isn't the third possibility that these quasars are illusory?

<comment><USER9> IIRC lensing won't produce the red shift observed.

<comment><USER10> If lensing (through one or more lenses) resulted in a significantly longer path for the light, would it not make sense for an object to seem older than it is (i.e. have greater redshift)?

<comment><USER5> Lensing will make light travel through only a very slightly longer path. At most the difference will only be a few light-weeks. (This is seen in objects which have multiple images. Occasionally you will see one of the images flare up for some reason, and a few days later the other image will flare up.) It won't be anywhere near long enough for cosmological effects like redshift to be important. The main effect of gravitational lensing is just to increase the apparent luminosity of the lensed object.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the clarification. I was imagining a situation that would require tens of degrees of deflection, with two or three lenses zig-zagging light across a cosmologically significant distance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mocking Python Requests with Responses - <AUTHOR> http://cramer.io/2014/05/20/mocking-requests-with-responses/

<comment><USER2> I'm still wondering how HTTMock didn't do the job for them... Unfortunately, comments are closed on that blog, so I guess I'll never know..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm evaluating some different solutions to this problem and would love to hear from anyone who has experience with both this and HTTPretty.

<comment><USER3> I personally haven't used httpretty, because of the way it had been implemented, I thought it would be impossible for it not to cause bugs in my tests. (Monkey patching socket seems way more complex than patching urllib, or requests)

I am using responses in the CMS Scanner I am building

[https://github.com/droope/droopescan](https://github.com/droope/droopescan)

[https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/master/tests/base_...](https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/master/tests/base_http_tests.py)

I did have to create some helper functions in order to make responses easier to apply to a broad range of tests, those are here:

This one allows you to mock several requests in a more tidy way: [https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/2cf3f9fd076124e874...](https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/2cf3f9fd076124e87440d6bb549f254c6dae8654/tests/__init__.py#L100-L106)

This one is useful for adding responses.activate to all methods in a class: [https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/2cf3f9fd076124e874...](https://github.com/droope/droopescan/blob/2cf3f9fd076124e87440d6bb549f254c6dae8654/common/testutils.py#L5-L19)

Overall, it works perfectly (and I've been developing with it for at least half a year), and supports python 3.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Security Advice for Regular People - <AUTHOR> I had the idea to create a dedicated web page containing basic, easy-to-understand digital hygiene advice. So if a friend or relative asks you for advice on securing their digital lives, you can simply give them a link and hopefully they'll share it with their friends too.
Hosting is on GitHub pages; just a single, semantic, accessible HTML file.
I just made this today, so contributions are welcome, especially right now. I am not a security researcher, so if anyone finds an issue with what I've written in this first draft, or thinks some other point deserves mentioning, please tell me either here or in the form of a GitHub ticket or pull-request. Project goals and contribution guidelines are available in the readme.
I'm also thinking about getting a custom domain name for it, but I'm not sure what has the right balance of sounding trustworthy and being available/affordable. So let me know if you have any ideas on that front as well!
https://github.com/brundonsmith/basic-digital-security <comment><USER2> The biggest issue among my family and friends are the social engineering questions that strangers ask when on Facebook/Twitter/etc. "Hey what School did you go to as a child?", "What was your first car?". Those kind of innocent like questions that older generations just answer without thinking too much about.

That and explaining two factor authentication and password management, thankfully the latter is not much of an issue these days thanks to browser- integrated password managers like Bitwarden.

As a community trainer, I do a lot of explaining and development. I've found that simple, concise, straight-to-the-point dot points are the key to getting the message across. Perhaps have a short explanation about a topic, and the dot points explaining the fix, or helpful hints.

Definitely keeping an eye on this one and if I can contribute in any way I will.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The biggest issue among my family and friends are the social engineering > questions

That's a really good point, it should probably get its own section.

> Perhaps have a short explanation about a topic, and the dot points > explaining the fix, or helpful hints.

Yeah; I tried to avoid long paragraphs but may've still gotten a little too verbose in some spots. The hope was that the table of contents would function as a sort of bullet point-list, where people could skip straight to the things they haven't already heard about.

> Definitely keeping an eye on this one and if I can contribute in any way I > will.

Thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Open-Source WordPress Infrastructure on Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/presslabs/stack <comment><USER2> So this means wordpress on docker, I guess. So is auto applying of security patches disabled?</comment>


Questionable Accounting: Groupon Reporting Twice Amount of Revenue - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/catanach-says-groupon-reporting-twice-amount-of-revenue/2011/08/19/gIQAWkKuQJ_video.html

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: Groupon reports $100 in revs with 50% margins. Should report $50 in revs with 100% margins.</comment>


Australia gets a NetFlix of sorts - <AUTHOR> https://www.stan.com.au/

<comment><USER2> "a Netflix"? Is Netflix really ubiquitous enough that "netflix" is now synonymous with "Video On-Demand service"?

We don't refer to search engines such as bing or Yahoo as "a Google".

"A Netflix equivalent" perhaps?</comment>


How Solo Founders Beat The Odds and Get Into Top Accelerators - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/03/12/how-solo-founders-beat-the-odds-and-get-into-top-accelerators/?mod=WSJBlog

<comment><USER2> From the description in the article, these two solo founders had quite a bit more traction than the typical applicant team. Their initial source of funding is unclear.</comment>