Startup School Guide: Growing Technologies - <AUTHOR> After the first couple lectures from 'How To Start A Startup' I came up with some ideas of how to go about my next startup.
The points I came up with are:
1) Find out a side project to work on instead of a startup idea
2) Just learn
3) Choose a growing sector
My question to everyone is if we could compile a list of any growing technologies that others as well as myself can focus on and start our own side projects. Some that come to mind are:
-P2P
-Virtual Reality (Oculus Rift)
-Secure messaging smartphones (Cyber Dust)
-3D Printing (MakerBot)
-Wearables (Apple Watch)
-Internet of Things
-NFC (iPhone 6)
The technologies don't have to be new but ones that are growing. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies) Also pretty relevant here, wikipedia has a list of emerging technologies.

</comment><comment><USER2> My list is somewhat of the same but also different as well. It is focused on specialization within those trends rather than just a broad overview. The difference is specialization or niche in these markets can mean the difference from surviving as a business or failing.

Something else to be aware of is if you develop something now you are most likely to see it's production use within 3-5 years of development and then you are most likely to see it's market either growing or not in 10 years. This is an interesting dichotomy because it means picking things that may be hard but boring, or fun depending on how you look at them.

I am not affiliated with any of these companies. I just think some of them are well-placed in the market.

-Devops (mostly containers and virtualization software, but also fast/easy build software, customizable configs that adapt better and searchable/informative apis)

-Devops massive ssl/managing keys/passwords deployment software (there are a few automated tools that may help with this but there is in general not too many companies currently handling it)

-Devops massive worker model software or software that helps automation in newer/interesting ways like stackengine ([http://stackengine.com/blog/](http://stackengine.com/blog/)) just got $1 million in funding and provides a way to convert vagrant images to docker images and back again in a fast fashion

-Devops with companies that provide continuous integration at scale or preconfigured devops things that require too much learning to integrate etc, or alternatively lease integration tools. Also managed data worflow between many integrative models. [https://jidoteki.com/](https://jidoteki.com/)

-Saas, PaaS, etc software as a service especially in devops looks to be going in several directions or so: 1)safe php applications using sandstorm sandbox and type-safe php llvm type stuff (integrating some of parse: [https://parse.com/docs/php_guide](https://parse.com/docs/php_guide) which makes traveling from one php application to another seamless, and Hoa which makes dsls more manageable [http://hoa-project.net/En/](http://hoa-project.net/En/) ) 2)devops delivered through docker + automated binary releases 3)devops in nodejs that controls docker and other things or just low latency/fast productive js (dart could be a good useful bet) 4)determinable execution type programming mostly ocaml and haskell which are considered 90% correct and safer languages 5)clojure immutable data that can be shared between large amounts of web online applications

-safe low latency/low requirement distributed services

-large data crunching (think distributed versus not distributed, purpose of what it is doing, competition)

-the coming large amount of "internet of things" in the next few years will be tons of small robots because of finally cheap enough robotics that they will be buyable + good software markets from many different companies working together The internet of things opens a new dimension for SaaS products that interact seamlessly this is an idealistic idea for how to structure something like that as many multiple agents: [http://eve.almende.com/](http://eve.almende.com/) Also training an AI in a massive simulation with cloud/distributed tech with machine learning algorithms for real usage is a definite possibility

-privacy software (anonymous logins like facebook did, garbled circuits and homomorphic encryption, encrypted multiparty applications like auctions for bidding etc and cloud computing)

-artificial intelligence (not just "deep learning" on it's own like convnets which are doing good performance wise but lack overall structural use, but intelligent software that can solve problems using many other algorithmic components like bloom filters, markov chains, dynamic time warping etc that focuses on specific problem solving interactive on-work jobs, data cleaning, vision, speech recognition and NLP)As a side-note if someone was able to improve data cleaning they can reduce a lot of errors by a large % and is under-utilized at the moment. Although it is problematic that most active learning algorithms ask for a lot more quesitons: [https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/publication/scaling-up-crowd-...](https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/publication/scaling-up-crowd-sourcing-to-very-large-datasets-a-case-for-active-learning/) . Crowd answering has been a better use for data cleaning.)

-Specifically Artificial Intelligence in vision through point cloud library needs to be more useful. Vision will need to be a very automated and big process and is not talked about as much on how hard it is to determine vision constraints like object detection and avoiding using edge detection etc. Simply learning to move is not the only problem associated with AI since vision is hard: [http://pointclouds.org/](http://pointclouds.org/)

-Specifically Artifical Intelligence using networking to off-load some of the heavy load in computing lots of difficult/complicated tasks by automating large chunks of activity as computer signals this is known as macroprogramming: [http://fiji.eecs.harvard.edu/Macroprogramming](http://fiji.eecs.harvard.edu/Macroprogramming) )

-3D Printing (I think metal 3d printing or harder material like construction from cement is more successful than regular plastic 3d printing as it can lead to more things getting done. 3d printing could be improved wholesale from some re-imaging by making it from adaptable molds rather than a dripple of material that moves (different concept than most 3d printing and may provide different results). Cheaper materials that are durable integration into actual electronics or support for holding computer chips in the printed models)

-Better safer faster payment gateways

-Anything security that helps solve the massive cybercrime problem that still plagues every major company (using AI for reviewing security control policies, account policies, and more CYBR IPO does this)

-Also related in security Intrusion detection systems have risen over 30% in sales lately, and despite defense being a lot better upgraded recently there are still many evident attack vectors. A key factor in this is companies by policy are almost always forced to use older technology, people enjoy renting out windows computers and windows computers have better virtualization server balancing support because they are the most tested)

-data content management systems that make data more available and easily constructable/displayable

-I like how you mentioned "wearables" as a seperate category. There are many things that could be wearables that are not watches most likely that people could use. A swiss army knife type thing (something that can solve many problems) that is electronic yet still carryable on a normal day basis or maybe job specific could take off.

-Using constraint provers to reason around problems in the human domain (math etc) or in computer optimization/security

-Generated business reports using machine learning + formatting (abuse free services like ipython, ihaskell, etc for output)

-Tools that keep people productive (extremely wide category there is lots of old software in it, but mostly is just old, any new way with better UI and more useful features can surpass tons of old software.)

-A "sensor world." Sensors cost near to nothing now (just a few cents under a dollar) and they can be placed basically everywhere. There needs to be a better hive-mind like use for them. Also pretty soon phone apps or simple vision type apps could be able to quickly identify objects around them using web-apps and machine learning that could provide specs or information on them as well as interact with them.

-Just simply "tech of tommorrow." Things that "can scale" massively or improve performance tech wise with speciality in that domain, though this isn't likely a first startup idea.

Note: I can list more if people want or I could expand with more specific examples of software or companies that do things in these fields etc. Feel free to reply.

<comment><USER2> A simpler way: Look at what big tech company x is doing that looks to be selling. Do they use an open source solution to it if it is software based? Do they provide a api or something that could be useful? Is there a market for an addition built on their framework or is it based off of an open source implementation which can be improved?

If yes to all above then you can maybe turn that into a product. A great site for seeing what is available for frameworks is yeoman: [http://yeoman.io/generators/](http://yeoman.io/generators/) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cryptocurrencies, drones</comment>


The Lost Art of Memory: Simon Critchley Drags Occult Philosophy into the Present - <AUTHOR> http://flavorwire.com/549362/the-lost-art-of-memory-simon-critchley-drags-occult-philosophy-into-the-present <comment><USER2> _if it's true that we're damaging or losing our working memories each time we interface with the Internet [...] what isn't so clear is how we could reclaim them_

A cool project, unless it's been done or approximated already, would be a screensaver that parses through emails, music files, photos, videos, ebooks etc on your PC and plays a portion of them very briefly to rekindle the memories in your brain. Sort of like a dream played in fast-forward. In the case of ebooks and emails, you could convert small chunks of text to synthesized speech and flash the text on the screen in large font, intermingling between photos and snippets of video or music.

Of course you'd want to have a level of control over what content is shown, lest your erotic fan-fiction and sub-sub-genre of niche pornography is advertised to everyone around you. Although that could be a feature.

<comment><USER3> You may want to consider Mary Flanagan's "[phage]"[0], which did something like this. I had downloaded the Shockwave program once in the early '00s, but I can't find a link for it now.

[0] [http://maryflanagan.com/work/phage/](http://maryflanagan.com/work/phage/)

<comment><USER2> _consider Mary Flanagan 's "[phage]"_

Good find! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Makes me wonder if there is any major information repository that is truly "darknet" in the sense that it's never even been written down, passed orally for generations with extreme precautions against mechanical recording.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is using the Internet synonymous with not being able to remember. I find that I search for things I don't know and then retain the memory.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone to implement striptease code coverage tool? - <AUTHOR>

I have following idea: http://goo.gl/dFdys7
and as far as I search the web it is not implemented yet. Anyone interested in implementing it, or you find it too offensive/nsfw?
the screenshot was made with few modifications to  https://github.com/colszowka/simplecov but it will need more html/css/js tweaks to work properly and look nice. <comment><USER2> I can only imagine that you're a young man, so I ask you, to take a moment, and think about not doing something just for the lulz. One day, you may look back at yourself and cringe at your internet behavior, because it will be there for you and your contemporaries to read. Or what is far more likely, an algorithm will have weighed this post as bad taste and some score by which you are judged will be affected.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is what I think it is, you'll get a lot farther having a photo of an engineering failure turn into a photo of a solid engineering marvel.

If you want to motivate someone to write a complete test suite, remind them of their duty as an engineer. I don't see what breasts have to do with it.

You could also just go with a nice landscape.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is why women leave this fucking field man.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you had a daughter, would you want her to work at a company who used that tool?

</comment><comment><USER6> WAT</comment>


Scalability: PostgreSQL vs MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://tweakers.net/reviews/649/7

<comment><USER2> Yeah, a lot of things have changed since 2006. It would however been interesting to see an updated post with current versions of both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

</comment><comment><USER3> 2006 called, it claims it's copyright for old stories

</comment><comment><USER4> For small use cases, e.g. Hacking on a developer workstation, MySQL has historically been a lot easier to get started with. No need for Cygwin which used to be the case for postgres, MySql has a GUI installer, mysql has a ton of online help resources, no mental drain to deal with up front - how often should I run a Postgres vacuum? How should I schedule it?

When it comes to scaling up though, Postgres has in my experience, always just worked. This has been true for years. The documentation is excellent and the community extremely helpful and knowledgable.

</comment><comment><USER5> As I posted in the other thread. These companies (among others) use MySQL:

Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, Flickr, Amazon, Craigslist, eBay, Etsy, Google, Groupon, Ticketmaster, Yahoo, 37Signals, DHL, Dropbox, Evernote, UPS, Kayak, LastMinute, Orbitz, Continental, Mint, Quora, Tumblr, Techcrunch, Slashdot, NYT, NBC, Reuters, Wotif, Zappos, Wikipedia, Youtube.

So that should calm any doubts about MySQL's ability to scale. Twitter and Facebook even have their own forks which are tailored to their individual use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the point.

More to the point, those companies use lots of other software products, memcache among them, to improve the scalability of MySQL. It could be possible, if the numbers in the article are an indicator, that these companies are spending a lot more money on hardware than they would if they were using a more scalable database like PostgreSQL. They also may spend less money on engineering time if they didn't have to configure and manage all the software needed to get MySQL to scale.</comment></comment>


The Story of Building an Education Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/d1d0b95ff595

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a great opportunity. Unfortunately being non-technical rules out a lot of people it seems like.</comment>


Covid-19 in Proportion - <AUTHOR> http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/ <comment><USER2> So strange. Covid in 1 MONTH, with all its lockdown measures killed more than flu in whole seasons. It is also a strange comparison of UK with Sweden, which has to be compared with neighboring countries, and not arbitrary compared with UK. Say Norway and Germany have vastly, very significantly lower death rate from covid.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's not one month, in UK first "reported transmission case" was late February so it's at least 8 weeks by now:

"As things stand, the first recorded UK case was January 31 and the earliest documented incidence of transmission within the UK occurred on February 28." [1]

majority of flu deaths every year occur within similar period (normal distribution is obviously not uniform).

[1] [https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/coronavirus/uk-patient- zero-e...](https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/coronavirus/uk-patient-zero-east- sussex-family-may-have-been-infected-with-coronavirus-as-early-as-mid-january)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting comparison of current outbreak with previous seasons in UK and overall mortality in Europe by data scientist</comment>


Run Windows Apps 100% Seamlessly on Ubuntu - <AUTHOR> http://hehe2.net/thedarkside/microsoft/run-windows-apps-100-seamlessly-on-ubuntu/ <comment><USER2> Upmod for informing me about SeamlessRDP (although I'm not sure I understand exactly what I'm seeing technically, the result is pretty handy)

This article seems to imply that the problem with Windows is the shell (explorer.exe) and the taskbar. While I have no desire to start a lame Windows bashathon, I'd say that's probably the most superficial interpretation of the situation I've heard in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I remember correctly there's some limitation where you can only run one application at a time. I think it's something to do with the login limit in Remote Desktop, although I guess that can be avoided if the application you run is explorer.exe.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ummm, why not just use VirtualBox in "Seemless Mode"?</comment>


The deception of the 3 Gorges Dam finally released - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O1w2UelZZQ <comment><AUTHOR> What I found interesting was at 5:17 the narrator says that farmers are lamenting no crops due to flooding, and that a great famine is expected. [1]

1\. [https://youtu.be/5O1w2UelZZQ?t=317](https://youtu.be/5O1w2UelZZQ?t=317)</comment>


Show HN: White label link shortener for startups and marketers - <AUTHOR> http://clk.im <comment><USER2> Truly a kick ass product.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These guys knows their job. Indeed the best link shortener for making money.</comment>


Wiping the datacenters every night - <AUTHOR> https://blog.edgemesh.com/edgemeshs-clean-slate-protocol-782fa00eb3c6 <comment><AUTHOR> This is from our (Edgemesh.com) blog about our use of Docker and how we wipe and reload every datacenter each and every night. Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Vanishing Act: Movie Trailers Are Going Voiceless - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/2014/09/movie_trailers_going_voiceless.html

<comment><USER2> _Technology Claims Another Victim_

Oh bullshit. Every film professional I know hated voice overs and thought they were cheesy years ago. Nobody liked the way marketing companies cut trailers so more and more directors and editors started supplying trailers along with the final cut.</comment>


Getkitsune.com – Web optimisation tool for web developers - <AUTHOR> I am not a developer, frankly this would be my first post on HN. I work with Kitsune, it's a one click solution to host, optimize, setup CDN for  websites to be used by web developers(we released the first version for static websites recently). We'd love your feedback. If you are interested in  helping us, please send an email with your inputs to email@example.com<p>Also, you can check out the initial release product at http://getkitsune.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't see any evidence of [http://getkitsune.com/](http://getkitsune.com/) using a CDN of any sort. Aren't you using your own service?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was our initial website, our new website(under construction) will be hosted on our own service. Kitsune blog is hosted on our systems though, here is the link blog.getkistune.com

<comment><USER2> _Kitsune blog is hosted on our systems though_

Your blog is hosted on AWS. The CDN is Cloudfront.

If you've build something to easily get a site on to AWS with Cloudfront configured automatically that's great, and potentially very useful for some people, but maybe you should be upfront about what the service you're selling actually is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is helping. Another thing I forgot to mention was , Kitsune works on pay as you go model, i.e. you pay only what you use for Hosting and this is billed monthly .</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi 4 PCI-Express Bridge "Chip" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zakkemble.net/rpi4-pci-express-bridge-chip/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty awesome stuff, but what could be a real use of PCIe in Raspberry Pi except for experimenting ? Just curious, but most things I can think of are probably going to bottleneck...

<comment><USER3> Quick, reliable and (probably?) pretty easy transfer of lots of data. In currently researching how to drive a non standard display with another SBC and an FPGA driver (sopine) and would be pretty happy about PCIe.</comment></comment>


SpaceX Rocket "lands on droneship, but too hard to survive" - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588076749562318849

<comment><USER2> "We falcon punched the barge..."

[https://twitter.com/SpaceXEngineer/status/588075066757361664](https://twitter.com/SpaceXEngineer/status/588075066757361664)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing"

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588082574183903232](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588082574183903232)

<comment><USER4> I am surprised there's nothing on the barge to catch it if this happens. The landing struts on the Falcon seem pretty narrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple of days ago, [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/587704139225759744](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/587704139225759744) set expectations with, _Odds of rocket landing successfully today are still less than 50%. The 80% figure by end of year is only bcs many launches ahead._

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there video anywhere? I would like to see it.

<comment><USER7> > All we have right now is low frame rate video (basically pictures). Normal > video will be posted when ship returns to port in a few days.

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588084593552596992](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/588084593552596992)</comment></comment>


Welcome to the Likernet… like 'er or not - <AUTHOR> http://memesteading.com/2010/04/24/welcome-to-the-facebook-likernet-like-er-or-not/

<comment><USER2> _The Internet was a great prototype for geeks and knowledge-worker bees. But the cool kids and average folks have arrived, and the Internet has been kind of a mess for them — what with spammers and phishers and predators and nutballs all over. ... The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routs [sic] around it, which was kind of nice. Unfortunately the Internet also interprets every unguarded email, form, website, and program as an opening into which to spray its unsolicited marketing, harassment, and malware._

It's the cool kids and average folks who are the spammers and phishers and predators and nutballs. The geeks didn't invent the harassment and malware, those things saw significant increases online when everyone else invaded our utopia. The geeks may have introduced the marketing, but the average person _abuses_ it.

However, I don't think I'd wish for the old internet back. I like things like Wikipedia, feeds, APIs, Google, sharing, and all the convenience and entertainment that the modern internet affords us. And I like watching those who don't get it and are tied to pre-information age ideals or are threatened by it try to fruitlessly control it. I like that it's different every year, everyone is chasing innovation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where's my Loathe Button?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately Zed Shaw's 'Utu' project - which could have given rise to the Haternet -- seems moribund:

[http://blaglash.com/2008/04/11/utu-saving-the-internet- with-...](http://blaglash.com/2008/04/11/utu-saving-the-internet-with-hate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> it's like Singapore_

which offenses are subject to caning and which to hanging?

<comment><USER5> FTA> It's like Singapore, but in cyberspace with 100 times more citizens. Most current Internet residents will prefer to move to the Likernet.

Here (Canary Wharf, London) Singapore is a running joke for any clean, soulless, fake place.

<comment><USER6> Irony, then?

<comment><USER5> Yep.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making key parts of the Ordnance Survey (OS) MasterMap freely available - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/government/news/unlocking-of-governments-mapping-and-location-data-to-boost-economy-by-130m-a-year <comment><USER2> This is an interesting decision. Whilst there potentially are economic benefits, I wonder how much this is in response to Openstreetmap becoming a large player in geospatial data.</comment>


Lessons from the Language Boot Camp for Mormon Missionaries - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2014/06/07/319805068/lessons-from-the-language-boot-camp-for-mormon-missionaries <comment><AUTHOR> Confirms my own experience. I learned English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, in that order, using the method of speaking with native speakers and looking up and learning new vocabulary along the way. It really works.</comment>


Good Programmer vs. Average Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/javinpaul/good-programmers-vs-average-programmer-and-why-asking-questions-and-paying-attention-to-details-matters-j3h <comment><USER2> I agree with the point the article is making.

However, I would add that a developer (programmer) should be in the initial client meeting and project discovery meetings (if they even happen at all). If a developer is given a spec to build out a system they were totally in the dark about they have missed a ton of context.

This leads to a pile of unfolding requirements questions emailed to an increasingly frustrated client that feels all these questions are obvious and nitpicky.

At a certain point the developer just has to produce something with his best guess because hey other clients projects need done too.

Is it fair to put the blame on the dev? Maybe.</comment>


Recurrent neural networks, dreams, and filling in - <AUTHOR> http://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/12/05/recurrent-dreams-and-filling-in/ <comment><USER2> Just to note: although the models discussed in this blog can be arbitrary deep and rely on multilayer perceptrons, the principles of learning are completely different then in other contemporary deep learning: the error is injected at every level in a distributed way. There is no vanishing gradient, because there is no necessity to propagate anything end to end.

</comment><comment><USER3> very interesting work...

so i was wondering, as far as "fill-in".

I see this is mainly focused on image synthesis for information that literally isn't available.

OTOH, occluders happen a lot in the real world just temporarily as things move around in front of us, or we move past an occluder.

In these cases we may have seen what is actually there just moments before the occluder appeared.

So it might be interesting to create a version that fills-in from what it had previously just seen rather from a corpus.

This way, if I'm shooting a video and there is an annoying lamp post that suddenly gets in the way it can be instantly erased. This would seem really useful for autonomous vehicle work as well.

I liked the ideas on sleep at the end as well w.r.t. attractors. I've thought quite a bit about "stuck target vectors" in the context of boid simulations. Really might be onto something there. Could have a loong chat about that.

Anyway, it's really cool, and great blog!

<comment><USER2> To some extent it does fill in based on what it has seen before. Although there is a fair number of parameters in that model, it cannot memorise the entire clip. This is apparent, since the "dream" sequences cannot reproduce the entire sequence and compress/stretch/repeat certain subsequences or collapse into a fixed point.

So the fill in does have some temporal context of what was there recently. I'm running a bigger model now (great thing about PVM, it scales seamlessly) which should provide a better quality image.

<comment><USER3> great! looking forward to the results. good stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Usenet search do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Newzbin2 closed its doors last week, followed by Nzbmatrix. How are you all getting your NZBs these days? <comment><USER2> <https://www.binsearch.info> =)</comment>


Could MySpace buy RockYou to mess with Facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/rumormonger/could-myspace-buy-rockyou-to-mess-with-facebook-311588.php <comment><USER2> WOW! I hope this is true...

</comment><comment><USER3> For $800 million? No.

<comment><USER4> This article even says that they know it is a bad tip, yet they printed it anyways...</comment></comment>


JSONRequest: two-way data exchange with any JSON data server - <AUTHOR> http://www.json.org/JSONRequest.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a great idea and, according to the timestamp, was proposed in 2006 already.

Well, considering the incredible pace at which W3C and browser vendors operate I'm definately looking forward to see this implemented within the next 15 years or less!

</comment><comment><USER3> The example he uses throughout is pirate.net attacking penzance.org. Lovely Gilbert and Sullivan reference:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance>

</comment><comment><USER4> Good idea, bad implementation.

XmlHttpRequest was as bad a name choice as JsonRequest.

There should be a data agnostic API used to communicate any kind of data across web sites, with security in mind.

Name it HttpRequest, period.

<comment><USER5> Why? That would just confuse people.

<comment><USER4> No, we shouldn't stuff browsers with an object for every data type in existance: XmlRequest, AsciiRequest, CSVRequest, EDIRequest, ASNRequest, TXTRequest, etc.

Just one that allows same/remote connections and a few methods: get the data and check for errors.

The parsing and validation should be done on the client after the data has been received and for that we have xml parsers and json parsers.

The data transfer should have nothing to do with its format or content.</comment></comment></comment>


The single biggest use of stolen University logins is to download papers - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2008-04/2008-04-27.html <comment><USER2> It's an interesting point about the changing role of media as it becomes digital.

A friend of mine was complaining that he couldn't share his Kindle ebooks with friends which was something he did a lot when he had actual books. Now he can only recommend they spend money on stuff.

<comment><USER3> This is precisely why I would never buy a Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I'm told that the single biggest use of stolen Columbia University logins is to download papers_

Citation needed.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can easily believe this. I'm at university, I have electronic access to a host of journals.

There are some I don't though and for these I'll first speak with friends at other institutions before contacting the author.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of my main motivations for going back to school is journal access.

<comment><USER7> What will you major/minor in?

<comment><USER6> Math. Last time it was economics and finance, but I suspect that math will let me 'downshift' into either of those, or CS, so I have plenty of options.

<comment><USER7> Options...always good to have on the journey. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ... and start publishing in open source science journals.</comment>


ShaderFrog – Create and compose shaders in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://shaderfrog.com/home <comment><USER2> This is a pretty cool project!

I especially like how easy it is to combine two shaders automatically into one. Andrew Ray, the brilliant guy behind ShaderFrog, automatically parses the shaders to intelligently merge them together -- something I've never seen before.

Andrew has also created a run-time library to make it easy to adopt ShaderFrog shaders into your own tools (sort of like how Allegorithmic has the Substance run-time library for Unity and UE4). It is available here:

[https://github.com/DelvarWorld/ShaderFrog- Runtime](https://github.com/DelvarWorld/ShaderFrog-Runtime)

We here at [http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io), an online 3D modeling & rendering platform, are exploring adopting the ShaderFrog material run-time.

<comment><USER3> it's pretty damn cool - i wish it is open-sourced.

<comment><USER4> This may be a silly question, but could you elaborate on why you prefer the project to be open sourced? I'm keeping it closed source now for potential business and security reasons.

<comment><USER3> I'm just curious and want to know how it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey folks! All this traffic has got our server a little excited. We're working on restoring full service. Check @shaderfrog for updates [https://twitter.com/shaderfrog/status/641645102960500738](https://twitter.com/shaderfrog/status/641645102960500738)

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat! See also shadertoy.com, though it's set up more for demoscene stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks very interesting, but seems like they're <do we have a verb for HN traffic akin to slashdotting?>ed right now.

Looks like a tech demo right now. They need someone with taste to design a few actually attractive/useful shaders.

<comment><USER4> All shaders are beautiful :)

This is a problem with user content submitted sites. It's hard not to conflate the quality of the content (shaders) with the quality of the product (ShaderFrog). There are no default ShaderFrog shaders, they're all user created.

The more oddball shaders (my favorites) are the composed shaders, which are _not_ eligible to be used as inputs to other composed shaders. Only the basic shaders, which are generally higher quality because they require more knowledge of how GLSL works, can be inputs to composed shaders.

<comment><USER6> Right, but you do have a choice what's displayed on the landing page, and even what default objects the user is given to play with. It pays to select them well because ugly stuff can drive potential users away. You need to show people who aren't technical that you can achieve nice effects and show them how.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice job Andy! This is by far the most intense thing I've seen my browser do.

</comment><comment><USER8> I tried ShaderFrog recently and was extremely impressed. The experience of creating new shaders by composing individual existing shaders is incredible.

In my opinion, Andrew is just scratching the tip of the iceberg here. Hope he keeps up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing! Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER10> what is a shader exactly in layman's terms?

<comment><USER11> Tiny program that runs on the GPU. Executes once for each point in the scene (vertex shader) or pixel in the rendered image (pixel shader).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find good side projects for coding school students? - <AUTHOR> I am a teacher/mentor at a coding school, and our students have been asking me where could I find good side/learning projects for them. Since these will be side projects they wont be able to invest more than 15-20 hours/week into them, but they might form teams if it really looks good. We, mentors will be able to help/guide them but just a little, e.g. help with negotiations or do code reviews.
Some ideas that came to my mind:
- Make a company account on a freelancing site (like Upwork) and let them pick up work from there. The profit is theirs of course.
- Find charities that need help with software development (any idea where?) and help them. Its unlikely that they will get money for these, but it would look good on their (currently empty) CV.
- Anything else? Im open to anything.
They are learning to program in Python (using Peewee, Flask) and know a bit of SQL and HTML/JS/CSS. So the work should be with these languages, I doubt they could pick up a new language easily at this stage. These projects should be about getting real-life experience and adding something to their CV that looks nice. But some monetary compensation would be a big plus.
So anyone got any ideas where I should look? <comment><USER2> [https://nugget.one/](https://nugget.one/) emails one SaaS/business idea daily.

This could provide some good ideas that could be fun to work on for them and to learn new things.

If you want reach out to them they might be able to set you up with a free account or maybe have a pool of ideas that didn't make the cut that would be perfect for your class to work on.

Possible monetary compensation if they build them as a business. Might be better as solo projects instead of teams if they find an idea they are serious about unless they want to partner with a classmate.

Reach out to local businesses who might have an ongoing need for work your students could do. This would give them some compensation and a taste of real world projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm good ideas! I'm now thinking about reaching out to tech startups and getting collaborations with them - we provide part time/remote interns, they provide learning opportunities and beef up their CV - plus maybe even some money.</comment></comment>


Nobel Prize Winners by Country (Interactive) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/nobel-prize-winners-by-country

<comment><USER2> Does the nobel prize even mean anything, anymore? Peace prize winners like Obama and Kissinger (Chile, 1973 anyone?) make me think it doesn't.</comment>


I wish HN had a downvote option for submissions - <AUTHOR> I think a dislike button option could be helpful to stop spreading biased and false information like this recent highly upvoted HN submission (please see its comments why not credible) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108109<p>Link title is: "C will never stop you from making mistakes" <comment><USER2> Once you accumulate a "small karma threshold" (quote from the HN FAQ) you can 'flag' submissions. Flagging is the closest to a "dislike" option available. But it is suggested to use it for items that are off topic.

The better way to make sure items you find to be "positive" make the front page is to upvote everything you think deserves to get there. Upvote the positive, ignore the negative, and the negative will fade from view.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[edit]: add additional clarity

</comment><comment><USER3> Disagree strongly. Downvotes add a level of toxicity that should be avoided as much as possible. Ignoring an undesirable link is better than having a negative reaction to it. The lack of a downvote button also forces any critics to leave a comment explaining their criticism, rather than just mindlessly pressing the down arrow.

</comment><comment><USER4> To be honest, I think the down vote is abused sometimes. It would be nice to see who down voted a comment. Transparency could help correct the abuse.

<comment><USER5> I think what would be helpful is to have an option to ignore all voting for purpose of sorting, so that you can vote if you want to, but if you don't like to, you can disable that option and it will display only in the chronological order (it could hide the voting options too if you wanted to, but I suppose it doesn't have to do).

<comment><USER4> chronological order would be a good option. I sometimes never get to the other pages when there are hundreds of comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a downvoting feature for comments when you have enough HN karma points. 500 iirc

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I updated the title to be more precise

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know there exists one because one of my posts has -4 lol

</comment><comment><USER8> Credible or not, the article was evidently written by someone on the ISO C committee, which makes it noteworthy and topical for HN.

> _please see its comments why not credible_

Most of the comments are of low-quality; I can hardly find a single nugget of anything that stacks against the opinions given in the article.

I'm on the fence. I'm actually surprised that, for instance, strerror doesn't return "const char * ".

However, the proposed change is a low-value fix.

Except for the dynamically generated cases for unknown error numbers, the strings are static text that can be represented by write-protected string literals.

GNU Linux:

      $ cat strerror.c
      #include <string.h>
      #include <errno.h>

      int main(void)
      {
        char *x = strerror(ERANGE);
        *x = 0;
        return 0;
      }

      $ gcc strerror.c -o strerror
      $ ./strerror
      Segmentation fault (core dumped)

This arguably not as good as a compile-time check. Though in some ways it is better because it cannot be casually dismissed with a cast! No matter what tortuous paths the returned pointer takes through the bowels of the program, and how it is converted, at the end, if it is dereferenced to perform a write, the machine will catch it.

In any case, the main point is that we don't have a heisenbug here. If the offending code executes at all, there is a predictable and instant access violation.

The insidious problems in C programs that people struggle with are the ones where something is inadvertently modified _without detection_ and causes a misbehavior at some later time, in an unrelated part of the program. The _const_ qualifier helps with this, if people use it judiciously in their code bases. Adding a sprinkling of _const_ to a code base that was developed without _const_ can find some of these kinds of bugs.

There is no chance of that happening here; the hardware protects the strerror strings, and will kill the program at the first misuse. Which means, people have already debugged those situations, and all we will get from the _const_ is a bunch of annoying false positives.

No, not every hardware has a MMU for the above to be possible; ISO C is not just for platforms with memory management. But anyway, we have those platforms. Maybe people should port as much of their code as possible to more robust platforms with better tooling and test the heck out of it.

A code base that has been Valgrind-ed and Asan-ed to smithereens on Linux, but is running on some MMU-less embedded chip, is probably in better shape than similar code that hasn't been so treated.

ISO C is a portability standard; it can help people write code which is portable, which then allows it to be exposed to the tools and approaches available from diverse platforms. Not every kind of bug has to be caught on every available platform. It's okay to use one platform that has good diagnostics and tools to harden some code, which then gets ported to some obscure chip using a compiler that has poor diagnostics, and where the run- time has very little error checking in the hardware or libraries.

Okay, now here is an alternative opinion. strerror obviously _should_ return a const-qualified pointer. What, I'm surprised that it doesn't; how did that even happen?

Anyway, we can do that without introducing any false positives for existing code. The reason is that people compiling legacy code should be using the compiler options to select the legacy dialect. So, that is to say, compiling code in C90 or C99 mode would produce the old strerror declaration without const.

If old code is breaking for you due to a new standard, it's because you're inappropriately failing to restrict the dialect to the one in which the code was written!

C99's introduction of // comments broke contrived C90 code like this:

       z = x//*divide by y*/y
       ;

But, in 2020, I can still compile that with "gcc -std=c90" or "gcc -ansi", and it nicely divides x by y.

The "can't make the slightest change that will diagnose or break old code!" knee-jerk reaction betrays an ignorance about compiler support for multiple historic standards.

</comment><comment><USER9> bias is not bad</comment>


Building and Developing an A++ Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.founderblog.com/2009/02/building-and-developing-a-team.html#comments

<comment><AUTHOR> Frank Addante, who's built a few successful teams, gives the high points on what to look for in your first hires.</comment>


Lucian Asks, Why Sports? (180 CE) - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sports-games/lucian-asks-why-sports <comment><USER2> The date may be off by a few hundred years, but isn't the essential message of sports the same?

We must win, and they must lose. They are not us, and when we win, as we surely will do, they will not share in our winnings. The glory is ours, for defeating our foes.

That's true, isn't it? That's what I was taught in high school. How could that other school's foolish imitation of a "sports" team ever compete with ours? We are superior, and any challengers will be defeated in battle.

I didn't learn this very well. I was happy enough with my ham radios and Teletype machines. Alas, I didn't get the girls like the jocks did. They were the winners. I was just another nerd.

This was in 1969. Maybe it is different today.

<comment><USER3> That is one reading. A more nuanced reading is found in the cliche: 'It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.'

I believe that sports serve as a teacher of morality to the masculine aspect.

> "Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to > football (soccer)."

― Albert Camus

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The date for this one is an estimate based on Lucian's lifespan; looks like the good people at Lapham's Quarterly were mistaken in attributing it to c. 590 Athens, seeing as how he wrote during the Roman Empire. He did set the fictional dialogue in the Athens of that time though.

</comment><comment><USER4> In case you were wondering who the protagonsists are:

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

Solon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon)</comment>


Sell yourself with open source, generating infinite money. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/renasboy/canistro

<comment><USER2> This is very peculiar. There are no "trap"s and no "|| exit 1" type constructs in that installer script. What happens if something fails or is aborted?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

this is true.

however what the install script does is what we usually do manually it is just time saving.

I am still working in the documentation but I could not resist sending it out.

Thanks for your remark, will work on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick update: Just added a simple trap function to clean the installation in case of failure, however once again this is designed for geeks to install. If you want to just use it go to the online version on canistro.linuxforme.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> love the headline...

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, love it too, open for suggestions :-D</comment></comment>


Zipf's Law in Passwords (2017) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://wangdingg.weebly.com/uploads/2/0/3/6/20366987/ieeetifs17_final.pdf <comment><USER2> > What is the underlying mechanism that leads to the emergence of Zipf's law > in passwords?

As far as human-generated passwords go, it does not seem surprising that they follow Zipf's law, since it seems humans are hard-wired to communicate via Zipfian languages, and we likely adhere to that distribution unwittingly when choosing passwords.

What's interesting is that when humans choose numbers, those numbers typically do not follow Benford's law (which is a special case of Zipf's law), and can be detected as fraudulent. I would be interested in seeing if machine- generated passwords also follow Zipf's law (my hunch is that they will not, much like how human-generated numbers do not follow Benford's law and stick out like sore thumbs).

<comment><USER3> Any machine generated password that follows Zipf's/Benford's law should be nuked from orbit.</comment></comment>


Choose Your Own Greek Default Adventure - <AUTHOR> http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/16/so-what-would-your-plan-for-greece-be/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see this as a flow chart too.</comment>


"I had so many advantages, and I barely made it": Pinterest engineer on sexism - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/659196/i-had-so-many-advantages-and-i-barely-made-it-pinterests-tracy-chou-on-sexism-in-tech/ <comment><USER3> I'm ... not sure what to make of this. I'm not a woman, so not qualified to comment as such, but I can say without question that I've had to struggle through many similar issues, just take sex out of the picture - <USER2> from watching classmates apparently breeze through classes that I've had to take four times to wondering if my career success is just because I'm a white American male.

Edit: I took a risk saying something like this, and have some karma to burn, but please, if you downvote, at least say why.

<comment><USER4> There's a well documented and researched confidence gap between men and women. While confidence isn't an issue restricted to just women, it is a more prominent issue for them on average. Did a quick search, and here's the first paper I found on the topic. There's a ton more, though I'm not sure which are publicly available.

[http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/confidence_fi...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/confidence_final.pdf?m=1437407065)

Also, what you're talking about is also called stereotype threat, which is where "people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group". First step to combating those feelings is often recognizing them!

<comment><USER5> And how is this sexism? Or are you suggesting they professors should treat women differently? I was half way through the article before realizing the author was female. She could have been anyone, and have the same issues. And then we find out the professor encouraged her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everything is someones else's fault.

I don't have confidence in myself. Fault of society. Sexism.

I don't know how how to reject advances. Fault of men. Sexism. (BTW. How is giving anyone's a t-shirt with your name a sexual harassment? I could totally imagine a guy giving one to another guy and other than being rather lame gift, not be a big deal.)

Obviously being a guy makes it so much different, and your road to becoming an engineer is very straightforward. You're always overconfident, never shy, noone ever is mean to you, noone ever bullies you, society melted you to be a perfect human being capable of anything you desire.

It's amusing to see how woman raised in America (especially CA!), where everything is super sexist-conscious, and sometimes plain rigged in favor of girls (eg. how many boys vs girls gets drugged for ADHD, as they naturally can't stand still in the class?), still find a way to blame everything on sexism.

<comment><USER7> Whatever you say about her, the sexism she has faced in certain situations cannot be denied.

Giving a t-shirt with your name on it to a dude friend of yours is not the same as giving a t-shirt with your name on it to the intern who has joined the company.

The first comes off as a joke, the second is just downright creepy and is the side effect of poor social skills.

<comment><USER8> Are you saying that you should take into account the... wait for it... _sex_ of the person you're giving the gift to? Wouldn't that be, you know, sexist?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a guy, I experienced the same feelings of not being good enough to make it as a programmer, throughout school and my early career.

Of my programmer friends and classmates who quickly landed good jobs, only one ever took the initiative to ask his boss to consider hiring me. The others just smiled and shrugged when I begged for career advice.

Once I had squeezed into my first company, I rarely received support from my coworkers, and mostly advanced my skills through staying at work for extra hours and spending lonely weekends on side projects. I've come a long way, but I still wonder how far ahead I would be today if I'd just received a bit more support early on.

I'm not convinced that there is widespread sexism in the computer industry, because I've worked alongside and been managed by many fantastic women, and witnessed them advance as quickly as me.

However, I think it's a rare individual who can become a great programmer without having strong support, mentorship and encouragement. Women need that support just as crucially as men, and it's important to draw attention to the places where they are not receiving it.

<comment><USER10> ahris's response to another comment applies here as well:

"While confidence isn't an issue restricted to just women, it is a more prominent issue for them on average."

This is generally an important thing to consider. Just because a particular issue applies to you or you've seen a similar pattern amongst male colleagues doesn't mean that it isn't a more acute issue for women.

> I'm not convinced that there is widespread sexism in the computer industry, > because I've worked alongside and been managed by many fantastic women, and > witnessed them advance as quickly as me.

Relying on just the evidence you have directly around you is the same as relying on anecdotes. It's possible you've been lucky and work at a particularly un-sexist companies, but that perhaps the industry as a whole has an issue with sexism.

<comment><USER9> You're entirely correct, though I want to emphasize that while I understand that my own experiences are limited, I haven't found arguments that there is widespread sexism to be more convincing than my own experience. I'm quite open to being convinced otherwise, should a strong argument be made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a bit off-topic. I noticed the author was listed as one of "Forbes 30 under 30" in 2014. I'm sorry, but I must ask: how? The other folks on the list include the founders of Dropcam, Snapchaat, Stripe, etc., while the author is listed as merely "software engineer at Pinterest" with a great resume of good schools, scholarships and internships. Similarly, there is one other fellow who is simply listed as "security expert". I guess this is more of a critique of Forbes than anything.

<comment><USER12> A cursory google search says that she's done work[1] in[2] diversity[3] for women, which is a pretty big deal, even if people are tired of hearing about it.

[1]: [http://readwrite.com/2014/11/11/tracy-chou-pinterest- enginee...](http://readwrite.com/2014/11/11/tracy-chou-pinterest-engineering- how-i-got-my-start/)

[2]: [http://www.vogue.com/4537369/pinterest-tracy-chou-silicon- va...](http://www.vogue.com/4537369/pinterest-tracy-chou-silicon-valley/)

[3]: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/30/pinterest- dive...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/30/pinterest-diversity- women-underrepresented-minorities-silicon-valley-jesse-jackson/30881091/)

<comment><USER13> Each of those sources were written after she was chosen as a 30-under-30 so it doesn't really answer the question of what made Forbes choose her.

You have to admit that it is kind of interesting that the list are pretty much all founders or people who have invented something incredible. Her bio on Forbes's article lists her as a "rising star"[1]. Founder, founder, founder, founder, rising-star, founder, founder, founder. Am I sexist for pointing this out?

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/special- report/2014/30-under-30/techno...](http://www.forbes.com/special- report/2014/30-under-30/technology.html)

<comment><USER14> There's also a designer, an engineering manager, a "security expert", a researcher, and a "hacker" \- all men

Also, note that just because the sources cited in grandparent were written after, that doesn't mean she wasn't already working on it before, e.g.

[https://medium.com/@triketora/where-are-the-numbers- cb997a57...](https://medium.com/@triketora/where-are-the-numbers- cb997a57252#.31uw8sqvo)

[https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software- eng/commit/02...](https://github.com/triketora/women-in-software- eng/commit/0245cca39dae607b18fd71303cd55976b42ca444)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-saleh > Like many a woman before me, I had run smack into the confidence gap.

I was thinking about this lately. I realized, that among my friends, we have been playing this weird game of terrible insults and trying to appear the smartest guy in the room since we were 10. We still do it while in pub some- times :)

Interestingly, girls never wanted to participate. I remember talking to one of my friends in High School where she told me how terrible one of my friends was, where he was always ridiculing her. I tried to explain, that this was normal among that particular group of friends, and that she should ridicule him back. She thought that attempting that wasn't worth the time and effort, because the result of her trying to flip the ridicule would probably be just more ridicule towards her. My thoughts were, yes, it took me 3 years to learn to endure the ridicule and fire back ... so, yeah, probably not worth it to get into this game, if you don't find it fun.

But as a esult, with this way we were trying to one-up each other for better part of a decade, of course "we were unfazed by any of the challenges professors might throw our way".

</comment><comment><USER15> This doesn't sound so much like an issue with sexism in tech so much as an issue with sexism and social conditioning. Women are taught to be perfectionist and hyperjudgemental about themselves. Of course this translates miserably into tech, rather than a more stable job with less unknowns and better integrated into the rest of societal structures, not a field hardly more than fifty years old in its modern state. Which I find interesting, as those very social structures are the ones not kind to women in the first place. I guess it just goes to show how deep the pressure placed on women runs.

IMHO there's nothing that can really be done about the examples guys being assholes, or nothing that can be realistically done about all of them, but I think nine tenths of this article wouldn't exist if we start raising girls to be risk takers instead of social objects. Notice how much the author obsessed over themself in relation to everyone surrounding them. Fifteen hours on an assignment wasn't a problem until she heard of her peers doing it in less time. We're simply not going to have women succeeding in tech and entrepreneurship until we break down the construct of women existing solely as objects that are parts their society. We're all the absolute worst kinds of sexists, because of what men and women expect of young girls. Of course they're going to fail when they're raised believing that trying and failing is worse than not trying at all.

<comment><USER16> >We're simply not going to have women succeeding in tech and entrepreneurship until we break down the construct of women existing solely as objects that are parts their society.

Women are taken very seriously (helped and protected) when they portrays themselves as objects in need of help, and are not taken seriously as seriously when they try to act as free agents. Men are taken more seriously when they act as free agents, but are cast aside when they show vulnerability. Some believe that this is purely because of societal expectations, some believe that this is purely because of biology, and some believe it is somewhere in between. But no matter which you believe is true, it should be clear that continuing to portray yourself and your gender as vulnerable and incapable of achieving their goals without external (male) support is doing the exact opposite of making you seem like a mature free agent. It makes you seem like a child.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C46rSIfTum4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C46rSIfTum4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> She didn't think she was good enough to take up Comp Sci because the guys had a lot of bluster and seem to 'get things' quicker than her... Is that sexism?

<comment><USER18> [edit, in this case I'd suggest that...]Sexism is a side effect of engineers being utter arseholes.

Fortunately the toxic "bow down to my magisterial knowledge, any person that dares to ask questions shall be cast into apostasy" isn't pervasive in any of the companies I work.

Having a daughter, it really shows in stark relief that girls are not allowed to be leaders, they are just bossy little [insert word here].

Women in meetings have to steep themselves in business passive to get an idea across, which is both fucking sad and annoying in equal terms.

As for watching nerdy bro's hit on women, if fucking pathetic. Iterative a/b tests of single chatup lines do not work on the same person.

Its a shame you weren't confident of your own opinion enough to use a real account.

<comment><USER15> Is sexism a side effect of engineers being assholes or is engineers being assholes a problem because sexism exists so much in the first place? It's very easy to blame a company or a subculture as being sexist, but no one thinks about how the entirety of Western society is still damn sexist. The fact that makeup exists, for example. Women are universally expected to be subordinate and seen before heard. Women keep getting pushed around because that's what our social structure expects them to do. Engineers not being assholes isn't going to solve the problem. Women being assholes, and everyone getting used to that, just might.

<comment><USER18> I broadly agree here, but I'd suggest that its more nuanced than 'western culture' sexism in britian is different to in america.

However, I work in tech, so I can't comment on other areas. But I'd love engineers to stop being arseholes, it make life much easer, and we'd get more things done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> She is living a life of great privilege. But she wants to be a victim. (Society teaches that this is a good thing to be.) But no--nerdy guys occasionally flirting with you doesn't make you a victim. No, the mere existence and layout of pink dolls in Walmart don't make you a victim. No, applying meme-of-the-day terms like "Impostor Syndrome" to yourself doesn't make you a victim. Sorry.

You're more privileged than 99.9 percent of the world. Just admit it and drop the false morality.

<comment><USER20> _One offered to give me a massage "because I looked stressed." Another tried to get me to watch a movie with him in a dark room with the door locked and blinds closed. Later, he gave me a custom-made t-shirt with his name emblazoned across the front._

These repeated unwanted sexual advances are textbook sexual harassment, specifically creating a hostile work environment. If she had gotten them to text those things to her, she would have grounds for a lawsuit.

Here's the definition of sexual harassment:

 _Harassment can include "sexual harassment" or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature... harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment._

[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm)

<comment><USER21> I never understood the whole sexual harassment thing in tech. Don't get me wrong, I understand how awful the entire situation is, but it sounds much more like a systemic issue than an issue that simply affects tech. The whole idea that many, many, many people find their significant others through work seems to indicate that in tech, it's "just" a hyper-condensed artifact of a much larger issue. I'm very curious what others think or if they know of any recent and relevant papers in either direction.

<comment><USER20> Sexual harassment is pervasive throughout all industries. I was replying to a comment that was ridiculously dismissive of a clear example of sexual harassment without speaking specifically about tech.

Basically, the law as it stands says that you can express romantic interest to a coworker once for free, but you have to drop it if they're not receptive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pinterest engineer, facebook and google intern, daughter of two engineers tells us how awful her life was because her classmates were absurdly arrogant ( _all_ of them) and two co-workers were dicks. Right. I'll never get this successful, but I'm white cis male so I should pity her I guess?

</comment><comment><USER23> I see her complaints about her misperceived technical competence relative to her peers as orthogonal to the sexism. I'm going to skip the sexism part because I really don't have the competence to talk about it.

First, she went to Stanford, a school absolutely _BUILT_ on bullshit, bluster, competitiveness and social networking. I'm about as dead center of the stereotypical male engineer as it gets--and the Stanford attitude came through and sure made me cringe when looking at graduate school. UC Berkeley matched my personality much more strongly.

Second, her parents inculcated into her to care way too much about her relative competence rather than _doing something interesting_. This, in my opinion, is always the dividing line that separates out the genuinely good from the mediocre. When you write a website to optimize trading card game returns, who cares whether it took you 5 hours or 15 hours to write it? It does something you think is interesting, and that is good enough.

Third, it seems like being the offspring of two PhD parents that she was missing a few social survival skills that most people learn from home. To quote House: "It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what." That doesn't make people bad, but everybody has their own wants, needs, desires, agendas, etc. Everybody has to learn to deal with that at some point.

And, my thanks to that professor who made you a TA. I have occasionally, myself, had to twist the arm of a female undergraduate to become a TA, take on a programming assignment for a company, or enter a programming competition.

</comment><comment><USER24> This was a good article about the stresses of entering a programming career.

The strained sexism tie-ins were unnecessary because most of the challenges she faced are universal, I remember hearing the same gloating conversations and feeling the same way when I was young.

As for the back massages and tshirts with men's names on them, that is a bit weird and should probably be taken up with their supervisor if it continues. It's most likely to be caused by poorly calibrated social cues than straight up sexism. There's nothing sexist about awkwardly showing interest in someone, it's only a problem if they don't take no for an answer.

<comment><USER25> Except that men disproportionately "awkwardly show interest" in random colleagues, strangers, passer-by.

All the women you know have experienced it, several times. Most of the men you know never experienced it.

So there is something sexist here, because women experience a flow of continual "akward interests" from random men that they have to manage. It's all on the women to manage men's akward interests, and from what my female friends tell me it is really stressing and wearing them down.

(I did an art-documentarish piece a few years ago, going and interviewing my friends about public space harassment and how they built techniques to manage mens. There's an excerpt in french there: [https://www.facebook.com/Le- sac-%C3%A0-main-269196498659/](https://www.facebook.com/Le- sac-%C3%A0-main-269196498659/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where was the sexism? Her professor encouraged her. She went to a prestigious school. She got an internship at some big companies that don't give internships out to everyone. She was treated as an intern, because she was an intern, not because she was female. And it sounds like she was treated like a female in some social situations. There isn't enough info in the article to determine if those situations were sexual harassment. But the article didn't mention any cases where her superiors treated her differently because of her gender.

</comment><comment><USER26> _I felt as if I was welcomed because I was cute to keep around, not because there was any expectation of my doing useful, good work._

It's hard to do the latter - I think I'd succumb to welcoming women in the workplace to avoid being sexist, as opposed to the expectation of the colleague doing useful, good work - now that I think about it - ironically in trying to reduce sexism in the workplace, I would make a sexist situation worse. Maybe it would be better not to have read the article at all.

<comment><USER27> I think men have relatively few social experiences where they see women create and maintain a driven, competitive environment -- for one another or for both men and women. I experienced this only rather late in life when I took ballet.

<comment><USER26> Good point - I haven't been in many situations where I had to compete with a woman directly. I suspect part of the reason why it's uncomfortable for women to break into software engineering is because it's mostly men. It'd be uncomfortable for me to work 8 hours a day in a room full of women, at least until I got used to it.

What do you think of ballet? Was it hard to get into as a man? Were there any prejudice issues where you were discriminated against on the basis of your gender, or was it as easy as in other fields of work?

<comment><USER27> I never worked in it, I only took classes as a hobby. I had private lessons for a time; I think that made things easier. And having a male instructor early on certainly made a difference.

There is no discrimination but there can definitely be a sense of being out of place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is hard (and it's made obvious by all the comments) is to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's a minority in their environment. I encourage all guys here to do something simple: go to a Women in <something> meetup (or Black engineers, anything where you'll be a minority). Chances are, you'll be one of very few guys/white people, and you might start thinking "do I really belong here?", and you'll feel a lot more self-conscious. Now imagine if it felt like that every time you went to classes/to your job - it's hard to imagine the consequences it could have after a few months or years.

</comment><comment><USER29> ITT: Hacker news believing that sexism isn't a big deal or otherwise downplaying it's role. It's like watching people who have never had a mental illness wonder why it's a big deal. For any normal feeling, assume it's greater magnitude and a peergroup doesn't exist for support.

Sexism isn't necessarily intentional (socially inexperienced college guys hitting on the only girls in their peergroup when they are unwanted). However; it exists and is very measurable. The least we can do is acknowledge it, even if we don't know what to do about it.

I'm not sure about most of you men, but I happen to like having women around. If we can't encourage more to work with us, we can at least do our best to be accepting to the people we already work with.

Edit: We do have great, data-backed responses to all posts as always. Its a difficult problem to understand because most people won't experience it and are probably tired of being reminded about.

<comment><USER30> >socially inexperienced college guys hitting on the only girls in their peergroup when they are unwanted

What is sexist about that? Or do I misunderstand you? Not native English speaker...

<comment><USER31> This might help:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11485689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11485689)

<comment><USER30> Yes but that is about harassment. I don't think sexism is the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How does someone with such a pedigree not know how to program before university? I grew up poor in an immigrant neighborhood and even in the early '80s (really bad time in NYC), I was coding Basic in sixth grade on a Commodore Vic-20. In high school, I was doing Pascal on PCs and assembly on a Zilog Z-80. Did I mention my family was dirt poor? My parents never even have a chance to go to high school.

Let's face it, writing software is not for everybody. The author is such a person.

<comment><USER14> You seem to be under the mistaken impression that only people who have been doing things since their childhood can or should become experts in those things.

<comment><USER33> You may want to compile some list of counterexamples or few will treat you seriously.

I'm skeptic. It takes dedication and time to become an expert. And the older you are, the easier it is to find yourself working for survival all your time or get lost in bullshit and no longer have the clarity of mind to learn.</comment></comment></comment>


Stop Using Curved Drop Shadows - <AUTHOR> http://delvarworld.github.com/blog/2012/05/14/stop-using-curved-drop-shadows/

<comment><USER2> Also annoying: Ignoring the "global light" on a Website.

Popular example: The new Ars Technica Design: Background - light from the bottom; Social Icons - light from above. (There are worse examples out there but this just came to my mind first...)

<comment><USER3> Great example; the new Ars Technica gives me a headache. It's clean, but it is impossible to read and harder to navigate. I've been meaning to redesign it myself for fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although I am not a fan of the fashion, it is indeed possible to create this effect in real life by shooting directly face on from a distance while maintaining orthogonal edges on the sheet. Like any form of forced perspective there are correct and incorrect ways to use it which is where the perceptual problem arises.

For example if the image portrayed is particularly detailed/noisy, then it's ideal to distort it to lend to the fact that the edges are curled towards the viewer (a weaker version of how a label around a cylinder appears distorted.)

</comment><comment><USER5> This trend has been getting my goat for a while! Such a lame use of pixels to confuse the mind and yield absolutely no cognitive benefit!</comment>


Why you'll never have to pay for Facebook  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/18/no.facebook.charge/index.html?hpt=C2

<comment><USER2> What users don't realise is that Facebook could pay people to use the site and still make money.</comment>


Marketing Conference Guide 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.enest.net/blog/marketing-conference-guide-2013/

<comment><USER2> This is good stuff, please update the list as you see fit, I will bookmark it as a reference. Please let me know if you cannot maintain it, so I know :) Thanks

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sure, we will :)</comment>


The Mad Scientist Bringing Back the Dead... Really. - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/bringing-back-the-dead-1208

<comment><USER2> Why was this article written in the voice of a drunk frat boy? She bled out. She bled out! Like, totally!

<comment><USER3> I had the same thought. It was a little unclear as to why the author picked that tone, I wasn't sure what the point was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The overly conversational tone doesn't seem to do this guy justice.

</comment><comment><USER5> Link to Dr. Mark Roth's company website:

<http://www.ikaria.com/science.html>

It looks like they are trying to develop an on-demand reversible metabolic hibernation for critically ill patients.

</comment><comment><USER6> its mainly a fluff piece without actually talking about what he's working on</comment>


Secrets of the Little Blue Box - <AUTHOR> http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html

<comment><USER2> This is really a very fun read. Good ol' times :)</comment>


Trump agrees to deal in which TikTok will partner with Oracle and Walmart - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/trump-says-he-has-approved-tiktok-oracle-deal-in-concept.html <comment><USER2> When I heard it was going to be banned my curiosity finally got me, and I downloaded TikTok. In an hour of using it I saw dozens of Trump supporters. I suspect that this is part of Trump's campaign strategy. He's basically advertising TikTok, because it's an even better platform for him and his supporters. No reading so it appeals to subliterate voters; his base.

<comment><USER3> Can you point me to some research exploring the comparative literacy levels of Trump supporters and everybody else?

<comment><USER2> It's pretty obvious by the way they use "your" and "you're"</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Cannot Disappoint Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/9433/business/apple-cannot-disappoint-anymore

<comment><USER2> Wow, with headlines like this, it makes me want to short Apple. Not that I want to, but comments like this indicate a top.</comment>


Joel Spolsky's explanation of Unicode - <AUTHOR> http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

<comment><USER2> I have yet to work on a project where neither charsets nor line-endings ever pop-up and cause problems... seeing as it is 2011, this is an absolutely abysmal testimony for IT as a whole.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft had/has a lot to do with that.

<comment><USER4> How is it Microsoft's fault that the world couldn't agree on line-termination or charset (especially charset, since there really was no reasonable option before unicode)?

<comment><USER5> CR/LF. That's why.

<comment><USER4> That was one of the most popular line ending formats. According to Wikipedia, the following non-MS-related all used CR\LF: DEC TOPS-10, RT-11, CP/M, MP/M, Atari TOS, Symbian OS, Palm OS. Meanwhile Mac OS used just CR, as did the Apple II, Commodore, Acorn BBC, and TRS-80. The only players that used LF were Unix (and derivatives), BeOS, Amiga, and RISC OS.

It just happens that we ended up in a world where basically everything is Unix or Windows, so Windows seems like the odd man out. But history tells a rather different story. The use of CRLF was enshrined in RFC561 (the original email RFC) in 1973, before Unix was popular.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s - <AUTHOR> http://imjustcreative.com/turbo-boost-incoming-freelance/2009/01/22/

<comment><USER2> _This is my only grumble with WuFoo; ... the only option up from the 'free' is the $9.95. May not seem much, but ...it's certainly overkill...

It's not a cheap option by any means_

Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)

<comment><USER3> All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this himself.

<comment><USER2> That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid- well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.

You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:

1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks

2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice

3) you actually know what a server is

4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"

5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list

Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?

<comment><USER3> That's true. It's easy to forget how difficult this would be without experience.

Still, $120/year to enable a single web contact form seems excessive (his isn't free b/c it has more than 10 fields). You could embed a form from Google Docs for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He could double them again if he stopped asking for superfluous and lengthy information such as an address just to receive a quote...

</comment><comment><USER5> _Correction_

Web Forms Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's important to note that the only previous way of getting a quote from him was directly contacting him. A lot of people don't want this. Also the forms makes it explicit what his costs are and what he is capable of doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I saw a ~7x jump in online enquiries when I added a simple contact form to the bottom of every single page of the e-commerce store I've been building. We went from about 2-3 online enquiries per week to 2-3 per day.

I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission with my own code.

<comment><USER7> _Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers)._

I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking (and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that conversation.

<comment><USER3> If you can find it, do let me know. I was just working on this a couple days ago and looked into it extensively.

The only option they offer which doesn't involve an iframe comes with a warning, "It will NOT submit to our servers. Because of limited resources, we cannot provide any support for helping you connect these files to your backend." (I'd post the URL but it's in a logged-in area of the site).

<comment><USER8> If you actually need to change the markup on the form, then your only option would be to use our API to submit the data to our servers. Joe is correct in that we do have embedded methods that reduce the load on our server and allow you to handle the initial page load, but we do not have a method that allows you to use your own HTML (but you can use your own CSS). Posting to our servers DOES work, but if there are errors on submission they would be shown to the user on the hosted version of your form.

<comment><USER3> OK. I didn't see any mention of the API in the 'Code Manager' section and didn't think to search specifically for it.

In any case, it looks like it's best if I stick with what I've got if I want to maintain error display... I have functionality in the form that's not possible to add with CSS, I'm using jQuery to set up ajax form submission / error display, and XPertMailer sends my messages through a gmail account on the back end.

Thanks for the info though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised anyone submits an RFP with a from that long. I prefer a simple name, email, and message field instead.</comment>