Ask HN: Startup School Meetup, SF, Sunday 25th 6pm - <AUTHOR>

any others looking to make the most of the startup school weekend?
a few people have talked about an informal meetup over beer, I guessed at a time/city that would be best,
noisebridge could be a possible venue, but would prefer a member confirm that it would be cool, or a local to suggest somewhere. <comment><USER2> Can you use our tool <http://EventGel.com/> to coordinate this and tell us what you think? This is our new startup. Since we are aiming to be useful to exactly the thing that you are planning, it will be great if you can tell us how practical our tool is and how we can make it work better for you. [our earlier HN post : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883731>]

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure cheers,

<http://eventgel.com/ev/startup-school-techmeetup/>

got a few feedback notes for you but Ill compile them all in one email

<comment><USER3> Where in SF?

<comment><AUTHOR> thats what I havent decided, I dont know SF in the slightest, I just think it should be easy to get there by public transport, and quiet enough to talk

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went to Cal. I recommend Jupiter which is a local brewery pizza restaurant in Berkeley that serves great hefs. It was one of my fave places to go.

[http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=jupiter%27s&ns=1...](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=jupiter%27s&ns=1&find_loc=San+Francisco%2C+CA#find_loc=berkeley%2C%20ca)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm coming from Chile and I'll be staying in the Bay Area (not sure where yet) until the 30th. I'd be happy to meet anybody who's up for coffee or beer (probably SF would be the best place to meet).

I look forward to seeing you all at startup school. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm making a vacation out of it: Wednesday through Monday, staying with friends in Berkley and Oakland. Planning on renting a bike, riding up into Marin, and tooling around on the old fire roads.

There's already a pre-event party on Friday night.

<comment><USER6> If you are into mountain biking, there's a fun trail up in Fairfax (five minutes north of Golden Gate Bridge) called Tamarancho (approx. 11 miles). I'd be down for heading up there with a few people on Sunday if people are interested. There's a place to rent mountain bikes right at the base of the trail.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that a private trail?

<comment><USER6> It is owned by the Boy Scouts. You pay 5 dollars at the bike shop to get a day pass that you put on your bike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, what are people thinking about this? I'd love to do it, though a little earlier in the day would be better for me. Maybe 2pm, and then it can stretch as long as people want to hang out for?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm getting to SJC at 1PM on Friday and leaving at 6AM Sunday morning, but I'll see you guys Friday night and Saturday.

Let me know if you want to get a late lunch Friday afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm in, though I'll be staying in palo alto.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm flying out Sunday, but if anyone wants to meet up Friday night I'd be down. I'm staying in Sunnyvale, but plan on being in San Francisco for most of the day Friday.</comment>


Google Maps gets a new icon - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21125275/google-maps-15th-anniversary-new-icon-tabs-design-transit-information-live-view-update-features <comment><USER2> Well done Google, this has caused me to use Apple Maps even more.</comment>


iOS 13.4 does not let you edit URLs in Safari - <AUTHOR> https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/url-bar-behavior-change-in-13-4.2228161/ <comment><USER2> Editorialized title. Original title is "URL Bar Behavior Change in 13.4".

And it's clickbait, because it's not true.

What's true is that getting a cursor instead of a text selection is annoyingly hard and takes multiple tries. I think that was already the case before 13.4, though.

<comment><USER3> It's been slightly less willing to switch into edit mode through taps, which I suspect is a side effect of iPadOS drag and drop somehow. Very handy for letting me copy URLs to clipboard, so I was glad for the change.

Getting a cursor still works on the first try for me using "long-press spacebar" standard iOS method for getting a text input cursor, though.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

I only knew the two fingers on spacebar method.

Is there a short overview over all iOS and iPadOS gestures somewhere? Especially the new window management confuses me.</comment></comment></comment>


Tab Closed; Didn't Read - <AUTHOR> http://tabcloseddidntread.com <comment><USER2> My bank displays an overlay every time I log in, asking me to install some dumb antivirus from some dumb company in exchange for $25 (#notabubble).

It was annoying me, so I sent them a message saying I had installed the antivirus (I hadn't, it's Windows only and I use OSX at work and Linux at home) and asked for my $25. They appeared a few days later in my bank account.

But the darn popup kept appearing every time. A month or two later, I messaged them again, saying I had installed the antivirus. A few days later, $25 in my bank account.

Oh well. If you pay me for your dumb popups, why not. I plan on messaging them again in a month or so :) (can't make it too obvious)

<comment><USER3> While I'm all for sticking it to the man, isn't this a legally dangerous thing to do?

<comment><USER4> If they pay for installs, why not?

Nothing stops you from uninstalling it the next day.

<comment><USER5> Use Sandboxie, it makes stuff like that trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep a bookmarklet around to destroy elements on a webpage for this very reason. [http://jsfiddle.net/6jbJc/](http://jsfiddle.net/6jbJc/)

Stuff like this, where flash is being replaced by html5+javascript, is what has me worried about Firefox removing the "disable javascript" checkbox from prefs (yes I know it can still be turned off in about:config but that's unacceptable). When we make javascript ubiquitous, these dark UI/UX patterns are only going to get worse.

Furthermore, why doesn't Firefox allow me more control over the data that's sent to and from my machine? The functionality that plugins like Disconnect and Adblock Edge have should be mandatory user preferences. There should never be a way for things like Flash LSO's and Evercookies to stay persistent in my web browser cache if I don't want them.

And we're still waiting on third-party cookies to be blocked in Firefox by default. That's been pushed back so much that I wonder if they faced too much outrage from advertising companies to make this happen.

<comment><USER7> Mozilla's argument is that all of that functionality is better left to plugins. People can make just as compelling arguments for all kinds of functionality and consequently firefox is moving in the direction of becoming a kitchen sink.

I think we could use a better middle ground, like a mozilla-endorsed "pack" of vetted plugins to improve privacy. As it is now, Adblock is the #1 plugin and NoScript is the #4 so this stuff is definitely important to users.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/extensions/?sort=users)

<comment><USER8> I think Mozilla makes a sound technical argument... but it's stilly to pretend ad blocking isn't also a political issue on some level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While you may find this annoying, these kinds of screens perform very well when used appropriately. You may drop off, but most people won't. Until that stops happening you will keep seeing these, and making a whiny site about it certainly won't do anything to help.

<comment><USER10> Seconding this unpopular opinion.

A site I was consulting was getting a depressingly low number of email subscribers, so we tested one of these modal popups that prompted the visitor to subscribe... It worked wonderfully. To minimize the annoyance we set it to pop up only once for each visitor (based on cookies).

It wouldn't be so popular if it wasn't effective.

<comment><USER11> What's the thinking behind putting an email signup form over the top of the content? That content would be the thing that might make me actually want to sign up, but to find out, I need to close the email signup form.

Maybe email signups were depressingly low because nobody actually gave a toss about their marketing emails, and all you did was trick a small percentage of viewers into signing up for a mailing list they have no interest in because they thought they had to sign up to close the modal. I completely fail to see how your client got any value out of this at all.

<comment><USER12> Any is a very finite word. As much as I don't like the practice, parent's data doesn't lie, they had more signups. Whether those signups have high customer lifetime value or even stick around are another matter that requires different data to understand. Parent has enough data to make the first conclusion, you don't have enough data to make the second.

<comment><USER11> But the first conclusion is completely meaningless without the data for the second. That's my point. It's this worship of numbers while ignoring the actual people that these numbers represent that has led to these intrusive practices.

<comment><USER12> We can go back and forth on this, but I'm just saying that for the same reason you say it's meaningless (i.e. lack of data), I am saying that you also don't know. Something is always better than nothing, unless you have actual reason and data to say otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't mind as much when they at least bother to bind the ESC key to close the overlay.

I hit ESC and it goes away. Not sure why it needed to be there in the first place (is there anyone on the planet that actually looks at these things?)

<comment><USER14> That would be worse. I use the Escape key to stop page loads, and if a keybinding interrupts that expected functionality, I get pissed. Key example: Gmail. I don't know what it sucks Esc to, but it doesn't direct it to the browser.

Web developers should really stick to the accesskey event which accepts alphanumeric bindings, and nothing else. Anything outside of that is likely to be used by the browser. I mean, there are some obvious exceptions (C-b for bold in a WYSIWYG editor) but as a rule of thumb it should be avoided.

<comment><USER15> I dunno... binding Esc to close lightboxes is pretty web-standard, and I'm very glad when it closes those annoying lightboxes too. Hunting for the tiny "x", which is often intentionally hard to find, gets tiring.

In fact, I had no idea Esc stopped page loads. Has that been a standard thing too? Although I must admit, stopping page loading is not something I hardly ever find myself doing...

<comment><USER16> > In fact, I had no idea Esc stopped page loads. Has that been a standard > thing too?

Has been as long as I can remember. Not that I use it much anymore with fat pipes (in comparison to a 9600 baud modem) being commonplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The mobile equivalents of these are worse.

No, I'm not going to install your app — I just want to see the content hiding behind this stupid ad. Even if I did install your app, I'd have to re-navigate to that content within your app.

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the samples is a paywall - it's _supposed_ to block content unless you've jumped through the hoop. It's not trying to 'enhance your experience' or do market research. It doesn't make sense to complain that you can't see the content in this context.

</comment><comment><USER8> _shrug_

I guess it's just personal preference... I find this practice mildly annoying, but I'm not likely to join a boycott. For most sites, I'd gladly click through a prestitial ad than pay even a very small amount of money (if the choice were offered).

EDIT: And full disclosure: I run ads like this sometimes (though rarely on the first page load, that's kinda obnoxious). I don't love them because there is definitely a population of people they piss off and I hate pissing off anyone... but it seems like a pretty small minority. They covert really really well. Like, way better than any other web ad type.

<comment><USER19> I did a poll in a developer community about running some free or cheap online training sessions. I got about 1000 replies and the majority said they'd prefer they were free with a sponsor message somewhere in the session compared to say even just $10-20. It seems if you can make it work for the advertiser, people still prefer it to paying cold hard cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised quora isn't included.

<comment><USER21> [http://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better](http://blog.quora.com/Making- Sharing-Better) "Open any Quora URL. If you come across a Quora link anywhere and you want to read it without being asked to join Quora, you can add the text "?share=1" to the end of the URL."

Works for me the first time and then no longer have to manually add it in for subsequent quora links.

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised they document this instead of making it e default. What's the point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This kind of misbehavior is why my javascript is off by default.

<comment><USER24> Sadly, many of these sites and interstitials are driven by CSS.

<comment><USER23> Really? Do you have any examples I can point my browser at? My experience is that, yes, they're implemented in CSS, but triggered by javascript.

Occasionally, I have to inspect the page and add a "display:none;" Alternatively, if a site is totally broken without javascript and I don't want to add an exception for it, I'll open it in another browser.

This method is a bit of a pain, but it's the lesser of two evils (for me).

<comment><USER24> You're probably right that it's both. That said, you can nuke these with CSS. I've taken to pretty liberally modifying site stylesheets (I've compiled almost 700 of these), and nuking things like interstitials, "social" toolbars, "related content", slide-outs, etc., is high up my list. A few of those are now in my default CSS (the Tumbler teaser most notably). Pretty easy to do using Stylebot (Chrome).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I especially dislike when there isn't a close button but rather a text link somewhere on the promo.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really dislike sites that have broken CSS that is fixed by JS. I either disable CSS to read them, or I just close them.

</comment><comment><USER27> For what it's worth, 9 times out of 10, you can hit the "Reader" button in Safari and it will show you the article without you clicking on anything in the ad. This way you get the content you wanted, you don't look at the ad, and it doesn't register that you clicked on anything, even the close box.

<comment><USER16> It's how I get around the "you exceeded your article reads for the day/week/month, subscribe to read the article" of the Seattle Times. The content's hiding right behind that popup. Feedly's "remove clutter" button in their iOS app works equally well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A popup by any other name is still terrible.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love sites that do this. Why anyone would block access to their own content is beyond me.

<comment><USER9> People do it because it performs much much better in many funnel optimization scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice! I use AdBlock to shun the ads but something like CB2 [0] will still show up. The most irritating ones for me are AllThingsD [1] and Forbes (I'm surprised no one has submitted it as yet) which have an intermediate landing advertisement page before proceeding to the main content.

[0] [http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68095629679/now- shopping-...](http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68095629679/now-shopping- elsewhere-via-nattarbox)

[1] [http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68051843383/or-just- close...](http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68051843383/or-just-close-the- tab)

</comment><comment><USER31> If it's a site I visit regularly then:

1\. I already subscribed/signed up/know about.

2\. It's a really annoying advertisement which could have been shown in a sidebar or, really, anywhere else.

If it's a site I don't visit regularly I'm just there for the content - usually via a link from somewhere else - and I'm extremely likely to close the tab or at least completely ignore it.

I'm trying to think of an example where this kind of pop over has been helpful but can't

</comment><comment><USER32> Yeah, all that stuff bugs me too.

I am curious, are there web analytics that let publishers know that a page was seen them immediately closed?

(Or that say your video was stopped after 3 seconds?)

<comment><USER33> _I am curious, are there web analytics that let publishers know that a page was seen them immediately closed?_

Yes, it's called Google Analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Besides being amazed that website authors still title sites "Welcome to ACME Widgets", so when I bookmark the site "ACME" gets sorted down to the "W's". Clearly these sites with modal overlays have not read this article: [http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/](http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/)

</comment><comment><USER35> The Tom's hardware one bugs me the most. For anyone who (thankfully) hasn't seen it yet, you get it by scrolling to the bottom of one of their question- and-answer posts, soon after the last answer (and it doesn't make it very obvious which one is last). If I found an answer in the thread, why on earth would I want to go check out another question?!

</comment><comment><USER36> As long as we're complaining about things that a lot of websites do, can I mention something annoying about the "Tab Closed; Didn't Read" site itself?

At the bottom of the page, it has a links marked "Previous" and "Next". "Next" takes you to the previous entries, and "Previous" takes you to the next entries.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've tried to attend LinkedIn of their horrible mobile experience. No change as of yet. Any link you click in an email of theirs, or any link while on your phone for that matter, brings you to that stupid app promo and breaks whatever deeplink you clicked.

</comment><comment><USER38> Could somebody write a Chromium plugin for this? Close the tab and report it directly.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love browsing those sites with my mobile devices.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wasn't expecting to see this on HN this morning. Feel free to suggest particularly egregious offenders for me to include.

</comment><comment><USER40> AdBlock + NoScript + Ghostery. kthxbai.

<comment><USER7> RequestPolicy is a little bit of all those wrapped up into one plugin that does whitelisting.

[https://www.requestpolicy.com/](https://www.requestpolicy.com/)

<comment><USER41> As much as I like RequestPolicy, it doesn't do JS blocking if the JS comes from the same domain as the page you're visiting, or any whitelisted domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Right click. Inspect element. Delete. If you're feeling charitable.

</comment><comment><USER43> Tab Closed; Didn't Read

</comment><comment><USER44> And this is also why people type in "Ad block" in to Google. It is the obnoxious few that ruin it for the rest of us. Now 100 people won't view your quiet embedded ad because some video pop-up. And these are mainstream websites that shouldn't be using dirty tricks like this.

These websites are losing business. They are listening to a team of marketers who are looking for quick conversions. What about that long term reader of a decade who just deleted your bookmark?</comment>


The biggest problem with Apple Maps? Our overreaction - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/apple/why-the-internet-turned-down-overreaction-road-on-apple-maps/?redirect_override=true <comment><USER2> Overreaction? You live and die by the sword. Apple's sword has been insanely great products that just work. Insanely, their map offering _just_ works.

If you're Apple then you must expect and accept a lot of pushback when you release something like Maps, not the least because you've proven yourself in the past capable enough to do much better.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. Some people may think that some of the backlash against Apple is "over-reaction", but it's exactly the response they'll get when they promise the moon for everything and then they don't deliver.

If they would've said "Our maps are pretty good", and not something like "Our maps are the best out there", maybe the backlash wouldn't have been so bad, although people still have the right to get mad at Apple for replacing a "better maps app" with a "worse maps app", without giving them any choice in the matter - other than not updating the old devices, I guess.

But yeah, my point is Apple generally overhypes anything they build - so they go on the "positive extreme". So they shouldn't be surprised that when people find out their features are not as good as they say, they go on the "negative extreme" with the backlash. Cause and effect. Maybe Apple should be more moderate and more honest with their marketing in the future. To be honest, I'm surprised there hasn't been this kind of backlash over the Siri ads, too.</comment></comment>


iPhone presenting Nintendo DS with unexpected competition - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123797909986936861.html?ru=yahoo&mod=yahoo_hs

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to me that iPhone-like "pocket computer" devices are the future of technology. Perhaps Nintendo should think about adding a phone (or, more importantly, a cellular radio) to the next GameBoy?

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been gaming a lot lately on my iPod Touch (1st Gen, 8GB) and I give it about one more year before the DS and PSP can't hold a candle to this thing. The hardware is better the GUI is better and the feature set is better. It's just a matter of waiting for the gaming library to catch up and it's gaining ground fast.

<comment><USER3> What kinds of games are you playing? I was considering picking up a Touch, but I've heard that they're mostly small puzzle games and such. Those don't really hold a candle to Nintendo first-party titles, AAA 3rd-party stuff, and all the massive PS2/PSX games on the PSP.</comment></comment>


Internet Privacy: Federal Authority Could Enhance Consumer Protection [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696437.pdf <comment><USER2> Awesome, maybe now all those news website blocking European IPs will instead fix their stupid tracking. I can't wait to see how many dark patterns they will use to force the user to "consent".

<comment><USER3> Why would it change anything? Unless it's close to 100% compatible with GDPR it won't help. The reason sites are blocking Europe is that serving content to European users is too great of a liability compared to the amount of money they make. Unless the US one has basically the same terms, that liability is still going to be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This doesn't look like legislation, it's just a report to tell congress that they should consider developing legislation.

<comment><USER5> Yes, exactly as the title indicated with the phrase "proposed to lawmakers". Whats your point?

<comment><USER6> It is possible to read the title as to mean that the link will contain the actual "proposed legislation" rather than the "recommendation" for such legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But apparently GDPR ruined the Internet, so surely the US would never do something like that.

<comment><USER8> There are positive and negative impacts of GDPR. Yes, poorly implemented consent is annoying, but forcing companies to use time and energy on privacy is super positive.

I have spent the last nine months in a few different co-working spaces here in Denmark, and all startups there have informed and essential conversations about handling users data. Just a few years ago that would never have been a topic. For me that's a very positive change.

<comment><USER3> > _but forcing companies to use time and energy on privacy is super positive._

Until you find out that for some reason your country/region has far fewer strong internet companies than other regions of the world. Then you realize that you effectively shot your own economy in the foot.

<comment><USER8> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER3> Europe is large and educated. The EU has 50% more population than the US and the EU is just as highly educated and almost as rich. Yet how much everyday software do you use that's from the EU compared to the US?

Something has kept EU companies down. I assume that it's the combination of the various regulations we have in the EU that make it less welcoming of an environment to run an online business. GDPR is just one additional brick in that wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Once again the U.S. has been caught on the back foot. We are late in responding to GDPR and by now the scope has changed. The real issue is that there is no regulatory body for the protocols of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Market driven responses develop slowly, and in the meantime the various competitive solutions will turn the marketplace into a spaghetti junction. We still don't have an eCoin, no direction on the potential issues with Blockchain, the web is, and continues to be leaky and DARPA is dragging their heels in spite of being offered solutions. Currently the Web has over 3000 specifications, and the corporations behind the W3c want to maintain control rather than working toward solutions. Meantime, our friends toward the far East are better organized, and are working toward control. This is path- dependent work and whoever controls next-gen ecommerce will maintain command of commerce for a long time. We're in trouble, and the Academy appears to be incapable of finding a solution. Treating GDPR is working on the symptoms rather than addressing the root causes. It's time to wake the f*ck up! --John Bottoms, inventor of the browser</comment>


Show HN: Restive.js – designer-friendly jQuery toolkit for responsive Web design - <AUTHOR> http://www.restivejs.com <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. We just redesigned the restive.js website. We've built a new toolkit called rScript to replace restive.js in the coming months, but we felt a change was in order. Comments welcome.</comment>


Netflix: 10,000s of VMs for 1,000,000s of customers, with 10s of ops engineers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/1129548391753691138 <comment><USER2> Conclusion: Fire almost every of your ops engineer, job can be done with smaller workforce as you can see. (JK)</comment>


New: Distributed Open House the day after Startup School - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/aoh10.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late notice. We only thought of this a few days ago. More startups will gradually get added.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Will there be some kind of transportation between some of the startups? I recall at last years startup school there were buses between the after parties in SF that were held at the different startups. I'm curious if such a thing will occur for visiting the multiple startups in SF or Pal Alto on Sunday.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, sorry, but a lot of them are close to the Caltrain: <http://www.caltrain.com>

<comment><USER2> alright, cool. I live in SF so I'll probably visit some of the SF ones, but I was just curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Heyzap (564 Howard near 2nd st) is going to have Foosball table, Xbox, probably some pizza, drinks, and a ridiculous PA system.

We will also be doing work.

Any one have other suggestions?

<comment><USER4> YoYos and Frisbee Boobie Trapping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I fly out Sunday morning. I'd kill to stick around, but changing my flight plans will cost something like $150-$400 looking at the change / cancel guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER6> GazeHawk (444 Castro) will have a ping pong table (if we get enough people we'll throw a tourney together) and we'll either grab burritos or order pizza.

Our office space isn't built out yet, which screams "office chair races".

</comment><comment><USER7> Is the Open House open to startup school attendees only?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, anyone is welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Traveling salesman solution, please?

Here's your input: [http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&#...

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a good way to partly solve the hiring problem (or so I hear) for the startups by bringing some likely interested/interesting people in.

pg, good use of that byproduct of Startup School!

</comment><comment><USER10> I got in, but as a student in Austin, there's no way I can afford $500+ for a weekend, even if it is Startup School weekend. And now there's a distributed open house?! I'm super bummed.

<comment><USER11> Not to be a jerk, but I'm super bummed that people who knew they couldn't come applied anyway, taking the spaces of people who could have come but didn't get in.

I got accepted, so I'm not being bitter or anything, but I'm sure lots of people who were able to come but didn't get in would have loved to have your place.

Maybe next year admissions to Startup School could happen on a rolling basis?

<comment><USER12> I've wondered if startup school / yc applications shouldn't have a nominal fee to offset non-serious applications – maybe $10. i.e. nothing that would put a serious damper on folks that really wanted to apply, but enough to keep folks from saying, "What do I have to lose, I'm only wasting the time of the folks evaluating applications..."

<comment><USER13> I think it's a great idea, but I'm guessing pg might not want to do the work involving billing, even if it's really easy.

<comment><USER12> Simple solution: have a charity handle the billing and generate a pass-code. I'm sure that someone at the EFF could be persuaded to create a custom page that would generate tens of thousands in donations per year.

(This ignores that there are a couple YC companies that can handle billing stuff.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Come by Mixpanel and we'll hook you up with a free shirt--trust me they rock! =)

<comment><USER15> I can totally vouch for the tshirts. They are by far my favorite startup tshirt. They even got me one in XXLT since I'm 6'6".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Edit: Oops, looks like a (better) map has already been made, I missed the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's one on the page:

[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&#...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "AdGrok and 6 other startups" -- can someone expand this list?</comment>


Sketchfab Launches 3D Asset Download API - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sketchfab.com/announcing-the-sketchfab-download-api-a-search-bar-for-the-3d-world/ <comment><USER2> This is funny. My senior design project is very similar. We have a Steam VR app, built in Unity3D, where we can search/load 3D models at runtime from a backend web service. I've written distributed web crawlers (docker, headless chrome, selenium) to build a repository of 3D assets and used GC Storage for file storage. Then I have a web app with a search index (lucene based) that provides a RESTful api for the Unity3d client. It is surprisingly fun to create scenes in VR.</comment>


Daily chart: Ice cream and IQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/04/daily-chart <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to break down the US number by state. Here in Massachusetts, we consume a _lot_ of ice cream.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ice-Cream consumption per capita is probably a proxy for GDP per capita.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone in the startup world use UML? - <AUTHOR>

By going through the RAML post I realized it's been a while since I last saw someone talking about UML.<p>Does anyone nowadays still using it except in the enterprisey world? It doesn't matter if is strict or loose UML, since UML by definition is full of it's own perks and people usually use their "own kind of UML". <comment><USER2> Way back when in 2006 I attended this talk as a budding sw engineer

[http://www.dfjug.org.br/Merson06_JavaOne.pdf](http://www.dfjug.org.br/Merson06_JavaOne.pdf)

Two questions asked to the speaker afterwards still resonate with me to this day (below are my notes)

Q1: How much should you document?

This question came up after the session, and he said you should document as much as necessary for your stakeholder. Documenting any more would be overkill.

Q2: Question the value of your artifacts.

What this guy also said was to question the value your artifacts are doing. If no one is reading the artifacts, then something is wrong with this picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with both answers.

I think that UML is one of many available options to document your stuff. The funny thing is that, like many other things, UML was specified in a way that is not practical to be followed 100% so people use it as they see fit and that's ok.

The other important point is to take into account your stakeholders. Developers (myself included) are also stakeholders so in many situations I create documentation for my future-self since it's the best way to remember that was the context at the time or how that weird stuff that is ran once in a while is done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes. I've used (loose) UML in previous startup jobs to help communicate problem. I've never seen UML used in docs though. It's usually when we encounters a problem, we draw it out on the white board and talk about it from there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, we are using it. UML is quite practical for stuff that needs clarity (so not just for the data model).

We are using even this allot lately: [http://drakon- editor.sourceforge.net/](http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/) (not UML but good for visual representation of stuff).

</comment><comment><USER5> I've found it useful in thinking through all possible directions to take the application or software when mapping out in the beginning stages. But as mentioned above it is done loosely on a whiteboard to brain storm.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nope. Never seen it used anywhere near startups aside from some DB diagrams.</comment>


Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments? - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/are-women-being-pushed-out-of-engineering-because-men-have-all-the-fun <comment><USER2> My company has desperately tried to hire female candidates into our engineering team, which is currently all male.

From the dozens of applications that we got for the position, only about 5% were female. After interviewing them, they either declined the position, or weren't able to complete our take home challenge (nothing against these women, we have lots of guys fail it too!)

So, yeah, I'd love to have some females on our engineering team. Unfortunately it's really rare for us to have a female applicant, and those we have talked to thus far haven't made it onto the team.

Please, tech, do something to fix this. I would very much like to have women on our team, because I went to university with a lot of smart women in Engineering, and it kills me that now in industry we can't hire any!

<comment><USER3> You may want to consider these posts by Gayle Laakman McDowell (who write "Cracking the Coding Interview") on possible problems with take-home exams:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give- cand...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-candidates- homework-assignments-knock-it-off)

From her blog post on general interviews and take-homes:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews- are...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2015/6/10/developer-interviews-are-broken- and-you-cant-fix-it)

"Be fair to candidates. Balance the demand on their time with the utility you get from it. If you're giving a longer project, these should largely replace your interviews. Be aware that this means losing candidates who have other responsibilities."

(in the context of github and other outside contributions, but applicable in my opinion to take home exams as well): "You may really struggle with female developers here. They're more likely to have substantial family responsibilities (and thus can't do as much out of work)."

<comment><USER4> Same experience as OP here both on number of applicants and number of qualified female applicants.

Take home test results were considerably worse for females too and they had over five days to complete a simple thirty minute exercise.

There might be responsibilities that get in the way but IMO if you can't find a slice of time to work on something that came up then I'll be really careful in considering you for a job.

Shit happens w/o planning and I'd rather have people I can count on.

<comment><USER5> I agree, the inability to do homework would itself be a little bit of a red flag for me, beyond the quality of the homework.

<comment><USER3> It may be that the candidate doesn't want to waste time. There's a big difference between putting in some time on weekends and evenings for an important work issue that arises, vs doing some homework assignment that might not even get looked at.

I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a higher pass rate.

If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's reputation among developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a very interesting article because it avoids the usual pitfalls of demography-based arguments. ("Group G is underrepresented in activity A. Therefore we should completely overhaul A with policy P, which appears to be pro-G. If you have any concerns about P it can only mean you're an anti-G bigot.")

The article instead asks a novel question and leaves solutions open. How do tasks get divided among peer groups? It seems like people who are vulnerable to peer pressure (girls in engineering, in the examples here) are likely to get booted out of tasks they enjoy and relegated to routine chores instead. It's a testable hypothesis, it opens a new perspective, and if proven true it lends itself to very reasonable remedies for both employers (e.g. formalize the task assignment process) and the affected engineers (watch out and prepare to stand up to it if needed).

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted.

On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."

<comment><USER8> _I 'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted._

Have you found you've needed to work harder to get noticed and promoted as compared to your male counterparts?

As a man, I've certainly observed that among my female co-workers, but that's as an outsider looking in.

<comment><USER7> For sure. Although I think again, it's mostly about people in the big companies fighting over each other for what management has allocated for raises and promotions. I've seen men duke it out as well.

Overall I would agree it's a higher up-hill climb for women, but I think getting the crap work means you're generally a less valued employee (most likely some strong correlation there between being a woman, but not causation IMHO).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I question the method of this "study". I don't think it's a leap to say 40 undergrads writing in their journals is anecdote.

<comment><USER10> Not every study is a double-blind random sample with statistical modeling and error bars.

<comment><USER11> Which also means not every study should be used to project its results over an entire population.

<comment><USER12> You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims about these results, but no one is doing that here.

<comment><USER10> I agree with the first part of your comment, but the authors are making specific suggestions about changes to college programs.

<comment><USER12> Yes, specific suggestion about qualitative changes to college curricula, based on qualitative results of a study. That seems reasonable to me. Once these changes are enacted, of course, they can be subject to quantitative study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't join is - there is no other female. I wish someone told her - "you start from somewhere".

<comment><USER14> That's a fair point, but in an interview she's also assessing you. If she sees no other women working there, then it could be a red flag.

From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.

<comment><USER13> May be I missed mentioning this. For whatever reason, we never had a female engineer in that company. Either too few applied or whoever applied did not made it to job offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You want to know why women are trying to exit tech? -- read today's dilbert cartoon (Jun 17). In it Dilbert proudly proclaims that he does not take vacations and anyone that takes vacations is a loser with a bad career. This kind of shit is being constantly pushed on engineering employees.

The only people that would willingly go for that are those with autism spectrum disorders and we all know that autism hits men more often. There some people that would go for that unwillingly (i.e., grudgingly) in a calculated bet to sacrifice their health for the sake of better career and better life later on, but those are also more likely to be men. Most women want to have children and they know that sacrificing your health affects the health of the children regardless of how good your career has gotten.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Twenty percent of engineering graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the > engineering workforce is female.

>It's not a pipeline issue

Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.

<comment><USER17> Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the end of it.

<comment><USER18> The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%, assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors become more aggressive for lack of prospects.

Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage.

Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.

<comment><USER17> In your first paragraph you're essentially describing the Matthew Effect. It's one of the strongest arguments against laissez-faire libertarian approaches to unfair/unnatural inequalities.

Your approach is a more aggressive form of affirmative action.

<comment><USER18> Affirmative action can't work. It isn't that kind of problem. There is no percentage of qualified female applicants you can accept that will put 10 women in 50 seats.

You have to change the culture in middle and high schools so that lots more little girls _want_ to be hackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.)

I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opinions instead of her, even when she's leading the meeting. Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.

<comment><USER20> > Partly it's because corporate environments prefer bluster to quieter > expertise but the answer shouldn't be to tell women to be bigger blowhards > than the men in order to get to do interesting stuff.

This often seems like a better dimension on which to analyze these "gender in the workplace" issues. That is, these issues arise more often due to the typical characteristics and behaviors that members of each gender display and engage in, rather than something essential about gender in and of itself.

Blowhards versus... well.. what's the opposite of a blowhard? "Introvert" doesn't seem quite right.

My point is that gender issues are often actually personality type issues.

<comment><USER21> It also affects quieter, sometimes more effective men.

"Speak up!"

It not infrequently reduces to physical posturing. And volume escalation. I kid you not.

(Not to mention, that these loud and aggressive types often make particularly open-space workplaces much greater challenges to the concentration of... this quiet, effective type (me), for one.)

Why does engineering increasingly suck in the U.S. (excluding some of the Silicon Valley et al. "gifted" enclaves)? Because type-A assholes have taken over U.S. management. And they shit all over anyone who isn't like them and isn't the bully they are.

Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene? Or do different cultures shut them down? Does e.g. a Shenzhen -- where I just got my latest and greatest fitness tracker for $23 -- manage to give them a big "fuck you" while combining extant tech into new and compelling products?

<comment><USER20> > Next up: Do they succeed on the international scene?

Ha... is there yet a "Godwin/Poe/Betteridge/etc's Law" equivalent for how quickly HN threads converge towards Trump?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My wife, PhD in engineering, finds interesting and challenging work fun.

Lucky for her, I guess, that she is usually the only one of her level of expertise at a company because no one else can typically do the work she is capable of.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've long thought that the best way to get more women into engineering is for parents of young girls to realize that they need to buy their daughters more engineering labs and electronic kits and fewer dolls.

</comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't this come down more to men being conditioned to be more assertive and women being conditioned to de-escalate?

<comment><USER10> That wouldn't explain why men were assigned different jobs than women. _...sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate "engineering" assignments._

<comment><USER25> Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?" is something someone more assertive would say.

<comment><USER17> When women do that they get labeled "bitch".

<comment><USER25> Foul language aside, I believe it's possible to make my previously mentioned assertion in either an offensive, or a non-offensive manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So maybe the difference is in the behavior (learned). As the example suggests, men try to do what they do aggressively while women are not so aggressive.

For men: understand that others should have fun, understand that women are more likely to be more passive and overcompensate for it.

For women: let others know that brushing you off is not okay. Many do it without realizing it and most do it for both other men and women.

</comment><comment><USER27> Women are leaving engineering because men don't want women to have fun. Who honestly thinks men having fun means women don't want it?

</comment><comment><USER28> Everybody's criticizing the study but nobody has actually linked to it and the link isn't in the article. What's up with that (and airline food)?

[http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178](http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178)

The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings.

This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?

</comment><comment><USER29> Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general.

Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.

Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.

Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.

A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.

Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?

Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.

The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.

<comment><USER30> I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same?

You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in _any_ field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and many women choose not to have children anyway.

So what exactly is it about engineering that makes it the smart move for women to leave the field but not men? Or what is it about women that makes them recognize that it's the smart move when men don't see it?

I'm not saying that your assertion is strictly wrong, but I am saying it's not interesting. If women are leaving engineering because of entrenched sexism, that might well be the "smart move" for them. But this isn't a useful insight because the underlying problem remains the entrenched sexism.

<comment><USER29> If engineering were lower status work than a lot of people think it is, it would provide a more viable explanation than the effect of a conspiracy.

Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering.

The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort.

Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure it's sexist (but maybe in the other direction?) to claim that men are in general too stupid to realize that they should leave engineering. "Perceived barriers" also indicate some sort of sexism is at play here. (The alternative that women are just imagining these barriers seems far-fetched and equally sexist.)

Perhaps more to the point, this argument only holds up if women who leave engineering go into more prestigious/higher status fields. Is there any evidence of that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards getting more interesting work? After all, in their example the girls could've just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their lot.

<comment><USER32> The problem with that is that once you do it a few times, you get a reputation as a "bitch". Assertive men are seen as a "leaders", assertive women are seen as "bitches".

<comment><USER33> As a leader you get criticized. When we're assertive, men are called assholes and women bitches. I think the difference is men tend not to care what they think and believe they're right, regardless. This is useful in that it lets you press on despite the adversity, but detrimental if there really is an issue. It's good that women listen better and are more aware than men of peoples' feedback, it makes them a different kind of leader. Perhaps we need corporate cultures that value listening more. We all have our strengths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I might be over-simplifying, but isn't this the crux of the whole "lean-in" approach? Being more assertive in the workplace definitely helps you get more interesting and meaningful work.

</comment><comment><USER35> I appreciate insights and research like this. It seems clear to me that these issues are complex, multi-faceted, and often subtle. If they were obvious single issues they would be much easier to address.

Figuring out hard to see sources of bias and discrimination make them easier to address. For my part, I'll try to consider fair distribution of both boring and fun tasks in groups when breaking down work.

</comment><comment><USER36> My question: Are they exiting engineering because of brogrammers or are they becoming leaders because of their higher empathy?

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like a problem with leadership.

Failure should result out of poor leadership in the end. On my team I don't care for your gender, your race, your culture or your social image. I only care that you can get the job done. If I know you can, then I'll give it to you. If I think it allows for time to learn, then I'll give it to the ones who need to grow. If you think you aren't given a chance, then speak up and I'll give you a shot at something. Poor leaders will deny those opportunities.

But I believe that there is more good leadership as opposed to poor leadership in our industry, and that articles like this create misguided issues.

Also, it is too easy for anyone to go and find another job; especially if they have talent. A full on exit means something else, something these articles haven't shown yet. For example, my last experience with this type of issue was with a coworker, a gay black male, who decided to quit in the middle of a project he was leading. He was falling way behind and presenting demos with bugs & poor functionality. All would've been fine and understandable if it weren't for the developer misleading the boss and stating that the project was on track and doing well. After continuous failure our boss eventually gave him extensions but was obviously was not happy about it. The boss began to put pressure on and keep a watchful eye over new commits. The senior ultimately chose not to continue and quit. On his way out he complained of bullying and not being appreciated. He declared that he was a senoir and should've been included in more decision making and that other senior developers were treated with higher favoritism because they got "cooler projects" and he did not. He was partly right, but only because he had not shown that he could get the work done, and rather shown quite the opposite. He had never proven his skills when given the chance. He faltered at all chances and yet still had some type of delusional self-entitlement. He left and his project was delivered 2 months late even after his poor code-base was heavily refactored by the next lead. I recently chatted him to ask how he was doing and he stated that his experience on our team and with our boss was so negative that he hasn't looked for a new job yet, and is even considering a career change. I agreed that he should do what is good for him, but only because I consciously knew he is in no place to be a senior developer in this industry (but he will never tell you that, and neither will any journalist trying to make a story out of it).

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has had the statistically rare opportunity to be the only man on a software engineering team I can see this explanation reflects my experience.

I took so many fewer days off than the team average that I tended to get assigned the most vital work.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out.

If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue.

The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't.

And as time goes on, I think you will see this type of prejudice disappear.

However, men and women and their differences will be around forever. There are clearly differences in how we think, act, behave and look. It's up for debate how much of this is cultural and how much is biological.

So, I don't see this going away, maybe ever.

Is there only 13% female engineers because men are sexist and treat them poorly? Or is it because men like math, science and engineering more than women?

I was a high school math teacher. I did everything I could do encourage my strong female students to go into a STEM field. They were some of my strongest students, they worked hard, they were ambitious, but they just didn't want to do it. I have no idea why, but they didn't want to study any more math than they had to.

On the opposite end, I had a few male students who weren't great (not even as good as a lot of the female students), yet they went on to study in a STEM field. Why? Because they really wanted to do it. They were drawn to it.

This is all anecdotal, but there is something there when I saw the same issue play out in several of my classes. I even brought it up with my female math teachers and they saw the same problem. Girls just aren't interested in studying math and science in college at the same rate as boys.

<comment><USER10> [http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png](http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png) Other engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.

<comment><USER39> I think you meant this one - [http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png](http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png)

It shows the growth trend as typically being positive for all fields, while computer science is the negative outlier.

<comment><USER40> Is there a graph that shows absolute numbers instead of percentages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Aren't women just _not entering_ engineering because management is more fun and pays more??

</comment><comment><USER42> Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong.

Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them (the ones who dreamed of sexist careers like fashion designer, models, teachers, or most sexist of them all mothers) realize they really don't enjoy this work, there was never any "painful injustice" that needed their "sacrifice" to right, and that they've just been tricked by the popular political agenda. And, after effectively wasting a decade of their lives chasing careers that means nothing to them, they quit and actually go follow their dreams (instead of someone else's).

<comment><USER43> Ummm.... no.

At least not with the data points that I have. 1) Former boss, who is now managing over 100 people at Intel. Smart engineer and totally into the technology. I loved working for her. 2) Former female employees and coworkers that are every bit as much into the technology and every bit as capable as male engineers. 3) Friend and female no-nonsense CEO of startup who has had to fight jack-asses like you for her entire career and would very quickly plant her boot up your ass for talking that way. 4) My own daughter, headed off to MIT this fall, who is very capable of doing the bench work and has been instructed in no uncertain terms that if some lab partner displays your attitude and says something like: "Let me do the measurements and you can just write them down for me, sweetheart." that she is to grab the multi-meter probes and poke the bastard's eyes out.

Wake up and grow up, dude. The world has changed.

<comment><USER25> > The world has changed.

The nature of people has not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh no, they were tricked into a high-paying, in-demand career! What a disaster!

<comment><USER44> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923855) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> No. ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines) )

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, the comments so far are so disappointing. (When I wrote this they are all completely dismissive of this study.)

<comment><USER46> The comments on any HN thread about barriers to gender equity in software engineering illustrate the barriers to gender equity in software engineering.

<comment><USER47> Comments that take legitimate concerns with the merits of a particular study and dismiss them as misogyny don't add anything to the discussion either.

<comment><USER46> Thanks for illustrating my point so nicely :)

For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny.

What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying?

How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I just heard another first hand account of a female computer science masters candidate dropping out shortly before completion due to sexual harassment from her supervisor and no support on the matter from the University. Interesting that the study focuses on the "fun" aspect while the journals themselves highlight unwanted advances and "creepiness" from males. There are many factors keeping women out of computer science, but rape culture seems to me to be the most serious and under-addressed one.

<comment><USER49> Unless your first hand account involves an actual rape, please leave the term 'rape culture' to situations involving actual rape. The linked story certainly didn't invoke any mentions of rapes occurring - why dilute a real problem with unrelated 'creepiness'?

Secondly, females complaining about 'creepiness' is a difficult problem to quantify or solve, as females find attention from unattractive males 'creepy' regardless of their actual intentions.

<comment><USER30> I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist, they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a 21-year-old coworker is inappropriate.

I do not agree with your dismissiveness of female complaints about "creepiness". Solving "creepiness" is a hard problem, but not because women are bad at distinguishing between creepy guys and normal guys who happen to be unattractive. If you repeatedly hit on someone and fail to pick up on the social cues that say your advances are unwanted, you are a creepy person, regardless of whether you are unattractive or not. It is not reasonable to disregard the discomfort this causes the recipient of the unwanted attention. It is also not reasonable that the recipient should have to be blunt, abrasive, or combative to make the unwanted attention stop.

<comment><USER49> I completely agree that repeated attempts to ask out a woman who is clearly not interested in you can come across as creepy, and I'm not really insinuating that it's not a problem. People that do that will earn their association with that term.

I can only comment from personal experience, but many of my female friends will call ANY interaction with an unattractive male 'creepy', regardless of how polite or nonthreatening that person has been. An ugly male will warn them that their car tires are low, or that they dropped something, or ask them about their volunteer organization (that they are promoting via a t-shirt), and these women will either give a quick response and leave, or give no response and actually physically flee the scene. Afterwards, they will ALWAYS say "some creepy guy tried to tell me that my tires were flat", or "some creeper was trying to find out where I worked. Is he going to be stalking me in my parking lot?" And I will have been there, observed the same individual, and say "what's wrong with you? He was just trying to help you out", etc.

I realize that the above is just anecdotal evidence, and that the normal/typical behavior of women could be completely different in most/all other situations, but can I really help that my observations shape my worldview?

<comment><USER30> Well, there are two things to consider here. First, as you called out, your friends' behavior is anecdotal and may not be representative. Second, there is a big difference between work colleagues and strangers. If someone at work does something like complement my shoes, I'm much less likely to see that as weird/creepy than if a stranger does it.

Certainly, there are interactions that get labelled as "creepy" when they really shouldn't. But there are also plenty of legitimately creepy people making others uncomfortable at work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free data mining resource: 1 million videos with metadata and links - <AUTHOR> http://developer.metadatalabs.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to mention: It also lists video content authors and their reputations based on their popularity (the links their videos get.)</comment>


Netdata system monitor app embeds spyware - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366 <comment><USER2> I admire the patience of the Netdata developers. When you develop opensource software you unfortunately have to put up with such drama.

Is this telemetry really "spyware"? Or, is it just an attempt to insinuate that there is malware embedded somehow in the source, just to cause trouble to the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Software that transmits information about its user (including their PII[1]) by misusing that user's computer hardware and resources _without that user 's consent_ and against their wishes is malware: specifically it is spyware. Netdata goes a step further and does it _silently_ , without even notifying the user that it is spying.

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

People don't like their common, popular software being called that because it's truly _not a good thing_ , not because their software isn't spyware (as you can see at the above link).

It's become somewhat popular amongst unethical developers to pretend that this sort of collection without consent is somehow okay or necessary to their ends as long as the users don't see it happening; this belief is _not_ shared or widely held by users. Indeed, when exposed to users, it generates huge distrust of the manufacturer, and sometimes makers of software will backpedal, such as GitHub's Atom now offering[2] a consent dialog on startup[3] for user spying.

[1]: An IP address + timestamp, in practice, usually uniquely identifies a person, and is thus personally identifying information _in reality_ , regardless of whether or not the GDPR classes it as PII for purposes of regulation or not.

[2]: [https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966](https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4966)

[3]: it's still nonfunctional, sadly: [https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33](https://github.com/atom/telemetry/issues/33)</comment></comment>


FizzBuzz in 123 languages - <AUTHOR> http://rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz

<comment><USER2> I think c sample is wrong, doesn't handle the cases where number divides with both 3 and 5.

<comment><USER3> It does, both if-statements will fire

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if the code was changed or my mistake. Anyway, now it will print out Fizz and then the number when number divides with 3 (but not with 5).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Heh.. brainf __* truly describes my initial reaction to the syntax.</comment>


Posty – A comprehensive, modern Postfix and Dovecot administration tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.posty-soft.org <comment><USER2> What problem does this solve? And does it do so without introducing a half dozen more?

<comment><USER3> I'm not 100% sure yet, but I'm 100% excited about this. Problems today is that Google/Yahoo/MS have all given the government backdoor access to your email if you have those providers. This application solves that by having you host your own email service. Deploying postfix + dovecot with multi domain usage and multi alias capabilities is hard! They did all that work for you. I'm not sure how the client works yet or if you're supposed to make your own front end to this using the API from Posty. Either way I'm excited to try it out in hopes to move my email out of the hands of big companies and into my own hands.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. This makes it a bit easier to run your own stable mail server.

<comment><USER2> It looks to me like adding more complexity than it relieves, and I'd worry about the security implications besides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whats that gibberish after Library usage examples at [http://www.posty- soft.org/doc_client.html](http://www.posty-soft.org/doc_client.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Go to the github repo [https://github.com/iaddict/posty_client](https://github.com/iaddict/posty_client)

</comment><comment><USER7> On github: [https://github.com/posty](https://github.com/posty)

Site isn't loading atm...

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks fantastic; self-hosted email is too hard. Can't wait to try it...

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm really not sure how I feel about those huge square tiles</comment>


Ask HN: Capacity Planning in the Cloud: An Oxymoron? - <AUTHOR> Obviously, there is some sarcasm in the question above. Arguably, the cloud's greatest benefit is its elasticity, which implies that most aspects of traditional (focused on own or rented hardware) capacity planning for the cloud environment are not really applicable. However, clearly, some capacity planning is still needed, both for initial deployments as well as for ongoing operations. So, the real question is: "What are the optimal strategies, tactical approaches, potential issues and best practices for capacity planning in the cloud?". Comments and/or points to relevant resources are welcome. <comment><AUTHOR> Among several other books on or related to the subject, I ran across this 2017 book ([https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling- Resourc...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Capacity-Planning-Scaling- Resources/dp/1491939206)), which largely has triggered my question.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hoo boy. The answer varies wildly with scale.</comment>


Can we expand our time? Better track time. - <AUTHOR> http://www.timecamp.com/blog/index.php/2014/01/can-we-expand-our-time-better-track-time/

<comment><USER2> This is like [http://rescuetime.com](http://rescuetime.com) with billing tools?

"You forgot to track time. Sounds familiar?"

That was the main reason I built [http://wakatime.com](http://wakatime.com), so I don't have to remember to track time.

<comment><USER3> wakatime looks great, been looking for something like it occasionally. thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to [http://www.rescuetime.com](http://www.rescuetime.com)? I've been using Rescue Time for years now and it's pretty great. I can't see how timecamp improves on this, maybe I'm missing something?

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like the idea of doing two things at once without multitasking, as our brains don't handle multitasking that well. A very "two birds with one stone" concept.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some people just want to sit around and relax sometimes.</comment>


Children raised in greener areas have higher IQ, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/24/children-raised-greener-areas-higher-iq-study <comment><USER2> There is a well-known correlation between the greenness of an urban (or suburban) space and income level of the residents.

[https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/low-income- neighb...](https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/06/low-income- neighborhoods-often-have-fewer-trees-than-wealthier-counterparts/)

[https://caseytrees.org/2017/11/d-c-s-poorer-neighborhoods- fe...](https://caseytrees.org/2017/11/d-c-s-poorer-neighborhoods-fewer-trees/)

[https://www.audubon.org/news/in-los-angeles-rich- neighborhoo...](https://www.audubon.org/news/in-los-angeles-rich- neighborhoods-enjoy-more-street-trees-and-lot-more-birds)</comment>