Gaussian distributions are monoids and why machine learning experts should care - <AUTHOR> http://izbicki.me/blog/gausian-distributions-are-monoids <comment><USER2> all exponential family distributions may be written in a form that depends upon a set of fixed dimension sufficient statistics. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_family> these sufficient statistics have the additive form described in this article (this is a consequence of i.i.d. sampling). it is common to exploit this structure when implementing efficient inference in, for example, mixture models.

if you combine this property with a bayesian analysis, and put a conjugate prior on the parameters of an exponential family distribution, then the posterior distribution, and the marginal likelihood depend upon on the data only through these sufficient statistics and everything else is easily computed. in this form, one of the sufficient statistics often has an interpretation as a "pseudo-count"; how many effective samples are encoded in your prior?

exponential family distributions include: poisson, exponential, bernoulli, multinomial, gaussian, negative binomial, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> That the sum of two Gaussians is a Gaussian an be found in any basic text on statistics. That combining distributions, calculating them in parallel or online is possible isn't new either. The Kalman filter which was published in 1961 is an example of an online algorithm for fitting a Gaussian.

This is a interesting exposition and places specific results in a more general algebraic framework; however, the title suggests this is a revolutionary discovery which it isn't

<comment><USER4> I think you mean product. The sum of two Gaussians isn't a Gaussian.

<comment><USER5> I think he meant the sum of two gaussian random variables is a gaussian. I.e., if X and Y are both drawn from a gaussian distribution, then X+Y is too.

<comment><USER6> Right. (You also need X and Y to be independent, or at least multivariate Gaussian -- i.e., X and Y can both be Gaussian but (X,Y) can fail to be Gaussian as a pair.)

The product of Gaussian random variables is certainly not Gaussian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A comment on the reddit version of this discussion points out that the approach the article uses to combine Gaussians has numerical stability issues: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/13r2mh/gaussian...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/13r2mh/gaussian_distributions_form_a_monoid_and_why/c76g6jo)

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, but this is an example of bringing in extraneous math and notation to make something well understood seem mysterious. The fun statistics facts being abused here are: 1) moment summaries (sum 1, sum x, sum x^2 ...) are easy to manage; 2) many important summary statistics (count, mean, variance, kurtosis ...) are easy functions of moments; 3) once you decide to think parametric you can use that many distributions are completely determined by the first one, two or three sufficient statistics. But since all of the above can be clearly taught- it isn't as exciting.

<comment><USER8> Also if we want to get all math abusey (using graduate level concepts to do basic work): how about something like "moments are a co-product"? The emphasized property in the article is calculations on the raw data can be done on the moments. So all the calculations of interest map through the moment summaries (hence you can think of them as a co-product). Surely that is more exotic than just saying "monoid." And monoid is kind of used up by the crowd that says "free monoid" when all they mean is "set of all strings."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ...so my knowledge of Abstract Algebra and Category Theory could actually have practical applications if I learn Haskell?

Edit: I phrased this flippantly, but it's a serious question. My educational background is in Math, specifically Abstract Algebra. Would learning Haskell actually help me use those concepts for practical purposes?

<comment><USER10> Yes and no.

There are "issues" with those structures in GHC, i.e. how the Functor/Applicative/Monoid hierarchy evolved in GHC (applicatives were discovered a little late)

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7595023/why-is-this- decla...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7595023/why-is-this-declaration- not-allowed-in-haskell)

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730270/alternative- imple...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730270/alternative- implementations-of-haskells-standard-library-type-classes)

But: (and this one of the beauties of Learn You a Haskell), learning the categories (functor, applicative, monoid through arrows, duality, groups etc), is a superb way to abstract the software analysis/development process and is one of the winning features of languages with good type systems (haskell, the *ML's incl F#, scala)

<http://learnyouahaskell.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would somebody explain this step in his explanation?

[http://izbicki.me/blog/wp-content/plugins/optimized- latex/im...](http://izbicki.me/blog/wp-content/plugins/optimized- latex/image.php?image=tex_240ba03b0952b1e7d16eb8570d9d1ee5.png)

How does he go from (a - b)^2 to a^2 - b^2? What am I missing?

<comment><USER12> That's the definition of variance. Look here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance#Definition>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strikes me mainly as a trendy recasting of the statistical concept of a "sufficient statistic" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufficient_statistic>)

<comment><USER13> Which would be to miss the point that monoids are the general principal of which sufficient statistics are a specific application.

Also, not sure mathematicians wore skinny jeans in 1904.

<comment><USER14> Surely the burden is squarely on the author to show what the generalization (in this context) offers that the specific concept of sufficient statistics does not? In other words, how else can a statistician or ML expert use this foreign "monoid" concept to improve or better understand parameter estimation?

<comment><USER13> "show what the generalization (in this context) offers that the specific concept ... does not"

What does group theory tell me in the context of 1+1 that knowing the answer is 2 doesn't? Generalizations are useful because they apply to more than one context.

That said; the interesting connection between two areas of mathematics is what I took from the article, but I'd agree that his title (well, subtitle) is way overblown - his argument for "Why ML experts should care" seems to boil down to speed, but the Haskell statistics package itself contains faster algorithms that are marked unsafe, and he hasn't demonstrated safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As I recall the Gaussian distributions are the only distribution that have the desired property (i.e. form a monoid). While the Gaussian is important it is by far the only distribution of interest in machine learning. I would like to hear what the author has to say about handling, for example, the beta distribution.

In summary: interesting idea but I'm not sure it applies outside a very narrow domain.

<comment><USER2> i wonder if you are thinking of another monoid property of a gaussian?

suppose we have:

       x ~ N(0,1)
       y|x ~ N(x, 1)

then we have:

       y ~ N(0, 2)

i.e., gaussians are closed under marginalization.

however, i believe gaussians are not the only distribution with this property either: i think this property corresponds to the stable family of distributions: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distributions>

<comment><USER6> Stable distributions are something else, not related to marginals or conditioning. They come up when studying laws of averages.

Gaussian distributions belong to the class of stable distributions, though, because of another of their properties: independent Gaussians, when added, are again Gaussian.

<comment><USER2> the particular property of the stable distribution, i was thinking of, is "closure under convolution" which is the above marginalisation (i believe?).

infinite divisibility is (yet another) property of gaussians!

<comment><USER6> Nope. Closure under convolution is the same as closure under summation of the associated random variable, which is the defining property of stable distributions. This is explained in the first paragraphs of the wikipedia page you linked to ;-)

Closure under marginalization is something else.

It so happens that the functional form of the gaussian satisfies both, but the two properties are not at all the same.

      P1: X, Y gaussian => Z = X+Y gaussian
      P2: X, Y gaussian => X | Y gaussian

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of the graduate level physics class where we used the renormalization group to prove the central limit theorem.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting to be able to subtract inputs from the learning rather than starting the learning over again. I had been wondering if this were possible.</comment>


The World's Tallest Waterslide Was a Terrible, Tragic Idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/595981/water-slide/ <comment><USER2> terrible story.

"Henry and Schooley were ultimately indicted on charges of aggravated battery, aggravated endangerment of a child, interference with law enforcement, and involuntary manslaughter. Henry faced a charge of second-degree murder. "

...

"In February, a judge dismissed the charges against Henry and Schooley. "

not a lawyer and didn't read the brief, but the only one that seems remotely applicable to the accident itself is involuntary manslaughter or maybe interference with law enforcement depending on the context (e.g. ride inspections vs the investigation)..

Perhaps the DA should pick charges that make sense? like say, fraud (selling ride as safe when it is not), criminal negligence, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> A direct consequence of insufficient safety regulations.</comment>


Digg Reader is planning to shut down on March 26 - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/reader# <comment><USER2> And so the wheel turns...

Some choice quotes from the launch of Digg Reader:

> "Free products on the Internet don't have a great track record. They tend to > disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people > can rely on and trust will always be there for them." [0]

From a Wired slobbery puff piece:

> "The Digg team certainly has a shot at cracking that nut; their progress so > far is astonishing, and their relentless enthusiasm makes you almost believe > they can accomplish anything. But they also might melt the wax on their > wings, come crashing down into the hard crust of the real world, and lose an > astonishing amount of money. It almost doesn't matter." [1]

From Gizmodo:

> "Where Google set us adrift, Digg threw us a life-preserver. While it's > exciting to see what the future might hold, right now, it's nice enough just > to have our heads above water." [2]

And the prize for winning HN comment from 2013 goes to @nothxbro:

> "It looks good, but I am wary of using any of these guys stuff based on how > fast they 'pivot' and shut things down." [3]

0: [http://blog.digg.com/post/49264812779/were-still- learning](http://blog.digg.com/post/49264812779/were-still-learning)

1: [https://www.wired.com/2013/06/inside_digg_reader/](https://www.wired.com/2013/06/inside_digg_reader/)

2: [https://gizmodo.com/digg-reader-hands-on-your-google- reader-...](https://gizmodo.com/digg-reader-hands-on-your-google-reader-life- raft-is-h-530930770)

3: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5894290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5894290)

<comment><AUTHOR> to be fair they did a good job, was fully functional quickly. I've had 5 good years with no ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We're working on V2 of Winds, a beautiful open source RSS Reader and Podcast app based on React/Redux and Stream. Release of V2 will be this April: [https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds)

</comment><comment><USER4> Disappointed that their exit strategy did not include open-sourcing their RSS Reader and letting someone else carry the torch.

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

<comment><USER5> What is the downside to doing this? Seems like a no-brainer.

<comment><USER6> The downside to this is that it's hard. This kind of service requires a sprawling infrastructure with many dozens of servers and tens of thousands of dollars in costs per month. And the amount of programming work to take that code-base and make it just work, plug-and-play, on someone else's machine for individual use, or in a larger set-up for shared use, is pretty serious. Not to mention that the many individual services powering such a service are often reused and tangled up in other (critical) services run by a company, and it's not always possible to separate out the intellectual property.

This is only a sampling of the issues - open-sourcing huge projects is actually much trickier than you might think!

<comment><USER4> Releasing their source does not imply that they are providing a working turn- key product that another company or individual could just one click install and have Digg back. Put it out there so the next generation has the opportunity to learn from their experience as well as their mistakes.

That said, you are absolutely right. Software at scale is complicated and often difficult to deploy and maintain. I just feel that this is not a barrier for open-sourcing their product.

<comment><USER7> > Releasing their source does not imply that they are providing a working > turn-key product that another company or individual could just one click > install and have Digg back.

Except that exactly what most people will want and get mad if it's not easy to run. The backlash from that isn't worth it.

> I just feel that this is not a barrier for open-sourcing their product.

IP alone can be a bitch and that coupled with the fact that a number of companies have secrets (key/tokens/passwords/etc) in their code and cleaning those out (AND removing the git/svn history) is no small task. Lastly there are number of open source RSS readers out there, I seriously doubt Digg was doing anything particularly innovative in this space and I don't imagine many people care to build on something they made 5 years ago and probably didn't update much since then. Especially if it's not built with the "New hotness".

<comment><USER4> Most of what you say is speculative. Without their code we will never be certain for sure.

Also: "Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… " -Theodore Roosevelt

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't recommend inoreader.com enough. A worthy successor to Google reader. (I am not affiliated, just a happy user)

<comment><USER9> Would you recommend it compared to feedly?

<comment><USER8> I tried feedly shortly after Google Reader shut down but didn't like it much then. Don't know how it is nowadays. Inoreader is very close to the Google Reader experience without being a 1:1 clone.

<comment><USER10> I just tried it from seeing you mention it. I like how it more closely resembled what I was familar w/ re: Google Reader and Digg Reader. I think I've bought some more time with this one, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some weird reason, after Google Reader shut down, I tried several RSS readers, including OldReader, the AOL one (I think) and Digg Reader.

As I used to visit Digg quite often (it's not the crowdsourcing site anymore, but an editorial-based one) because of its content, I stuck with it.

It started ok—what you would expect from a feed reader. It was clean, it updated quite often, it was good.

But three or so years ago, it started to look stale. No new features, and worse: the count read was wrong, and often it would mark your items as read. It was clunky and unreliable, late last year I moved to feedly and haven't look back.

The lesson here is that maybe there's no model for a free hosted RSS reader. Google found out, and then some others.

And that's not good for an open web.

<comment><USER12> It's not ideal, but maybe it's OK inasmuch as I use a local RSS reader (feedbro) perfectly happily. It works, it's not beholden to another company, and its feature set will remain the same as long as I choose not to upgrade it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I consider Digg Reader a perfect web app. It's simple, free, featureful _and_ has a stark beauty to it

Like everyone else, I had to find a replacement for Google Reader, so I tried a lot of them (even paid ones). Digg Reader was the only one that exactly matched how I used Google Reader — and in fact, I like it even better now.

Not looking forward to finding a replacement.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm going to swoop in and recommend (read: shameless plug) my own RSS reader, Zuperlist. It's trying to do things a little differently: it prioritizes topics the user cares about. More details are on the home page: [https://www.zuperlist.com](https://www.zuperlist.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't resist to recommend my own BazQux Reader [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com)

It's a paid feed reader (so if you like to move between closing free readers every few years it's not for you).

<comment><USER16> Current customer, really happy with it, though I wonder if there are any new features in the pipeline...?

<comment><USER15> Almost finished mobile version of site (you could check it in beta.bazqux.com -- landing page/menus are not ready yet, but the reading itself is more or less OK). Planning to add feeds management and reading statistics, themes, bookmarking, improved sharing, mailing lists support, many little things and to open source it.

<comment><USER16> Mobile view is great--thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any suggestions for alternatives? I tried Inoreader, Feedly, Old reader - didn't like any of them! :( Been using Digg for several years now and would like something similar to this!

<comment><USER18> Same here. Just gave quick tour for both of them and don't like them at all. TheOldReader UI with crazy spacing between elements drives me crazy. Feedly on other hand wastes too much space. Will not use none of them as replacement.

<comment><USER19> Devoted feedly user here. If you switch to 'Title only-view' and switch the display density to 'condensed' in the settings (Click user profile pic --> Settings --> Appearance), I think that should solve your annoyances. I too hate needless spacing between elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its becoming a habit. Any good alternatives?

<comment><USER20> If you're cool with paid[0] or self-hosted[1], I've heard Newsblur is nice.

[0] [https://newsblur.com/](https://newsblur.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur)

<comment><USER21> NewsBlur _is_ nice. (I'm a very happy paid user.) It's social features are close to what was lost when Google shutdown their Reader. (The biggest thing lacking is how big the community was in GReader's heyday, but that was a rare lightning in a bottle and not NewsBlur's fault.)

As a paid customer I know that I'm a _customer_ of NewsBlur, they expect to keep my business, and Samuel Clay has been very good over the years about listening to customer and community feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why I'm very happy to pay Feedly money. They keep track of my RSS feeds and give a nice API so I can use my app of choice to read them (or the web interface). And because I pay them, it's in their interests not to fuck it up by trying to be too clever.

</comment><comment><USER23> I never really understood how Digg managed to fuck up completely and never return to the battlefield. Any body here who knows what happened?

<comment><USER24> Digg changed the design (to digg v4) and interface and alienated it's userbase (august 2010). After years of other poor decisions this broke the camels back. Digg was then flooded with links to reddit. Reddit was there and caught all the users that all looked for a new home to "migrate" to. After a month 30% digg users or so moved to reddit and the rest is history.

Let's see what happens when reddit tries to do a redesign ;)

<comment><USER25> Reddit has actually been slowly lurching towards revealing a redesign for the last couple of months. To be honest they seem almost too paranoid about not messing things up to the point where it feels like progress has been at a standstill for years. They're doing a lot of previews [1], and getting a lot of feedback from users, but I still feel that the sort of power users who engage with a process like this might end up helping them design a Homer that blindsides a lot of people.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/7ul5k9/hey_were_here_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/7ul5k9/hey_were_here_to_talk_about_that_desktop_redesign/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm using Feedbin for now. Tried hosting miniflux 2.0 but there seem to be a few bugs at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is why I enjoy hosting my own reader ([https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt- rss.org/)). But I do wish I could find one with a CLI interface.

<comment><USER28> I have my own ttRSS too, and for a small netbook I have I use newsbeuter[1]. I specially like it because it syncs with ttRSS, so all the feeds and read statuses are kept centralized.

[1] [https://newsbeuter.org/](https://newsbeuter.org/)

<comment><USER27> This looks awesome, thanks for the heads up!

And thoughts on this vs newsboat[1] which claims that newsbeuter isn't being updated anymore?

[1] [https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/)

<comment><USER28> I didn't know about it, but you're absolutely right. Newsbeuter has a notice on their README file to that effect and they recommend newsboat[1].

Newsbeuter works fine for me for now, but it's good knowing that. I'm glad I saved your comment in the morning so I could reply later at work :D

[1] [https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/akrennmair/newsbeuter/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 50+ Comments and dozen of alternative named, not a single mention of feedly? I thought it was the Google Reader in modern era.

</comment><comment><USER30> never used digg reader, switched from google reader to feedly and now i've switched from feedly to my own news aggregator / rss reader: aktu ([http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)).

It's currently a beta version, and i'd love to have some feedback :-)

thanks !

</comment><comment><USER31> Why can't they just charge for it?

</comment><comment><USER32> Any solutions to save Saved bookmarks?

<comment><USER33> I just published a command-line tool for the same: [https://github.com/sangupta/digg-reader- dump](https://github.com/sangupta/digg-reader-dump)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> can't understand why they must shut down.</comment>


Give social networks fake details, advises UK govt web security official - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20082493

<comment><USER2> I suspect this was driven by frustration.

HMG are driving hard to push government to citizen interaction online to reduce costs and speed up the transactions. The financial transactions are a huge amount of money passing over the Internet leaving aside the serious duty of care they assume for vulnerable or at-risk citizens.

This relies on knowing who is driving the browser you're transacting with. when you're dealing with the entire population there are a lot of people who it's difficult to establish a valid identity for.

Knowledge-based authentication is the 'good enough' answer used by commercial providers but for a significant proportion of the population it's broken by their social network use and footprint.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't share every second of your life. Keep to yourself what you want private and share what you want public. No need to mess around with other identities.</comment>


An Introduction to Quantum Computation and Communication by Rob Pike [PDF] - <AUTHOR> http://herpolhode.com/rob/qcintro.pdf

<comment><USER2>
      The two-slit experiment.

      1. Single photon still produces interference pattern!

      2. Ask which slit photon passes - pattern disappears

This kind of explanation is common, and it has always bothered me, because it's the wrong sort of mental model.

The interference pattern doesn't disappear "because we're looking", or "because we're asking", or "because we thought about finding the answer".

It disappears because in order to check which slit a photon passed through, we need some way of measuring that. To do so, we need some way to "see" the photon; to do that, we need to shine photons on it; and it is _that_ which destroys the interference pattern.

The reason quantum mechanics is "weird" is because it (currently) is fundamentally impossible to invent a device to answer the question "which slit did the photon pass through?" without destroying the interference pattern.

However, that _doesn't_ mean it disappears "because we're asking". The interference pattern is destroyed because our device, no matter what it is, will _always_ interfere with the experiment (shining photon A at a photon B == "well _obviously_ that would change the behavior of photon B"). Nothing more, nothing less.

<comment><USER3> A better example of "weird" than the two slit experiment is the the quantum bomb detector, which basically answers the question "if I sent a photon through point X, would it be absorbed?" without actually sending a photon (or anything else measurable) through point X.

There's no attempt with this to determine where photons are going, so you don't have the pesky issues of observation attempts messing with your photons.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb-tester>

Here's an improved version that doesn't explode as often:

[http://njsas.org/projects/light_polarization/Interaction- Fre...](http://njsas.org/projects/light_polarization/Interaction-Free- Measurements.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm about as far from an expert as you can get, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable can shed some light on this:

"A classical computer seems to need time exponential in n to predict precisely the behavior of a general quantum mechanical system of n particles. (Yet nature manages to do it in real time.)"

How could we know this from inside that system? For all we know it could take a billion [whatever unit is used to measure time outside of our dimension] to calculate each step, and it would still look fluid to us.

<comment><USER5> The usual time measure of computational complexity is in units of computation, not in terms of the wall clock time it takes to for a calculation to run.

<comment><USER4> Then what does "real time" mean in this context?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=208> \-- possibly helpful for those who saw the Shor's algorithm bit and wanted more.</comment>


Is Amazon having issues with load due to Prime day? - <AUTHOR> Try to "Shop all deals" and the page just reloads. Seeing other reports of "Ih-oh, something went wrong" <comment><USER2> Same thing here (page just reloads)</comment>


Proposed DMCA Exemption Would Unchain Device Owners - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2011/dec/02/proposed-dmca-exemption/

<comment><USER3> _"People must have the right to control the software running on devices they own," said SFLC counsel Aaron Williamson. "That right is essential to the continued development of free and open source software and is foundational to our privacy, security, and freedom, online and off."_

He nails it completely.

</comment><comment><USER4> I had never heard of the SFLC before, so this summary from their filing helped:

"SFLC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal services organization dedicated to protecting and advancing free software. SFLC provides pro bono legal representation to developers and educates the public about legal issues affecting free software development. SFLC represents a number of prominent developers and organizations that write and distribute free software directed at personal computing devices, including the Free Software Foundation, which develops and distributes GNU, a collection of free software operating system utilities; the Debian project, which distributes a complete free software operating system based on GNU and Linux; and the Foundation for Free Multimedia Technology, which develops free software commonly used for media playback."

Overall this seems to clarify the legal distinction of installing a legally- obtained OS on all electronic devices you own. Jailbreaking of mobile phones was ruled legal in 2009--but that only covers a small subset of electronics which are becoming increasingly locked down.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice, but I wonder about ways to circumvent this. If locking down users is central to a company's business can they force users into accepting that they "rent" the devices instead of "buying"?

<comment><USER6> If they are going to lock it down anyway, yes I would rather rent it than buy it. That might actually be a good solution.

I don't want to be told not to "tamper" with my PC on the grounds that it would then be possible to use it for piracy.

But "don't tamper with your electricity meter" is perfectly reasonable - <USER2> do not own that and you would not expect to own it or be allowed to modify it.

<comment><USER5> The line is thin. I would't want a situation where you can only plug rented, locked devices into the internet (aka the wet dream of the copyright lobby.) And the power to say "no" to a deal is not always sufficient to stop such crap - look at the game consoles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds great but I think it is worth considering two things:

1) I'm not aware of any persecution or prosecution of any private citizen for modifying their own device. For instance I've never heard of Apple seeking legal action against an iPhone owner who jailbroke their phone. Or heck, even against any of the groups who publish jailbreaks.

2) This would not force any manufacturer or carrier to provide support or assistance in modifying device software.

As a point of legal clarification I think it sounds great but I think there would be little practical impact.

<comment><USER8> Sony.</comment></comment>


Tasker is removed from Google Play Store for rediculous accusation - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/f47lsk/tasker_removed_from_google_play/ <comment><USER2> For context, Google Play made recent changes to the review process for Android Apps in 2019 and its almost equivalent to Apple's app review process. 'Device Automation' and app reviews are now apparently done by humans, it takes several days for your app to pass review and app developers will have to update their supported APIs levels in order to push an update.

I have not imagined that these changes could affect a well known Android app like Tasker, but if this is where the app ecosystem is going for developers then its survival of the fittest and the persistent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google Play already explicitly issued exemption for serveral well-known device automation apps including Tasker in the last year, apparently by human.</comment></comment>


A side-by-side look at run scripts and service units - vezzy-fnord http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess this is yet more systemd bashing, because the scripts are so small.

These runscripts are useless. They only start a service.

From the article:

This is deliberate; as the intent here is to allow an apples-to-apples comparison

It is not. It's comparing appleseeds with apples</comment>


What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/06/what-silicon-valley-thinks-women-302821.html <comment><USER2> _> It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley._

I agree that parts of the tech world are really horrible, and I think we need to be doing everything we can to make women feel more welcome in our industry (not just for them, but for us), but isn't it at least a _little_ exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley is the main "trench of the global gender war"?

I'd think we'd be ranked after at least a couple of these:

* The construction industry

* The Bible Belt

* The restaurant industry

* West Africa

* The movie industry

* The Vatican

* The sportswriting industry

* The people who make Superbowl ads

* Japan

* The adult entertainment industry

* The Middle East

* Wall Street

* Nepal

* The upper echelons of American politics

<comment><AUTHOR> The bible belt isn't exactly eating the world.

We live in a society where more people now aspire to be tech CEOs than pro athletes or rock stars, and tech is one of the main centers of power both politically and economically.

It's easy to dismiss the article because there are a few mischaracterizations and exaggerations. But you need to remember that most people get their information about the tech world from second hand sources, and SV is largely opaque and closed off to the general public.

If you actually read it for what it is rather than just judging the author based on her knowledge of obscure inside-baseball tech scandals then I think there are some valuable points.

<comment><USER2> Ah, you're saying SV is the front line not because it treats women worse than anyone else in the world, but rather (to use the military analogy) because it's an extremely strategic piece of territory.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't treat women worse than _every other place in the world_ , no, but it treats them worse than _many other places_. Computer science has a sharply worse gender participation gap than other professions, and even from other STEM fields. It also continues to allow that gap to reinforce itself, for instance with apologia about how women aren't taught computers when they're younger and (by implication) how they're too far gone by the time they're 20 to remedy that problem. And that's one of the more charitable pathologies to focus on.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't actually treat women worse than lots of other places that have plenty of women. Islam, acting and modeling all treat women worse than computing (flogging them for rape, casting couches), yet have far more women.

Women are sometimes treated badly in technology. Technology also has few women. But what evidence do we have that the former is a significant cause of the latter? It's hard to even demonstrate a correlation, let alone causation.

<comment><USER3> The notion that there is some intrinsic property of women that makes them uncompetitive in computer science, but not in accounting, actuary, law, medicine, &c is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. No such evidence has been presented.

The notion that a male majority which happens to almost entirely comprise the upper echelons of the technology industry might, intentionally or (just as likely) not, set up self-reinforcing cycles of encouragement for men and discouragement for women is not an extraordinary claim. It is bog-standard human pack-animal clique behavior. And nevertheless, clear, ringing evidence of these phenomena are published routinely.

<comment><USER5> I think you are ignoring the much more likely scenario that women see computer science/software development as a bad bet or it simply does not appeal to them.

For example it is a field where if you take 5 years off you are treated worse than a fresh graduate... Funnily enough a lot of women might want the ability to take a few years off.

Or for example it is an industry which has a lot of instability and lack of internal mobility. This means that you often are forced to leave jobs you love and where you have close friends in order to progess, or because they pivoted, or simply went out of business. Less women are willing to put up with this crap.

I've worked as a software developer at a couple of larger companies where maybe 15% of the developers were female. However, about 40% of the systems analysts/business analysts/project managers/testers/QA were female. These are roles in which you interact with the developers on a daily basis.... Surely if the issue was software developers being sexist then women wouldn't want to do these other roles either.

There is some sexism in the industry, but no more than many other industries which have plenty of women.

<comment><USER3> No offense, but I'm not sure you've actually said anything here. Take this exact comment, substitute "women" for "men", and it seems equally valid. If you can't explain why things would be different specifically for women, you're not addressing the fact that there are four men for every woman in software development.

<comment><USER5> I'm saying that women, on average, might value the attributes/factors I listed more than men. I.e.

Being able to take 1+ years off when you have children without serious career damage is more important to woman than men.

The research I have read suggests that women are much less likely to leave a job they enjoy and where they have made friends in order to get a pay rise than men are. It's not much of a leap for women to consider this issue before entering a field.

Likewise there is considerable research on women being more risk averse than men and surely this at least has an impact on joining the startup world.

My last two paragraphs basically boil down to a question for you: why are women who are, in your opinion, not becoming software developers because of sexism still entering into roles that interact heavily with these sexist software developers?

<comment><USER3> Easy: because those roles you referenced are fed by a career track that starts in university programs with a much better gender balance. Some of those role are MBAs, and some of them (the project management stuff) are generic liberal arts with some industry training (like PMP).

That doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is in university enrollment, but it does explain why it's easier to find women in non-tech roles in software companies: it's because those roles don't require an early life commitment to a career in technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the '80s and '90s.

Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy here:[http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of- required...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required- ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender- gap/)

Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.

<comment><USER7> I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a CS major.

We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker. I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.

<comment><USER8> What CS degree requires physics _and_ chemistry ?

Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program.

I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out. Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math, but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps.

I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.

<comment><USER7> Personally I think you can understand algorithms knowing only algebra and finite math. However, I should clarify the BA programs I'm aware of still required a semester or so of calculus versus others which require a few semesters.

At my college, almost every CS major ended up being 1 credit short of a minor in Math. I don't think that much math is necessary.

<comment><USER8> >Personally I think you can understand algorithms knowing only algebra and finite math.

How are you going to understand the growth rates of algorithms without calculus?

Are you just going to keep it at the level of: in f(n) = n^2 + n, n^2 grows much faster, so it's like comparing an elephant to a goldfish.

Intuitive explanations work fine as an introduction, but again I don't think you need a college degree to understand algorithms at this level.

It seems like what you're looking for would be better implemented as a 2 year programming degree at a community college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> John Carmack's "we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn't matter what they look like." is pretty much all you need to say, over and over, until they give up.

There are two problems w/ 'white male' dominated engineering fields (really, male, unless you insist on the slander that asian+indian are 'honorary white'). One is optical. It just looks bad to shallow thinkers who don't care to pause to find out what the pool of able+willing workers looks like.

The other is that techies are too insecure about their value and virtue; they're inclined to actually respond in good faith to slanders like this one. Big mistake. You _do_ see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD/PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone.

Yes, everywhere I look around me are a bunch of guys. ( _maybe_ 10-20% women). Yet I'm certain women are welcome. Sorry, they just are.

<comment><USER10> _You do see also occasional diversity attacks against the really high earners (managers, sales, finance, corp. law, certain posh local FD /PD, maybe some doctors?) but since they don't seem to flinch much, they're pretty much left alone._

I posted a question elsewhere in this thread asking why the tech industry has been getting the brunt of the diversity shakedown. I think this is part of the puzzle.

The type of mind that lends itself well to tech tends to have less political acumen and social intelligence. We're prone to taking things too literally and sometimes miss the bullshit below the surface.

Are we really expected to believe that people who write software are any more sexist than lawyers or the population in general?

Let's call the diversity hounding of tech exactly what it is: the playground bully picking on the kid who they know wont fight back.

<comment><USER11> Ah, but there's an alternative hypothesis. Tech is an industry that people enter because they see a new world being created and want to participate in the making of it with their own hands. Finance, corporate law, so forth, not so much.

So it seems believable that tech is a place where you will find people sympathetic to do difficult, tradition-destroying things to build a better world, much more than finance or corporate law. (The way that tech has publicly embraced things from LGBT rights to non-college-degreed people, more than finance or corporate law has, is evidence in favor of this belief.)

Given that, the pressure on tech to do better than the rest of the world, and thereby set an example for the rest of the world, makes a lot of sense. It's not that tech is the most sexist industry (it isn't), it's that it's the industry that's most likely to get significantly better in a short period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have a good source for industry-wide ratios that relate to the ones given in the article?

A couple examples:

2.7% of firms funded have female CEOs. How many of firms seeking funding have female CEOs? How many have a female cofounder rather than just looking at the CEO position?

80% of female founders used personal savings as their primary source of funding (it sounds like this is for the seed phase, but unclear in the article?). What is the industry-wide percentage?

Female founded firms do 31% better on average (in an industry where average = a failed company what does this mean?). Is the sample size (which the article makes sure to tell us is far too small on a moral basis) large enough to make this statistically significant?

Note: I am not trying to undermine the article - I don't have enough knowledge of the industry to say much. I am honestly looking for context for these numbers and wondering if anyone can help.

<comment><USER13> As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to contextualize them. For instance, you'll get a statistic about what percentage of funded startups have a woman co-founder but no information about what percentage of startups considered have a woman co-founder.

<comment><USER14> > As a rule, those industry-wide ratios tend to come without data to > contextualize them.

So the rule is to gimp data in order to fool people into believing things that may not be true?

<comment><USER13> That's the cynical reading, yes. A more optimistic one is that people believe the numbers are scary enough that no context is needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want to think forward about solving the challenges women face here, companies would do well to start taking a hard look in the mirror about how much they pay operations staff.

Operations keeps the company humming along while it's simultaneously trying to fly off the rails of the rocket sled that is a startup. Unfortunately, a large quantity of dicks (literally) in SV think that operations positions are cookie cutter and can be filled by anyone hungry for a job. I can assure you from first hand experience that's not the case, and have seen many a company encounter additional struggles because they lacked (or lost) the operations support to keep the team together in hard times.

Operation's positions are primarily filled by women. Women who work their asses off to keep the rest of the company fed when they are in crunch time. Women who ensure the office is warm, friendly and receptive to creative work. Women who make sure the ADD CEO is where they need to be on time to make deals happen. Women who understand the business better than most of the executives, because that's what's required to be good at helping the executives to get their shit together and get stuff done.

And, sadly, these women doing operations are paid a fraction of what men are in other equally critical roles. Personally, I think it's time to fix this discrepancy.

(Literally downvoted 2 minutes into posting this. Nice.)

<comment><USER16> I'm genuinely curious -- does the women in tech movement advocate for improvements in the treatment of such operational staff (HR, admin, etc.) or is the narrative mostly limited to engineering (and maybe including product and marketing)?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Model View Culture, which is as good a sample of tech feminism as any, published this good piece on exactly the subject:

[https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-non- tech...](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-non-technical- startup-employee)

<comment><USER13> If Shanley is the touchstone of good tech feminism, then it's time to give up and pack it all in.

<comment><USER11> I chose my words carefully. :) The topics in Model View Culture are a good representative sample of the topics popular in tech feminism, the article isn't by her, and it was published while Amelia Greenhall was still involved in the publication, for whatever that's worth. (Also, if your impression of Shanley is her Twitter feed, it's worth being aware that MVC is pretty different.)

<comment><USER13> I gather my impressions of Shanley from the parts of herself she chooses to show the world, both on Twitter and otherwise. I found her extremely hostile reaction to a journalist writing a profile of her very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Two founders got less funding then they wanted, sexism? The idea for the company seemed reasonable, after all.

Maybe sexism.

The more likely answer is: most founders get less money than they want, in fact most founders fail.

There is under appreciated carnage in the founding game; acknowledgement of this, is one of the things that made PG such a fresh voice when he came on the scene years ago. That realism.

reality is that the founder game is a suckers bet, and one that men take at a vastly, vastly greater degree than women.

Men fail hard, and men themselves internalize the failure(most often) or blame larger forces outside of their control. Either response is fine (they usually don't blame "sexism" but they are plenty happy to blame other conspiracies).

But, when it comes time to talley the toll on men, society is largely quiet, why? Males are disposable.

Women, on the other hand, largely expect to be valued on the mere fact of their personage. They deserve respect for them being them. A noble belief, but one that does not exist in the hyper-competitive modern economy.

>yeah, if I was a professor I'd give your business plan an A-... Does that mean you "deserve" funding? No.

So, I could go on, but until women start throwing themselves into the grinder at the same rate men do, the ratio of men at the top will always be lopsided.

And I say this not as a man that is bitter (I actually won the game against all odds) but I say this as somebody who believes that women's strategies on a whole are better than men's.

That is: men are stupid to take so much risk! It shouldn't be venerated!

The true non-sexism is to realize that women's choices are valid (and probably smarter) and women are more than just "poorly performing men"

<comment><USER5> Spot on. Startups are a high risk industry and most fail.

We sell young men a dream... And the same dream just doesn't appeal to young women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is not a good article. It's badly written and shit for nuance.

It divides things into a "Global Gender War" purely for the sake of heightening the mood."Look at these terrible gang-bang interviewers!" is all it has to say. There is no mention of the massive amount of work women are doing in the space, and when there is, it as an example of how terrible they are being treated. Here is a women-led company that offers peer mentoring, but they too are struggling because of gender bias. It calls Model View Culture an "acid-penned, widely read website". MVC is actually doing the social justice work and newsweek calls them "acid-penned". It puts fucking Vivek Wadhwa up as a better example of feminism than the actual women fighting for their humanity. Vivek Wadhwa isn't a good person, in general he's just a terrible male ally. (what he says just in _this piece_ is disrespectful to women, see [http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy- feminists](http://bensk.me/post/109449438931/tech-savvy-feminists))

There are no humans in the piece, only victims and demons. Two examples of struggling women-led startups, and a female VC who was forced to touch a penis. These are women in SV according to newsweek.

This is as badly thought out and less researched than that Rolling Stone article. One of the subheadings is "Asking for It" as a pun on women asking for money. That's an actual rape joke.

</comment><comment><USER19> These are always tough pieces to respond to, because there are certainly a lot of gender inequalities in the startup world.

But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of the situation instead of just a description of its current state.

They mention this particular pair of founders was turned down by YC and their trouble raising funding, but not any of the stats YC shares about how they have funded more and more female founders, and all of the outreach efforts they do.

They mention Ellen Pao concerned a lawsuit, but then only say she is "at Reddit", instead of saying she is currently the CEO. The CEO!

Also, they mention Peter Thiel and David Sacks are the new generation? I honestly didn't know who David Sacks was until I just looked it up. What about all of the partners at YC? What about Mark Zuckerberg? What about all of the non-sexist people?

<comment><USER20> > _" But I wish the piece had spent more time talking about the trajectory of > the situation instead of just a description of its current state."_

I admire the leadership being shown at YC right now and the progress that has been made.

But I'd caution against mistaking these accomplishments for trajectory. Just read the most upvoted posts in this very thread, and the number of men here who perceive that "women in tech" or feminism is a vendetta or war against men.

While we certainly appear more willing to call out the most egregious and obvious sexism in the industry (see: the Tinder fiasco), there are an alarming of young, supposedly enlightened participants who are vocally and virulently against any kind of reform, and adamant in their belief that women are "shaking down" the industry with their rabid bands of "SJW" lapdogs.

Note the sheer number of posters here who have completely not addressed any substance of the article and instead are focusing on how the tone is overly abrasive or the wording ineloquent.

No, I'm not willing to optimistically call the trajectory upwards - I'm not sure if I'm willing to call the trajectory level.

<comment><USER13> In all honesty, this article reads like a hackneyed retread of several dozen other articles I've read. It trots out the same statistics, quotes the same people, and so on. It's hard to take an article seriously when it feels like one giant repost.

<comment><USER20> It's a repost for us maybe - because this is an issue that's _finally_ being talked about within the industry. Keep in mind that Newsweek is a mainstream publication, so for many readers this is the first they'll have heard of tech industry sexism.

The significance of this article isn't that it makes any revolutionary advancement in thought or argument (it doesn't), but that it is one of few high-profile accounts of the problem accessible to mainstream non-tech audiences.

And this is IMO important - maybe unmasking the festering sores that blight this industry to the wider world would be a motivation to address them.

I agree with you in spirit though - in fact I take issue with them quoting Wadhwa so liberally, the guy's promotion of women in tech reeks of opportunism and chauvinistic paternalism - just read his quotes in this article where he paints women founders as a bunch of lost lamb who are too dumb to know when a VC is hitting on them, who are then saved by his sagely advice.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps seeing the constant stream of do-nothing protests in the Bay has made me cynical. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

I have exactly zero faith in the power of "awareness" or similar to affect much of anything. Beyond clogging up BART because someone has chained themselves to something again to raise awareness for something-or-other.

Doubly so when it plays neatly into a larger cultural narrative about nerds as The Other, in need of forcible correction by right-thinking people.

<comment><USER11> I've been thinking for some time about the environmentalists. I'm relatively young, but I recall in the '90s and a bit in the '00s, the environmentalists were portrayed in media (sometimes older media) as bleeding-heart liberals, people who chained themselves to trees, vegans like PETA, ecoterrorists like Greenpeace, etc.

Today, the stodgiest, most conservative industries have email footers reading "Save a tree -- think before printing."

I can't find anything else to explain that other than "awareness". And I usually am one to believe in the power of protests, but this particular change baffles me... yet it still happened.

<comment><USER13> Given that this "change" consists mostly of cookie-cutter email footers instead of drastic environmental change, I think we see the power of awareness laid bare.

It also shows that arguments about how printing costs more money than email- only were better-received than what preceded them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm actually consistently surprised that gender bias is really a problem (although I'm out in Boston so perhaps I don't see it). I would have thought that economic incentives would have stamped this stupid behavior out ages ago. The idea that team-killing unprofessional behavior on this reported scale is being allowed to continue by investors / management, or that VCs and hiring professionals are purposely ignoring strong opportunities because of peoples' gender just strikes me as being so stupid and shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. Is this really happening, or are these types of articles simply exaggerating the extent of the problem?

<comment><USER11> This is the same Silicon Valley where having Mahbod Moghadam is an asset.

Revenue, especially in the form of VC, is so disconnected from productivity that massive inefficiencies can exist (provided you have the capital to power through them). You _can_ build a sufficiently-successful company ignoring half your resumes. In some places it's way more than half, and there are biases to top-tier schools, biases to personal referrals, etc., and things work.

Also the nasty thing about those sorts of biases is that they're self- perpetuating. If someone else previously hired you for a job you were well- suited for, you now have nice experience on your resume, a good referral, and usually connections. So a company hiring experienced local developers, or a VC firm judging founders by what they've built in the past, gets the result of everyone else's biases. There's also explicitly some allowance for mistakes if you look like you should have been and could still be successful, ranging from the acceptance of pivots to giving people funding even if their last exit wasn't so great. While useful, this also tends to defang the savagery of the free market significantly.

This is not to say that anyone is guaranteed free money. There's certainly hard work required, and also certainly some blind luck. But the market won't shake out mistakes as quickly as you'd hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would love to see the numbers of bootstrapped companies run/founded by women vs. those recieving investments. Until there are more women VC's, you're not going to see more women getting VC money. Why? Because purely evaluating a potential fundee on metrics alone will fail. VC's that use too much math and not enough "gut" will finance the wrong companies.

The problem with that is, all the dudes got all the money, and human tendency is to think highly of things we most identify with. ergo, dude investors are more willing to go out on a limb on an idea if they can identify with the person giving it (currently, lots of white males). It's unfortunate, but it's not purely inequality, it's just a sad fact of human nature that we seek what's most alike us.

It takes a particularly well educated, and self-understanding individual to look past emotional bias. The problem then becomes that others around them don't necessarily have that skill, so there becomes a cascading effect of lack of belief in something. (be that other investors, potential clients, or even quality employees) In effect, our prejudices create the successes on a larger scale that seed the next generation (of VC's, not generations of people) that's making the same emotional decisions.

I don't have a solution. Maybe it's screaming about inequality, as some do, maybe it's succeeding in spite of it. I don't deny it's existence, but I just can't figure out how to change it.

I think it just has to come down to each person realizing it in themselves and changing it. For me it was in round 4343239534 of potential front end developers, when a dorky looking hipster girl came in, and I realized half-way through her interview I had already set her up for failure because I'd assumed she was a poser. It took her being beyond great at what she did to make me realize that in myself, and let me tell you, that's an awful, awful feeling to have. When you're sitting there thinking you're a good person, fair to people, and realize you've made such a sweeping - and wrong - assumption about some one else because of their sex, race, lifestyle, whatever, it's really damn hard to accept it. I can completely see how people let themselves continue to ignore that little nudge in the back of their mind. It's not easy to change the way you think.

TL;DR - Fucking sucks, and it's really hard to change, but it exists.

</comment><comment><USER23> Throwaway account given the topic.

As someone who has been in the valley along while, the disrespect from women seems to come from a couple of angles -- the bro culture (define as you wise, Uber excels in this), racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst), and many of those that grew up outside the bay area.

Some of us have been seeing each other as equals for years, judgement based on merit, but many a*holes still perpetuate issues.

My data set -- several startups, a few big companies, bay area native; my wife non native, white, a number of large prominent technical companies. One of us in engineering, the other in project/program management.

The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a difficult one.

<comment><USER24> > racial groups (indian males are amongst the worst)

> The influx of H1-B, caste loving people is making the push for equality a > difficult one.

I'm not going to call you a racist, but the least you could do is provide examples or, at best, statistics to backup your allegations. None, but one, of the feminist accusations of the tech industry in the American media involved a non-white male.

> caste loving people

As if Americans are not caste-loving? [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class- di...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class- dismissed/307274/)

<comment><USER9> Surely you can admit that Americans are _less_ caste-loving. We treat talented individuals of all races+genders+GLBTQBBQ pretty damn well compared to the majority of the world (the mentally ill, on the other hand ...). I give us an A-, globally speaking.

<comment><USER24> > Surely you can admit that Americans are less caste-loving. We treat talented > individuals of all races+genders+GLBTQBBQ pretty damn well compared to the > majority of the world

I'm not really sure about that. If you are talking about overt treatment, sure we tend to be nice and well-mannered compared to the majority of the world. But underneath that facade we really aren't any different from the rest. Why do you think an HN user had to create a throwaway account (throwaway6761) to denigrate an entire race of people? I'm sure he tends to be nice and well- mannered to the minorities outside the Internet. Finally note that the comment you are responding to points to the class/status system between Americans (not just between races): [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class- di...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class- dismissed/307274/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and > Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 > years from now. And there's not a female among them.

Wow, yeah, it's crazy that a shortlist of four people of 316 million that none of them are women. Despite Asians having large representation in tech, should I be offended that none of those these heavyweights are Asian?

</comment><comment><USER26> Many of the concerns raised in this article are legitimate, and obviously aren't exclusive to tech. But the narrative presented by this article is not as compelling as it could be because the author relies so heavily on the experience of two founders whose struggle raising seed capital mirrors that of countless male founders.

Is it possible that Glassbreakers simply isn't the $100 million/year investment opportunity the founders believe it is? The author devotes just a single paragraph to this possibility:

> To be fair, there are many reasons Glassbreakers might not appeal to a > Founders Fund or Andreessen Horowitz, or any of the dozens of other all-male > VC partnerships on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, reasons that have nothing > to do with sexist bias. It's not likely to be a Facebook, or even a Houzz, > the home-remodeling site launched by an Israeli husband and wife, financed > by Sequoia and now valued at $2.3 billion. Glassbreakers is by definition > "gender-gated," thereby excluding 50 percent of potential users. It also > presumes that many women do feel the need for female mentorship, when in > fact there is quite possibly a significant cohort of working women who think > they are getting along just fine without another woman's advice.

The author then minimizes this argument by pointing out that Uber founder Travis Kalanick was able to buy a San Fransico mansion when he sold a "now- forgotten" file sharing service. This has nothing to do with Glassbreakers, and anybody who stays in this game long enough will inevitably see more inexplicable fundings and acquisitions than can be counted. Good people and ideas go without funding and exits all the time.

The Glassbreakers founders were able to raise $100,000 in seed money, which the article's author humorously refers to as "pre-seed." They were looking for half a million dollars in "pre-seed" funding, but a lot of companies have problems raising. It appears Glassbreakers has _some_ traction (1,500 registered users) since launch, but without significantly more than this, raising $1.5 million might be difficult for the founders in today's ultra- competitive environment. Just because they want an 18 month runway doesn't mean that investors are obligated to provide it.

Meanwhile, there are companies like Chronus ([http://chronus.com/](http://chronus.com/)) and MicroMentor ([http://www.micromentor.org/](http://www.micromentor.org/)) that offer mentoring software corporations can use to build their own mentoring programs for employees. There is also an ecosystem of firms like Insala ([http://www.insala.com](http://www.insala.com)) that help corporations implement mentoring programs end to end. So if Glassbreakers is ultimately going to pursue revenue through corporate opportunities, which is allued to in the article, Glassbreakers has to prove that it can differentiate itself from and compete with what's already out there. Nothing in the article suggests that it has at this early stage.

<comment><USER27> It's particularly ironic that the author included this quote:

>"When I coach women, I tell them how wonderful they are. Women won't make the ridiculous projections about their companies that the guys will. They won't say the really stupid thing the nerds do. They are a lot more realistic and practical and humble."

Soon after this line:

>They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

And then they quoted Shanley Kane and I lost the ability to take the article seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and come out of the closet. There, I said it.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Gang-Bang Interviews"? Really?

SV tech is getting the diversity shakedown hard these days. Plenty of other fields have sex ratios just as skewed. Why is tech getting the brunt?

<comment><USER8> I've wondered that myself. There are plenty of other well paying jobs that are even more skewed than tech. Look at electricians, and plumbers to start.

I don't see a constant barrage of articles lamenting on the lack of women electricians.

<comment><USER29> How many articles do you see about electricians to begin with?

<comment><USER8> I think that's the point. The reason you see articles lamenting the lack of women in tech is because tech is currently a sexy career, while electrician isn't.

My point is that if people really cared about improving women's lives, they'd be pushing for more women in skilled trades _in addition_ to pushing for more women in tech.

Unlike software development, being an electrician require an apprenticeship instead of college. Apprenticeships are paid and therefore more accessible to people with lower incomes.

I'd argue that trying to improve the lives of less educated lower income women specifically is more beneficial than focusing on the smart, ambitious, college graduates (and future college graduates) who we are trying to entice into software development--women who would probably go on to high paying jobs in other fields anyway.

<comment><USER11> I'm a software engineer. I have a voice among software engineers, and not so much among electricians. I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of making some progress on. I don't think this means that I don't _really_ care about improving women's lives, any more than how, as a Linux user, me not writing Windows tutorials means I don't _really_ care about improving user's lives.

Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to ask the electricians.

<comment><USER8> >Why aren't there analogous articles written by electricians? You'd have to ask the electricians.

Software engineers aren't the ones writing these articles, and this is an article in Newsweek not a tech blog.

>I'll focus on the change that I have half a chance of making some progress on.

We're not talking about software engineers getting together and deciding to make our workplaces more hospitable to women (which I fully support). We're talking about people from outside singling us out for societal problems, while wrapping themselves in moral superiority.

This isn't bout helping women, it's about getting clicks by picking on an unpopular easy target. The same way we had articles blaming San Fransisco's housing prices on Google buses.

Again if they really cared about women, they'd be pushing for programs designed to get women into skilled trades.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. The diversity hand wringers could be targeting any industry they want right now but are lasering in on tech.

They smell the blood in the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The cover art just sucks all the air out of the room. I immediately know you SV folks aren't going to get a fair shake in this article.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wish they'd mentioned Theranos

<comment><USER32> Theranos imo is a special case. It was founded by a woman with tons of family money and friends in high places. She did not need to play the funding game to get started. I doubt she would have held onto her position today if she had to use regular funding channels in the beginning.

Most likely, she would have lost control of her company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.

<comment><USER35> thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Silicon Valley is where the future is allegedly built by people living in the past.

For just one of a zillion examples: why's the place so expensive? Fucking NIMBYs who refuse to allow 21st-century housing density. Also, California isn't that liberal. It's what 1960s liberalism would be if drained of all its leftist color and its impressive work ethic, leaving just nostalgic remembrances of the hippie era. The '60s leftists stood for something (like, civil rights and economic equality) but their 2015-era California remnant just wants to live in some silly suburban watered-down hippy-dippy utopia (see: Agrestic in _Weeds_ ) that never existed and doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Unfortunately, the not-fit-for-life soft-skulls become the Prop 13 assholes and the hair-trigger NIMBYs who block new development (it might shadow the gluten-free tomato garden I would start if I actually had ambition!) and drive house prices through the roof.

I like some people in California, for sure, but the Prop 13 NIMBY people should be forcibly relocated to the Pacific Garbage Patch... until we have something like The Raft in _Snow Crash_ to put them on.

In the same way, this supposedly innovative industry is run by people who still subscribe to the _Mad Men_ playbook of gender relations, never mind the fact that the rest of the world (yes, even Wall Street!) has moved beyond that and the sort of disgusting behavior (such as the investors who come on to women during pitches, or otherwise attempt to use their positions of power for sexual access) described in this article would get a person fired, if not more.

</comment><comment><USER37> I really wish I could go to at least one site related to something I'm interested in be it sports, tech or gaming and not have to listen to this feminist propaganda.

<comment><USER38> Yeah it would be nice to just enjoy distractions without my beliefs being challenged all the time. Why can't I ignore all the problems of society, and just read blogs all day?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism. That day has not arrived.

<comment><USER40> This is the same type of sloppy thinking that endorses "if you're so tolerant, why don't you accept my bigotry."

It barely deserves a response, but I would like to point out that it is far more revealing of your ignorance of other people's experience than of any cleverness or wit on your part.

<comment><USER41> I'm pretty sure your response did nothing but attack the author and completely failed to counter the argument. Well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The front line of the gender war is the American courtroom, where men are subject to grossly unjust and discriminatory divorce and custody law.

<comment><USER43> In contested custody cases, fathers win about half the time. Granted, there's probably selection bias there.

The custody issue is clearly a result of gender stereotypes. I'm a feminism in part because it's the one movement that's actively and effectively fighting against that root cause.

I don't think tech sexism in SV is _the_ frontline, or that the courts are _the_ frontline, but they're both important fights. (SV might be the frontline _in tech_, but not in gender or sex equality overall, or even in the US.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pollse, our weekend Rails Rumble submission - <AUTHOR> http://tectonics.r13.railsrumble.com/

<comment><USER2> This was my first ever hackathon so I didn't know what to expect. But, it was lots of fun working on Pollse and seeing the project come to life in such a short amount of time. Great job team!</comment>


Ask HN: What are you paying for SaaS products in your startup / team? - <AUTHOR>

Just out of curiosity, mention:<p>* Venture stage (self-funded lifestyle vs. VC-funded startup, etc ...) * Team size * Total Monthly spend on SaaS products <comment><USER2> Some good responses from last year. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449122)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll do mine:

self-funded project team of 2 ~ 300$ split between Kissmetrics, Close.io, Github, Slack, Heroku</comment>


On Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html <comment><USER2> It's a good book if you want to delve into macros and already know your way around. If you want to learn Lisp in general, then his ANSI Common Lisp makes more sense. It's pretty much every Lisper's gospel when it comes to one style of coding. [http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html)

It's not available for free, but there are 2 chapters for the sampling, and it is well worth the price to have on your shelf.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, the definitive CL macro book for free.</comment>


LinkedIn in FISA court [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/misc-13-07-motion-for-declaratory-judgement-LinkedIn-130917.pdf

<comment><USER2> The federal system of justice doesn't generally work like this. Except where specifically allowed by statute US courts don't issue declaratory judgments, and the fact that LinkedIn didn't cite any statutory authority that would give the FISA court the authority to do this is telling.

If LinkedIn wants to publish the stats they are absolutely free to do so; they just open themselves up to a lawsuit from the government. The fact that LinkedIn is filing a useless motion instead of publishing the stats sends the message that this is more about PR than results.

<comment><USER3> i completely agree. if all companies just would not comply, bow down and lick boots, they'd either all get sued or some awakening would take place. i'm pessimistic but i'd say the latter is most likely. the awakening might even happen through all those law suits which would overwhelm the courts and just be rejected.

"the problem is not disobedience. the problem is obedience."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too little? Too late?

<comment><USER5> Better late than never.

<comment><USER6> "Better" does not necessarily even mean "adequate".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it a good idea putting PostgreSQL inside container? - <AUTHOR>

most of the performance tips include putting PostgreSQL (or any DB) outside the application server, but is it a good idea to deploy PG inside OpenVZ/Docker containers in one server? And what is the your best performance tips/links for tuning PG. Most of the articles advise using XFS for PG, how does it compares to EXT4 in SSD vs XFS in SSD <comment><USER2> No containers. No virtual machines without hardware passthrough.

If you have a server where the _bios and hardware_ support VT-d/IOMMU, you can run the database in a Xen or VMware ESX VM which has a dedicated storage controller and optional dedicated NIC, via PCI passthrough to the VM. Probably a good idea to dedicate some CPU cores to that VM.

</comment><comment><USER3> Christ, why?

Containers are slower and less secure than bare metal. If you're using a puny database, use SQLite.

If you're using a real database, it should be on its own computer, in its own physical network segment, on a real OS, with no other services running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I have one server and I should utilize it as much as possible but trying to minimize performance trade-off.

<comment><USER4> Time is money. How much time are you willing to spend to make this work?

I'd spend the "time" on another dedicated box.</comment></comment></comment>


HN filtered with Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://hn.njl.us/

<comment><USER2> Video of the presentation plus an extensive discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297)</comment>


Making colorized console output with Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sosedoff.com/2010/06/01/making-colorized-console-output-with-ruby/ <comment><USER2> Just remember that this doesn't work as advertised in readline-powered output, e.g. irb.</comment>


My first game as an indie developer What do you think? - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/freaking-shapes/id905326564?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Also available on Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codemyworl...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codemyworld.freakingshapes)</comment>


Ask HN: Most difficult programming challenge you solved in 2014? - <AUTHOR>

What is your most difficult programming or software engineering challenge you done in 2014? Be it any Algorithm, Project Deadline or anything related to Software. Mine is setting up Apache Nutch along with Apache Solr and Hbase for large crawling project.<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Of everything done, doing nothing about something "so that I can be home at night" still places highest in my list of challenges with software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Correlate real time online banking traffic (5,000,000 hits a day) with multiple threat intelligence feeds fraud data to deliver real time security alerts within 10 seconds of suspicious online activity.

<comment><USER4> What's the next step after a security alert is delivered (i.e. does it go to a person first? does it get written down somewhere? are these bells constantly ringing?)? I promise I'm not a bad guy :)

<comment><USER3> The special care is taken to avoid alert blindness (i.e. too many similar alerts inevitably cause ignorance syndrome). I made a human study to make sure the timing of alert is enough to keep centinel's attention sharp, yet no important information event is missed.

The big picture - the action is taken to protect possibly compromised client's bank account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most difficult project I have solved (just finishing up the implementation) is developing a monitoring solution for a bunch of legacy telephone PBX's.

Essentially, the bureaucratic overhead for getting a bunch of companies to open their firewalls to us was unfeasible. Long story short, I ended up hijacking the SSL/VPN generated by a running JVM to forward a bunch of SNMP/OSSI-polling traffic to our api.

At the end, after implementing the above, I found out about a service port for outgoing only traffic offered to business partners. That was much easier to use, only requiring nginx to split off a certain sub-path of SSL traffic + business partner status.

I am still proud of the original hack, although brittle and ugly it was very exciting to get working.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wrote a automation script which keep track of server process and recover them on failure</comment>


New social networking site devoted to global music. Comments? Suggestions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vizions.com <comment><AUTHOR> We've been developing this site for some time now and are in limited beta at the moment. We're looking for some feedback regarding the concept, functionality and overall design. Vizions.com gives its users many easy to use features and tools.

Also check out our new music search engine, www.MyMusicTracker.com, which includes some awesome intelligent searching, voting, and tracking features.</comment>


Koa11y – FOSS desktop app to detect accessibility (a11y) issues on webpages - <AUTHOR> https://open-indy.github.io/Koa11y/ <comment><AUTHOR> Happy Koalaween! We just released a new version of Koa11y. It's an easy to use program to detect accessibility issues on webpages and output a report in different formats (HTML, JSON, CSV, Markdown, XML). It's designed to be usable by less technical folks.</comment>


Multiplayer HTML5 Indie RPG Game - <AUTHOR> http://mo.ee

<comment><AUTHOR> currently we have halloween theme and 1.25x experience too!</comment>


The Future UWP - <AUTHOR> https://www.sharpgis.net/post/2019/05/14/The-future-UWP <comment><USER2> The author seems to finish the article with a recommendation. But still do not understand what it is:

"... So what should you do with all this stuff going on? Well here's my recommendation: Whether you do WPF, WinForms or UWP, if it works for you now, continue the course you're on. You can't plan for the unknown anyway, and Microsoft generally like to support things for 10 years. Whatever happens I doubt you'll be setting yourself up for failure – You might just get more options later, and definitely not less. My biggest concern right now is how the changes to WinUI is going to affect the future – especially among component vendors. .."

It seems that MS is struggling with UI framework backward compatibility. If your app compiles using more recent UI features, there is no compatibility layer that is built into your app, that would allow it to run on earlier releases of Windows.

If that's the case, it will impede WinUI 3.0 as well, in about 2-3 years.</comment>


Show HN: An alternative to Apache / Nginx config hell - <AUTHOR> Concept wireframes: https://imgur.com/a/Qyvq5HF
HN,
I've been chronically frustrated by how challenging it is to configure nginx and Apache config files.
I had the idea for a simple, intuitive interface that could automatically generate and manage htaccess and SitesAvailable files.
Does anyone think it would be worthwhile for me to build this? <comment><USER2> For NGINX I suggest checking out [https://nginxconfig.io/](https://nginxconfig.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you want to make money or help people? If the former, I'd shy away from this, as it isn't directly tied to take people with money tend to care about.

If the latter, go ahead! I'd probably be interested in it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you know caddyserver ?

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not that frustrating... just read the documentation?</comment>


Show HN: Log Stuff, from the command line or anywhere (Part2) - <AUTHOR> https://logstuff.statvoo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow on from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353719) with many new improvements.

I originally made this because I needed a tool to log things from servers with zero setup and full SSL compatibility.

Please provide suggestions and feedback if you have any.</comment>


Never underestimate how much people desire to be spoon-fed - <AUTHOR> http://charliehoehn.com/2009/12/06/feed-me/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+charliehoehn+(Hoehn%27s+Musings

<comment><USER2> It's ridiculous to me how persistently poor receipt usability is. At a minimum, this is how I would like to see my ideal receipt:

* Sales tax integrated into the dish price rather than a sum at the end (or if this is not possible, at least an indicator of what the local sales tax rate is on the receipt)

* Items split up into categories: drinks, apps, mains etc.

* A percentage tip guide on both the receipt & the credit card statement (ie: 15% = $3.45, 18% = ...)

* A form area on the back for writing out how to split across multiple credit cards

* menu prices engineered towards nice round numbers post-tip (if I get a $51 bill, I'm inclined to tip $9 to make it an even $60. If I get a $52 bill, I'm inclined to tip $8 to make it an even $60).

At most, I've seen 2 of these features on any one receipt, most receipts have 0.

I think the most trying use case receipt usability needs to accommodate for is the birthday scenario:

A group of 7 people are celebrating someone's birthday. They order drinks, apps for the table to share, everyone has a main course and 3 people have desserts. The cost of the birthday boy's meal is being split among the rest of them. there are 2 couples who are paying jointly & 3 singletons.

Such a scenario is never going to be trivial but it could be a hell of a lot less painful than it is currently.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's being spoon-fed? This would be useful when I'm out for dinner with my gaggle of Math, Physics and Engineering PhDs. Splitting the tab is rarely the most interesting conversation to be had...

<comment><USER4> I've heard that single bills are the norm in the US (I don't actually know if this is true, however), but up here in Canada this is a solved problem.

When you order, you simply tell your server who is paying for what (e.g. "separate bills", "I'm paying for her, those two are separate"). If you don't say anything, they tend to ask before giving you your bill. It's pretty simple.

<comment><USER5> That's correct, but not the whole story.

At chain restaurants in the US, we get a single bill in two inches of space and 10 inches of space with laborious instructions on how to complete their customer satisfaction survey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't like the baby bird analogy, or the use of the term "spoon-fed" here. It makes it sound as if people should be ashamed for wanting things to be simpler.

<comment><USER7> That's just your own negative connotation. The man is using short, concise and clear terms to describe a trend and it's anecdotal evidence.

Coroners shouldn't stop calling a stiff "a body" just because it sounds mortifying to you. It's what it is.

<comment><USER8> No, the word _spoon-fed_ has negative connotations of helplessness and apathy, just as _dumbed-down_ or _pointy-clicky_ have. If that kind of words come to mind, or if you think users are _lazy_ when they don't read what you write, or refuse to fill out a seven-field registration form, then you are going to design bad user experiences and your competitors will beat you.

This particular writer is probably just using it as link-bait though.

<comment><USER7> How is being an application user negative? How is being helpless negative?

Whatever you write, it solves a problem for someone somewhere. And the less work they have to do to leverage your solution, the better your solution will work for them.

Here are your many words, confusing, lengthy non-empathic. Or you could just say "spoon-feed the solution to your user".

It's about caring, not about attacking or disrespect. The negative connotations are _yours alone_ , you're still reading too much into this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> POS (restaurant cash register/ordering software) is a field particularly ripe for innovation. I suspect there isn't much conversation going on between programmers and the service industry.</comment>


How Long Should Your SaaS Software Trial Period Be? - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/how-long-free-trial/ <comment><USER2> Working a smaller shop, 30 days frequently translates to at best a day or two of actual use of a product. Given the hassle or a 30-day vs. 90-day trial, and equivalent products, I'll eliminate the short trial up fron among a set of offerings.</comment>


Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 9 – Garbage Collection - <AUTHOR> https://danilafe.com/blog/09_compiler_garbage_collection/ <comment><USER2> is there a "cpp: the good parts" book that anyone can recommend for someone who has done c/cpp a long time ago?

<comment><USER3> Bjarne Stroustrup's "A Tour of C++" ([http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html](http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html)) is close. It's a slim volume that is roughly a survey of the language as if it had begun with C++11.

<comment><USER4> I wish he'd update them (both books) for C++20 (C++2a), or even just C++17.

<comment><USER5> A Tour of C++ 2nd edition covers C++17, AFAIK.

<comment><USER6> Yes it does and also mentions parts of C++20 like concepts and modules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These blog posts are golden, thanks. I definitely will peruse them when creating my language.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know anything like this, but for an indentation-based language? Writing a Python-like parser was always hard for me, ending up with a generic INDENT/DEDENT counter mess.

<comment><USER9> You need to use the "lexer trick". While lexing your input data, instead of ignoring whitespace or producing token WS or TAB or whatever, keep track of your indents and newlines. Then it's simple to decide if it's an indent (newline followed by at least 1 more space or tab than previous, add this to your indents stack) or dedent (newline followed by the previous indent (look at your indent stack)). Then produce INDENT and DEDENT _seperate_ tokens. Once you have these tokens produced by tokenizer, it's easy to parse. Do the usual recursive descent. Source: I built my own python compiler (python->C++) as a university projects.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much this. You need a stack because an single NEWLINE might result in 2 DEDENT tokens:

        if x:
          if y:
            f()
        g()

You only need to keep track of whitespace (spaces and/or tabs) after a newline (and you can skip lines with only whitespace & comments). It's also useful to keep tracks of delimiters (like parentheses and brackets), if you want to ignore newlines/indents inside expressions (like Python).

The easiest IMO is writing a lexer using a lexer generator (Lex, Flex, ...) and outputting a NEWLINE(spaces) tokens, then have another class that keeps track of indents, parentheses, etc.

I wrote a lexer/parser combo that (1) tracks whitespace in top (file) context, (2) ignores whitespace in expressions (parentheses, [] arrays, {} records), except (3) _restarts_ indentation-tracking in _{} blocks_ (even if they're in parentheses themselves!) - now _that 's_ hard to code (and debug LOL).</comment></comment></comment>