The Last PHP PDO Library You Will Ever Need - <AUTHOR> http://leftnode.com/entry/the-last-php-pdo-library-you-will-ever-need

<comment><USER2> There are no comment on the blog, so I'm just going to put this here and hope the author sees it (as they appear to have submitted the post):

You don't want to write SQL in your controllers. It's a recipe for future pain and suffering.

\- If a second action needs the same data, it's likely that you'll end up duplicating your query. Especially if you work with other people, and they don't know about the queries that exist in all of the different actions.

\- If you change the structure of the data in the DB, you need to find every affected query, in every action. It's extremely fragile, and prone to breaking.

If you have a model, with a nice public API, that interacts with the DB, you know that you've isolated the change to just that one place. All of the controllers that call $model->some_data(); will continue to work no matter how your change your data source so long as you obey the API.

There are million different ways you can approach that, but I strongly recommend that you find one that works for you, and stick with it.

<comment><USER3> Yes , totally agree with this but I still often see people put SQL (or HSQL or whatever) into controller/view level code.

I think part of the reason for this is it appears in allot of tutorials for different web frameworks, which I think they do because it makes the code smaller and therefor their framework look simpler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amen. There's already a well-proven and quite expressive DSL for accessing data stored in a relational database: SQL.

I see that this has been submitted before, so I'll just mention it here: [http://thoughts.j-davis.com/2011/09/25/sql-the-successful- co...](http://thoughts.j-davis.com/2011/09/25/sql-the-successful-cousin-of- haskell/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for pointing to that interesting article. However, a link to the corresponding HN discussion would have been more useful, at least to me.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't very successful, 3 points and 0 comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3059460>

I found it with hnsearch, by the way.

<comment><USER5> Now it has 4 points. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Generally I agree doing SQL queries on your own. I'm also not really an ORM- Fan because it's really hard to debug and difficult queries are more difficult to construct using an ORM.

But doing your SQL Statements in the Controller is just not the way to go.. What if you need the same query on different places?

What I like about good ORMs (like Doctrine or the ActiveRecord of RoR) is the migration part. Maybe there should be a tool which only supports you in creating the tables and handling migrations.

<comment><USER7> Install Propel, define the schema and only generate migration scripts with it. Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Always good to have something like this. Throw it up on GitHub and give it a descriptive name :)

Lately I've been using RedBean ORM for my projects. It lets you write your SQL (no query builders or anything stupid), but creates tables, columns, and foreign keys on the fly.

Here's some RedBean code from one of my projects:

<http://pastebin.com/hpLB1h37>

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks interesting. I'll give it a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is so simple:

\- If you do quick ad hoc script/page - use straight sql with mysql_query

\- If you extend it - use something like PDO

\- If you build real application, you have to use Model layer. And no matter what you prefer at this point - you'd better to put everything behind Model be it PDO-based queries, some dynamic objectish query builders or full-scale ORM like DBIx::Class (sorry, this is for Perl, not very familiar with something like this in PHP. If someone know good analogs in PHP - please post links to these).

Right tool for right task - this is what important to keep in mind.

PS: Sorry, but seeing straight SQL in what looks like an action, is really hurt my eyes. If you opted for MVC framework, you'd probably want to push all SQL into model and leave meaningful calls to it.

</comment><comment><USER10> After about 10-15 years working with many different systems that one way or another store their data in a RDBMS, all I can say is that I agree with what you wrote. ORM-wed code is a nightmare, 3-5 years on. When the ORM trends have shifted to something else, and the original people who implemented it or selected the framework is long gone.

Ill take a messy system with hand coded SQL over that any day, atleast then you have a chance to refactor.

Also, its not that hard to implement a pluggable data access layer (that uses hand written SQL). The most important thing is to keep your RDBMS data model separate from your application model. These two will be intermingled when you are using a ORM, in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a fan of a hybrid approach (a few wrapper functions around PDO itself that just abstract the repetitive stuff in PDO but not the SQL, very similar to the post), and very thin ORM too.

I like a basic Model class with a few helpers that I can extend to keep my logic separated from my controllers, but that's about it. Inside any given Model method, SQL is fair game.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a fan of the recent move towards Micro-ORM's. As others have said, SQL is quite expressive and pretty easy to learn (for most things). I suspect that the reason why many app developers shy away from it is because it is set based rather than object oriented.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really enjoy Flourish's ActiveRecord model <http://flourishlib.com/docs/fActiveRecord>

It feels natural, also it let's you do SQL if you really need it.

<comment><USER14> I've been using the library for the last few months on a number of projects. It's sort of become my Swiss Army knife for PHP. It's saved me a ton of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This sentence took me several reads to parse: "I will refer to any library or framework for interacting with a database besides writing straight SQL as an ORM in this article."

Maybe it's just me. :)

<comment><USER10> But It was very informative, as he explains what he is talking about since the definition of an ORM seems to be quite different for different people.

For me it also means anything that tries to generate SQL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's exactly what I meant by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would just add a fetch_scalar() function. It makes some common operations get very readable:

$total_users = $db->fetch_scalar("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users");

<comment><AUTHOR> fetch_column() does essentially that. You can pass in the column number you want fetched, in this case, it would be the 0th column.

<comment><USER16> I know. I would at least add it as an alias to $fetch_column(0), out of sheer readability preciosism =D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in your counter arguments too. I'm sure there is some component or aspect I'm missing.

<comment><USER17> It's really all about factoring. You'll notice now that you have model logic in your controller. If you want to reuse that elsewhere, you'll first have to extract it to another class. That class is effectively a SQL generation library, except it's not useful in a general sense and it's not as well tested. The more you do this, the more you converge on reinventing a full blown ORM.

I'm not saying there aren't downsides to ORMs, but the counter-arguments to SQL in your controller are pretty obvious.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. Yes, this should be refactored and placed in a model; but that would be something like Clients::getReadMetrics() that would contain the same SQL. I don't see that heading towards a full ORM or even remotely like SQL generation.</comment></comment></comment>


Go.dev: a new hub for Go developers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.golang.org/go.dev <comment><USER2> The part I'm most excited about here is the pkg.go.dev site, which is basically a module-aware godoc.org server!

For months now, the godocs for Caddy 2 (in beta) have been inaccessible, but now you can read the godocs for every specific tag of Caddy: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com...](https://email@example.com?tab=doc)

That's really, really a game-changer in my opinion. All the trouble transitioning to modules is starting to become worth it!

<comment><USER3> In the long term, do we think godoc.org is going to go away?

<comment><USER4> Eventually, we plan to redirect godoc.org requests to the equivalent pkg.go.dev URL. We will make sure not to break godoc.org links!

<comment><USER3> Cool - This new package browser is definitely "viable", in fact it's very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is... strange? It seems go.dev is a enterprisey marketing hub (with "Solutions" and "Case Studies" and "Testimonials"), while golang.org remains the pure, text-based, engineer-focused home of the language itself.

I can't think of another language that splits its official web presence across separate domains like this. Rust (rust-lang.org), Python (python.org), Ruby (ruby-lang.org) all have sections dedicated to marketing/eduction (usually "Community" or "Success Stories" tabs), as well as hosting the language reference, documentation, and downloads.

The result sure is confusing. Why aren't the blog and playground hosted on go.dev, for example? I can only imagine this is the result of internal politics at Google; it sure smells like the Go team engineers didn't want the growing Go marketing division to corrupt golang.org.

<comment><USER6> >This is... strange? It seems go.dev is a enterprisey marketing hub (with "Solutions" and "Case Studies" and "Testimonials"), while golang.org remains the pure, text-based, engineer-focused home of the language itself.

Given that go.dev registrar is MarkMonitor and not Google itself I think is safe to assume this isn't an initiative led by Google.

<comment><USER5> No, it's an official Google project. Here is the official Google announcement by a Google employee: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- announce/OW8b...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang- announce/OW8bHSryLIc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand this at all. How is this for developers?. The first screenshot of the main page is half logos/ads for companies using go. If I'm a developer using this is meaningless to me.

The first link in the navigation "Solutions" brings you to another page that is completely filled with pointless logos of companies using go. And then if you click on one of the 4 "solutions" you get taken to ANOTHER page with company logos. I DON'T CARE!!! Get that noise out of there.

> Clicking on Explore brings you to pkg.go.dev

What?! I would have never guessed that. Why isn't the link just "Packages" then? "Explore" means nothing to me as a developer. Naming is one of the hardest problems in computer science and you already had a good name (it's in the URL!), why create another meaningless name?

As a developer I can say this web site isn't targeted at me. And to be honest, I don't know who the target is. Is it for developers who aren't go developers? Is it for go developers? As a non-go developer, this site doesn't encourage me to want to use go. And as a go developer I don't want to have to sift through meaningless marketing speak, testimonials, and company logos. I'm already using the damn language!

Can't all the company logos and testimonials be moved to a section called "Case studies" instead of being littered all over adding noise?

All I want to know is who is the target audience for this?

<comment><USER8> > All I want to know is who is the target audience for this?

I imagine these pages are intended for someone who's interested in Go but wants to know more. I know plenty of people who base their decision entirely on what companies have had the most success when picking a programming language to learn. I think these pages satisfy the questions of "Who uses Go? What do they use it for? What did their success look like afterward?"

The package explorer does add some confusion for me though. The site otherwise seems entirely geared toward people who are curious about Go.

<comment><USER7> > I imagine these pages are intended for someone who's interested in Go but > wants to know more

But the title literally says "a new hub for Go developers".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I appreciate the design and marketing effort, but the split between golang.org and go.dev, and godoc.org and pkg.go.dev, is confusing. Newcomers may wonder what is the official website.

</comment><comment><USER10> pkg.go.dev has no apparent way to browse the standard packages that I can see, just this awfully useless split between popular packages and featured packages, both of which are never useful to me if I want to discover what's in the standard library or what's out in external packages that solves certain problems. Search is an abysmal user experience here. Discoverability should take priority.

<comment><USER4> You can view the list of standard library packages at [https://pkg.go.dev/std?tab=packages](https://pkg.go.dev/std?tab=packages).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a number of fronts, I appreciate this.

When I was first assessing whether to get into Go, and as a team lead whether it would be fit for future efforts, some of the questions answered on this site were some of the first I queried to see if the investment was worth it i.e.

Why would I use this? Who is using this? What are they using it for? If I introduce this to my teams as a potential member of our stack, am I introducing something that will be niche and hard for others to pick up and maintain, or will this have multiple applications and thus foster greater adoption?

I obviously could find the answers elsewhere and have since chosen Go for a lot of cases, but a clean one-stop-shop like this for others to look to, or be pointed to, when they first hear of the language is valuable (from my experience, and in my opinion).

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me or it really resembles the rust-lang.org?

<comment><USER13> Seems just you. I find color scheme and layout quite different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did they change their logo recently? Never noticed it before - it's pretty terrible imo; looks like something out of the 80s and doesn't inspire me to use Go at all...

<comment><USER15> April 26th, 2018 — the new logo was released publicly 566 days ago [1].

People didn't like it much [2]; it gathered mixed comments in the Gophers Slack group.

[1] [https://blog.golang.org/go-brand](https://blog.golang.org/go-brand)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/8f5n19/go- brand/](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/8f5n19/go-brand/)</comment></comment>


I'm Back - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/04/im-back/

<comment><USER2> Serious question: how does the presence of MG+MA add real credibility to any event?</comment>


UK Hosting provider accidentally deletes all customers websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/18/123reg_titsup_customer_vpss_gone/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also on the BBC - [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36072240](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36072240)

</comment><comment><USER2> Uhm, Is this another hoax or just perfect timing with the rm -rf server fault hoax?

<comment><AUTHOR> This one appears to be real</comment></comment>


Asymmetric numeral systems (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540 <comment><USER2> I once found a really great article explaining arithmetic encoding¹, and I felt I understood what was going on and managed to re-implement the article's example from MS-DOS-era C to modern Python, but when I tried to use it for anything else it didn't work and I wasn't smart enough to debug it.

The claim that asymmetric numeral systems are simpler than arithmetic encoding is quite interesting, but as a working programmer, I have difficulty with the academic language and mathematical generality used in papers like this. Does anybody have a more approachable explanation of what's going on?

¹: [http://marknelson.us/1991/02/01/arithmetic-coding- statistica...](http://marknelson.us/1991/02/01/arithmetic-coding-statistical- modeling-data-compression/)

<comment><USER3> Here are explanations of various people:

[http://www.ezcodesample.com/abs/abs_article.html](http://www.ezcodesample.com/abs/abs_article.html)

[http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2014/02/02-18-14-understandi...](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2014/02/02-18-14-understanding- ans-conclusion.html)

[http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/finite-state- entr...](http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/finite-state-entropy-new- breed-of.html) (Yann Collet, he has many posts)

[https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/rans- notes/](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/rans-notes/)

interactive simulator: [http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DataCompressionUsingAsymme...](http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DataCompressionUsingAsymmetricNumeralSystems/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It points to even older paper for ANS: [http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3861](http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3861)

The more recent one is: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540](http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540)

The first one is about kind of multidimensional analogue of Fibonacci coding ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_coding) )- on a lattice, such that there cannot be two neighboring '1's. It also uses an interesting concept of Maximal Entropy Random Walk.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, we updated the link to the newer version.</comment></comment>


A turning point for GNU libc - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/488847/cb91a5cc3d179f3c/ <comment><USER2> > The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor > applications deal with the kernel directly.

The amount of complexity in a modern libc, glibc in particular, is mind- boggling.

One thing I love about Go is that it completely bypasses even libc, the Go runtime and stdlib use syscalls directly(well, except on Windows, for obvious reasons), in a way a Go program is "closer to the metal" than a C program.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Go with its mandatory GC is about as appropriate for systems programming as Java, regardless of how its marketed...

<comment><USER4> For the more traditional definitions of "systems programming", yes. I would agree with that.

However I don't think anybody is really marketing Go for that niche.

<comment><USER5> Originally they were targeting "systems programming", and, being roughly the contemporary of the most well-known go authors, "systems programming" used to mean compilers, assemblers, and the like. In this meaning, this would also include browsers, although Mozilla is going for Rust.

Today, "systems programming" is more taken to mean "kernel programming", and I don't get the sense that is what was meant by the senior authors of go.

<comment><USER6> I always believed "system programming" meant "programming operating system components or the whole operating system" and Wikipedia seems to agree:

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

Last time I looked, inside of the Go libraries which had to do some tricky things there was some C code, meaning that even Go authors weren't able to write everything in Go. So Go can't be a substitute for C, and as long as most of the system programming is done in C, no go for Go.

<comment><USER7> That's like saying C is not a system programming language because if you write a kernel you need to write parts of it in assembly, and you need to write parts of libc in assembly as well!

Parts of the runtime are written in C and assembly, but that's because there is power in breaking abstractions: <http://research.swtch.com/goabstract>

As it stands today, Go can be used to write operating systems. Yes, you will have assembly, yes you will likely also have C, so what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the news here should be "lots of normal people are still surprised that the FOSS movement is littered with uncooperative sperglords everywhere you look".

The deeper and more complex a project, the higher my expectation for this type of behavior. I imagine a big venn diagram of "manages ultra-complex software in use by millions" and "social skills". Linus, of course, being the shining counterexample.

Seriously though, anyone familiar with FOSS projects should be entirely unsurprised by this. If you think I'm joking, go read some of Stallman's rants or peruse esr's "how to have sex" faq.

<comment><USER9> sperglords is a term i plan to use in the future.

(i think you mean a disjoint venn diagram)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These links (not mine) may help explain a lot to those who may be unfamiliar with Ulrich: <http://urchin.earth.li/~twic/Ulrich_Drepper_Is_A_.html>

<comment><USER11> Sweet Jesus, things like this really illustrate some dark corners of free software development:

<http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980>

Where the high-publicity trolling in the later part of the discussion is even worse than Uli's initial stubborness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is eglibc likely to merge into glibc?

I was under the impression that one of the reasons Debian moved from glibc to eglibc was friction with the project maintainer.

<comment><USER13> From what I've been reading, there will be efforts to remerge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are you sure you should be submitting "LWN subscriber-only content"?

It seems like they might not be too happy about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check my account name against the author of the article :)

I appreciate your concern. I do occasionally post a subscriber link in a place like HN or reddit with the idea of sharing some useful news and making people aware of what we do. So you shouldn't be worrying about me abusing the LWN subscriber link mechanism (which I implemented in the first place); instead, you should worry about my shameless and transparent marketing efforts :)

<comment><USER15> Could you please comment on the appropriateness of other subscribers sharing a link like this?

Within certain bounds - glibc being a good example - the general interest in the article might justify its widespread use.

I would hazard a guess that for the majority of articles, LWN would prefer subscriber links be kept relatively "out of public circulation."

Thanks!

<comment><USER16> Keep in mind that the content stays behind the paywall for 1 week before non- subscribers can access it. So unless a paid subscriber is posting links to every single article, I don't think it's that much of an issue for LWN.

So given that it's really only subscribers-only for about 24 hours more(the original article was posted on March 28th, I don't think that LWN cares all that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Also significant is the fact that Ulrich left Red Hat in September, 2010; ...he is now VP, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs."

For me this is the punch line to the story. I wonder how he's liking wearing a shirt and tie to the office.

<comment><USER18> If I remember his temperament correctly, he'll love it on Wall Street. He'll have an entire division to yell at.</comment></comment>


Composer & Symfony & Buzz - Oh, My - <AUTHOR> http://codebyjeff.com/blog/2013/04/composer-symfony-buzz-oh-my

<comment><AUTHOR> More exciting title than "Creating an extensible API wrapper with Symfony OptionResolver components and the Buzz curl library", which is what it is really about.

Php coding, a medium to advanced level of experience probably required</comment>


Google Brain Residency Program - <AUTHOR> http://g.co/brainresidency <comment><USER3> Given questionable academia politics, low to non-existent pay for PhD candidates as TAs, grants being mostly consumed by the school, profs acting as middle managers rather than true mentors, race to the bottom for quantity over quality of papers because of desperate PhD qualifications in order to then jump start careers (not to mention wasteful research for the sake of a PhD badge)...I think this is a great initiative.

<comment><USER4> Such examples and on one of those grad forums and other places like Reddit about how horrible and how political grad programs are (I mean PhD mostly) I must say it added a lot to my decision of not trying for a PhD (maybe ever).

Is it an accepted environment in academia by now and very widely known and people still go for the same environment? Or people, students, don't know how it is actually there, or the severity of it, and then kind of get trapped because of that mild ignorance, so to speak? Or, is it just the hope that - <USER2> that place cannot be that bad? Or is it really not this widespread as people make it out to be, or as it seems to be (to me at least)? Just curious (I'm not a grad school guy; just an MS aspirant who also wanted to do a PhD but now not).

<comment><USER5> _Or, is it just the hope that - oh that place cannot be that bad? Or is it really not this widespread as people make it out to be, or as it seems to be (to me at least)? Just curious_

I did my PhD in The Netherlands. I had an awesome time, both professionally and socially. I worked with great people, had a great social life, and wasn't paid badly (for Dutch standards).

Afterwards, I was in industry for a short time. Upside: people directly use what you create. Downside: in most companies (outside Google, Microsoft Research, etc.) urgent customer demands prevail over research time.

Given the relatively negative experiences I went to academia again (this time in Germany), and am enjoying it a lot: enough time to work out and test ideas, I enjoy teaching a lot, regular travel, a reasonable pay, and not much overtime.

I might explore the other side of the fence again when my current position ends, but I am happy where I am.

<comment><USER6> May I ask your language abilities? Would a route like this work for people who don't speak Dutch/German?

<comment><USER5> I am a native speaker of Dutch and proficient in English. My German reading and understanding is quite good, since I had German in high school, but speaking had regressed to a 'can manage at the bakery'-level ;).

Both groups I worked in had a fair amount of people who couldn't speak Dutch/German --- for research it's definitely not a problem. In teaching it seems that The Netherlands (and probably Scandinavian countries) is more flexible: non-native speakers are typically allowed to teach in English. In Germany, this seems more problematic unless it's an international program.

Outside work, I would definitely recommend expats in Germany to learn German. Most Germans are not really proficient in English (not even general practitioners). In The Netherlands you could easily survive without knowing Dutch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At what point does it make sense for Google-likes to educate their own workforce, skipping the university model entirely? They've already created a B.A. substitute by sponsoring Udacity's nanodegree programs, and now they're working on the other end of the spectrum with a masters / PhD equivalent.

Assume these companies have an excellent selection process (obviously a big 'if'). Could they pluck bright students straight out of high school, send them to two years of specialized super-accelerated Google School, and have a molded and productive employee come out the other side? They have the resources and the expertise, and there's only so many Stanford grads each year.

A workforce of bootcamp devs sounds unpleasant - but with skyrocketing tuition costs, and ever-increasing demand for 'only the best' talent at these companies, there's probably a point at which it makes economic sense for both employer and employee.

<comment><USER8> Would it be possible for companies to eventually become accredited?

Or, alternatively, would the preponderance of nanodegree programs and "Google Schools" diminish the value of a traditional degree to the point that accreditation would be unnecessary?

<comment><USER9> I agree that the increasing investment and quality of alternative higher education models will diminish the role of traditional accreditation agencies to some degree. However, there will always be some need for some third-party oversight to ensure educational institutions are delivering what they advertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I stopped here: The residency program is similar to a top Master's or PhD program in deep learning.

If you accept that a Master's program is contained within a PhD program, and this residency is similar to a PhD program in deep learning from a top school, then this would be the fastest PhD-like (revised from equivalent which is too strong of a claim) program ever. Only 12 months and a google badge!

<comment><USER11> I submit the connections at Google are unbelievable. It seems reasonable that you could in fact learn substantially faster in that environment. I don't know if you can cram 6-7 years into one, but maybe in 2-3.

<comment><USER12> A PhD isn't so much about learning the material as it is about learning to manage and complete projects. Your job is to identify unsolved problems, come up with ideas to solve them, and carry it through to a few completed research projects. Depending on your field, a lot of this can become more managing logistics and people than "pure" research.

In my experience (which, admittedly, has only involved much less flexible corporations than Google), you don't get to the level of responsibility you have as a PhD student or postdoc until you've been with a large corporation for >20 years.

I admit I have a slightly skewed view, but I've very skeptical that this is anywhere close to a complete PhD program.

It looks a lot more like a 1-year internship on an R&D team. Still a very good and useful thing, but you're not the one responsible for completion of projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The post doesn't indicate whether residents will be paid like PhD students or like Google employees.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the title, I thought the Google Brain Residency Program was the wetware version of Google Glass. Disappointing to find it's only a 12-month software development job.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is fantastic! Though it's not clear how much product/service engineering is required.

<comment><USER16> It seems to be listed as a software engineering position (and are likely paid through the same construct, since participants are required to be eligible for work in the US). I would think they are paid as entry level software engineers, but that's all conjecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is going to be a deal breaker for many: Eligible to work in the United States

<comment><USER18> very true, but am not very sure what it means. You think one can apply for a visa especially for someone who has never been to the United States before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know if this will this be a recurring program? As in beyond 2016?

<comment><USER20> Probably depends on the performance of the initial resident. :)

<comment><USER21> Did you write "resident", as in implying there's only one position?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Minimum qualifications: eligible to work in the United States. Damn.

<comment><USER23> just to clarify does that mean you should already have a work permit, or eligible to apply for the common visa's? I would expect the first but i couldn't find any clear definition in the past since it changed from case to case

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are people currently doing their PhD eligible for the program? Thx

</comment><comment><USER25> So, What about after the program?</comment>


Why Women Choose Differently at Work - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/why-women-choose-differently-at-work <comment><USER2> Tunisian female here. The answer is simple for Tunisian women. The highest paying jobs are in Engineering and Medicine and all of the other jobs are miserable. That combined with a free-ish education where you can choose any field, makes the choice obvious.

I personally see the lack of women in STEM in Western countries as a good thing, it means that they are doing well economically and don't have to deal with the tedious STEM education and workload.

<comment><USER3> The article makes exactly that point:

"I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can "live a good life" while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, "However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there...""

<comment><USER4> Even being a medical doctor means having a very good life, I wouldn't go for it in a million years.

I have a blog and a youtube channel that talks about raspberry pi, open source, embedded, and other programming projects that I do for fun in my spare time. I checked the youtube stats yesterday and my female audience was 0% (not rounded down, it was 0.0% according to Youtube) among about 10K people who watched them last week - globally. When I had google analytics on my site, it reported the same thing. Because my channel is new and no one knows whether I am a sexist person or not, so we can safely filter out the reputation problem. Also, I have a foreign name so people can't guess my gender by looking at my name. I think that anyone who watches my video has to be curious about what I do, not because they are used to me talking in a certain way.

Now my channel is a small sample, but I have a feeling that not many girls find tech (or at least what I do) fun and appealing the current way it is while many boys do. So it's just about an opportunity, money and job and whatnot as it is a hobby, a thing to have fun with that attracts certain demographic to a profession.

<comment><USER5> Well... how do you think Google Analytics guesses whether or not a person is male or female? It uses a machine learning algorithm based on browsing habits, and "views Youtube videos about technology/open source/Raspberry Pi" is a feature that is strongly weighted towards maleness.

<comment><USER6> I'm a woman in tech. Google used to have a page somewhere where it told you what it assumed about you from your habits. It was 100% confident that I was male until I started searching for pregnancy stuff all the time.

<comment><USER7> Also a woman in tech. A while back I checked my profile. It thought I we was a man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think what's really missing from the discussion is the simple fact that if creative jobs (artist, writer) or less technical jobs paid as well as Soft Eng jobs then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Alternatively, we wouldn't be having this discussion if our society did not largely judge a man's success in life by his wealth (and the things money can buy, like a nice car).

I guess what I'm saying is that, if I had the choice, I would rather be a sculptor making the same salary as a Senior Soft Eng than an engineer at a large company. Too bad our society isn't set up like that, eh?

<comment><USER9> > I think what's really missing from the discussion is the simple fact that if > creative jobs (artist, writer) or less technical jobs paid as well as Soft > Eng jobs then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

That's largely a function of markets. You make it sound like it's a policy of some kind, or some kind of social problem that needs fixing. Also, you yourself are guilty of exaggerating the value of money.

> Alternatively, we wouldn't be having this discussion if our society did not > largely judge a man's success in life by his wealth (and the things money > can buy, like a nice car).

Who's judging you? Some people might, but what do you care? Associate with people that value similar things, not with people whose highest values are cars and money.

> I guess what I'm saying is that, if I had the choice, I would rather be a > sculptor making the same salary as a Senior Soft Eng than an engineer at a > large company.

Again with the money. If you want to be a sculptor, be a sculptor.

> Too bad our society isn't set up like that, eh?

Set up? Nothing is "set up". You seem to be living under the impression that there's this abstract looming thing called "society" that lords over the affairs of man, and that you are this lone ego occupying its center. Society is the set of individual human beings in a network of a variety of relationships. Money doesn't fall from the sky. Who's going to pay you for your sculptures? Are people supposed to pay you just so _you_ can do what you want, market demand be damned?

(Btw, some sculptors make ludicrous amounts of money. Many probably make okay money, though apparently the avg. salary for sculptors, painters and illustrators in Delaware is the same as the average for software engineers.)

<comment><USER10> > Who's judging you? Some people might, but what do you care?

Women do and I care because I like sex. When you have a luxury downtown apartment with a view and a sports car, it's playing the game on easy mode.

<comment><USER11> Why do you want to waste your time with the kind of woman who would only speak to you if you have a luxury downtown apartment and sports car if you don't want those things for yourself? Sounds like a recipe for resentment and unhappiness. Why not aim to have sex with women whose values more align with your own?

\- A woman who earns more than her husband

<comment><USER12> The type of women I attracted tend to be type A and career oriented. I think they are the ones who want to be with someone with aligned values. Maybe they see material wealth as a signal for career success?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another way to look at the same question: Why are there so many males in these fields?

My one data point: I'm basically in it for the money. In fact the state, through child support enforcement, made it very clear that at least in my case, the meaning of my life is and shall be, to earn as much money as possible to support the children. If I had a spouse supporting me, I would probably be doing something fun and artistic. (Not that there aren't fun and artistic elements in my work sometimes. And not that there aren't elements of methodical discipline required to be a good artist.)

<comment><USER14> Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I wanted to ask your opinion since you're in a similar state to me. For my first marriage I felt like my wife was with me and part of building my career. So I felt no pause whatsoever about our differing pay scale. Now that I've been divorced 6-ish years differential income is one of my biggest hurdles. I feel like virtually any long term relationship I'm in will mean significantly subsidizing someone. From an economic standpoint there's so very few options where we're on an even footing. And frankly, women who make the same as me are likely going to be looking for mates who make even more. It's made it very difficult to find a relationship I feel is equitable and/or equally beneficial to us both. I've tried to "get over it" but haven't been able to. Women are fine, but women + the state is terrifying to me. Now I have a daughter to protect my assets for. Have you struggled with any of the same things?

<comment><USER11> >women who make the same as me are likely going to be looking for mates who make even more

I'm wondering why you make that assumption? I'm asking as a woman who earns more than her husband. This hasn't matched my experience AT ALL from talking to other women either.

<comment><USER15> As a male in his early thirties, who have been to several OKCupid dates, I can tell you that you are in a minority because you seem not to care much about your partner's earning power. Among the women I've met in those dates, at least 1 out of 3 will start conversation to find out how much I make in the first two or three dates; almost all of them will ask that question by the fifth date. I already wrote in my profile that I'm a programmer, so they could guess I make a decent amount of money. Still, they seem to be interested in finding out more about my income.

I, on the other hand, start to become very self-conscious about my income level and wonder whether it is too low sometimes. I also have a close friend whose girlfriend broke up with him after dating for >5 years because he was just a mere accountant (making just about 70k at the time) and she, after grad school, got a six-figure job as a risk analyst at a big bank. She said to him that she wanted a more ambitious man who can support her and make sure they can afford a nice house with a yard and a nice car. That's the reality most men have to deal with.

<comment><USER16> I had a very similar problem with an abusive ex-. She tried to bully me into starting a business in an area I was (am) totally unsuited for (when I was too young to be doing anything like that anyway), as well as studying for a career that she felt would earn "enough" money, all while helping herself to my bank account. She also spent up big on several occasions, and then came crying to me when the debt collectors came knocking. I was young and naive, so I think you can see how that ended up.

She eventually left me because I wasn't trying hard enough to please her; I was studying from 8am to 5pm, then working until 9pm, and she wanted me to stop eating lunch for several months so I could smother her with roses. I suggested that she should go f __k herself because I was working 13 hours a day plus catching up on study at weekends while she did four hours on a Sunday if she felt like it, so she wandered off with .. well, a pile of my furniture and equipment, plus a few grand from my bank account and my one (emergencies only) credit card, as well as my overdraft, all of which took me a few years to pay back.

I sure that not all women are like this, and I wonder if the masculine version of this is the trophy wife. Most of the women I've known have been the opposite. Maybe you could adjust your profile in some way to discourage that sort of approach?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a quick read of the actual paper (after seeing it covered much more thoroughly in The Atlantic last month). Two things that leapt out at my fairly untrained eyes are that the correlations are really weak, and there was no attempt to account for other factors which vary across the world.

If you look at the scatter plots and (visually, unscientifically!) pull out subsets of countries in the same region (southeast Asia, the nordics, mediterranean Europe, southeast Europe, etc), there appears to be no correlation between general equality and STEM bias. For example, Vietnam has about the same level of inequality as Thailand, but 50% more women STEM graduates. That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play. I could be completely wrong about that - but i didn't see anything in the paper which rules it out. Please do correct me if i missed it - it was a quick read, i'm not a social scientist, and i have a cold.

<comment><USER18> > That makes me suspect that there's some other factor at play.

That gender preferences explain much of the STEM gender gap is worth reporting on, as the article does, because it's not well known. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors, which of course there are.

Susan Pinker even addresses the larger issue very specifically:

> Q: Are these differences the result of biological or cultural differences? > A: I think that both play a role. It's simplistic and scientifically untrue > to say it's one or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"If we focus our telescope on what men have traditionally valued, which is high-income and STEM jobs and long work-hours, say over 60 or 70 hours a week, then yes, women are not there, at 50 /50, and I don't think they will ever be—even if we had the most gender-neutral society possible. But if we aim our lens on lifespan, career satisfaction, and close personal relationships nurtured over decades—relationships that have been shown to protect cognition, resilience, and immunity—then men, on average, trail well behind women. If men want to live longer, happier lives, they have a lot of catching up to do. It all depends on the outcomes you value most."_

It's extremely refreshing to see this discussed. It seems intersectional feminism is laser focused on prioritizing career and monetary success and nothing else. There's so much more to life than spending your life earning a paycheck. Raising a healthy family, building a community and many other non- career based objectives seem entirely missing from the conversation. Instead the goal seems to be everyone becoming an office worker and mass consumer. I'd love to see other dimensions recognized as success.

<comment><USER20> i dunno, i would argue that people generally do see these other things as successes. its just that paychecks are much more easily quantifiable/comparable that leads to a skew in emphasis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If given the choice people will usually pick the field they find interesting. If however you live in an impoverished country where getting a job in a STEM field could be the ticket out, you are way more likely to consider picking those fields. My (original) country is rather poor for example, but the education is free and a lot of people in college that were studying with me picked EE & CS just because it could give them a good paying job, they didn't care about the field nor did they in most cases enjoy it all that much, those who didn't change their mindset usually didn't graduate or it took them more because they were forcing themselves, anyhow in those living conditions the male to female ratio in STEM fields was always close to 1 : 1. But that might not be the case were OP lives, because in a rich country people get to choose with far less pressure and in the end it still holds true that most girls just don't find those fields to be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER22> I came here prepared to rant on the ridiculousness of typical modern journalistic attempts at explaining gender gaps while avoiding the taboo of biological influence.

This was a refreshing, relatively balanced perspective. I'm glad to see an article acknowledging both nature and nurture, and not blindly insisting that all differences are purely social constructs.

<comment><USER12> Whenever people want to discuss nature along with nurture, I'm reminded of what Neil Degrasse Tyson said about biological influence on gender roles in science.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Mwtkod_VM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> All: some comments below were originally replies to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442), a WSJ op-ed by the same author. We merged the two threads.

So, for example, if you see quotes that aren't in the OP, it's because they came from the other OP.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Given that there's an overall female advantage in school—one largest in language courses, smallest in math courses, according to the paper—why isn't there a corresponding advantage, in terms of pay and high-powered positions, for females later, at work?"

Maybe simply because the workplace has nothing to do with how school is organized?

<comment><USER19> There's definitely some truth to this. In my experience sales and negotiation skills play a huge part in compensation. I don't recall those ever being taught in school. Also basic financial management is sorely lacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "But when they examined individual students' strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys' strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided—a finding that confirms several previous studies.

If boys chose careers based on their own strengths—the approach usually suggested by parents and guidance counselors—they would be most likely to land in a STEM discipline or another field drawing on the same sorts of skills. Girls could choose more widely, based on their own strengths."

</comment><comment><USER25> And for a decade I had to swallow the "explanation" that men CONSPIRED to put women out of STEAM jobs... Who's gonna reimburse me?

<comment><USER26> What's more infuriating is that this explanation persisted in spite of women's gains in the fields of psychology, law, and medicine, just to name a few. The idea that computer science men perpetrated some special and successful conspiracy against women in their field that doctors and lawyers were unable to do in their field is so patently ridiculous as to be on the level of flat earthers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What does the income to children ratio look like for men and women? E.g. how does each extra dollar earned effect the number of children that men versus women can expect to have?

<comment><USER28> If you use education as a proxy for salary, more education for the man predicts slightly fewer children, but more education for the woman predicts _significantly_ fewer children. [https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational- attainmen...](https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2011/01/educational-attainment- and-fecundity-in.html)

<comment><USER27> I don't think educational attainment would be a good proxy. A lot of the best jobs, like CEO or hedge fund manager, don't require even a college degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For the same reason why there are more female kindergarten teachers than male ones. Equal distribution of gender across jobs is nonsense, equal opportunity is welcome though (see Scandinavian countries)

<comment><USER30> Do you really mean "equality of opportunity?" It seems self-evident that the term requires substitutability: someone would have the same experience going into STEM if you switched around the gender.

My recollection of engineering school was that the experience was not substitutable. The five women in a class did not have the same experience as the 45 men. For example, as a man I never tried to make a professional connection with someone, but then realized that they wanted a date instead.

<comment><USER31> It doesn't seem that way to me at all. Surely, we need to optimize for population-level happiness or something like it, and it hardly seems evident that this is compatible with optimizing for identical experiences. Besides, who is to say that "professional loneliness" is worse than the "personal loneliness" that your male cohorts experience? Do women generally want to trade easy access to optimal partners to avoid the tedium of negotiating relationship ambiguity? Even if they do want that, are they taking for granted the current balance (all groups are prone to think the grass on the other side is greener, after all). Are women even worse off overall in the first world? Men are more likely to be victims of almost every kind of violence, to be falsely convicted, to die younger, to die at the workplace, to lose child custody battles, to pay more in divorces, drafted into war, etc. Are these issues overall better than the issues women have to deal with? Is it safe to assume that the epistemological institutions charged with answering these questions (the media and social sciences) are trustworthy, given that they skew hard to one side of the political spectrum?

I really don't know the answer, but I'm disappointed that these questions are so rarely broached in national debate. It seems like the epistemological institutions (universities, newsrooms, etc) responsible for addressing these questions prefer to ignore these questions and impugn the moral credentials of anyone who tries to answer them (if indeed these questions are invalid, surely an explanation would be more effective and expedient than an inquisition).

<comment><USER32> When it comes to happiness, it is really interesting the choices people make.

Thought experiment: in an ideal world, what is the preference that leads to 100/0 split in career choice? By that I mean in an ideal world, by how much does someone have to prefer career A over career B before there is a 100% chance people choose A? At an 80-20 preference for A, surely 100% of people choose A - why would you choose B when you overwhelmingly prefer A? But what about 60-40? Of even 51-49?

Unlike say eating lunch, where you have 300 odd per year, which means you can have Thai 200 times, Italian 100 and other things the rest, given how costly most careers are to establish - University is time AND money, and progressing the career ladder is time - I think a rather small preference, closer to 51-49 than than 60-40, is going to lead, in an ideal world, to 100-0 A over B. Because why would anyone choose a lesser preference?

In an unideal world, where the cost of in income over a lifetime is large, job prospects limited and risks of failing large, preference will be negated, muted or reversed. In an ideal world, that tiny preference is going to really matter.

TL;DR Happiness is as much a measure of what you can reasonably choose from as what you actually choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One thing that bothers me is that fact that STEM degrees are consistently more difficult. Sure, there's a lot to learn, and the amount has increased as we've moved forward, but the same should be true of an English major. There has been an explosion of writing and more than ever to learn about.

It feels like we must be letting the liberal arts majors down by setting lower expectations.

<comment><USER34> Expectations are in relation with the money involved.

Even in engineering for instance, mechanical engineering was way more strict and difficult than CS, as screwing up industrial machines or physical artifacts (at school and on the job) had a bigger impact than bugs in a CRUD app.

I think as long as the English course is not directly linked to an activity that costs to screw up, (like law school for instance) expectations won't change.

<comment><USER33> That's true in the case of English, but some of the "easy" majors tend to include things like business and teaching, where you directly get responsibility for other people. If the knowledge has value, we should be trying to cram it in, but we don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if Google would ever bring the author of this book on to their campus for a talk about some of the biological differences between the sexes? I'd love to be in the audience for that presentation.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is an interview with Susan Pinker. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442) is an op-ed by Susan Pinker. I'm going to merge these threads as soon as I've eaten breakfast. Which article is better?

Edit: the Nautilus article wins. We moved most comments from the other thread hither.

<comment><USER36> WSJ article can be read at [https://outline.com/7vHrgS](https://outline.com/7vHrgS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My impression is that in the West, there used to be more women in computer science (than there are now) at least until sometime in the 80s, if not a bit later.

<comment><USER38> In the current climate, I'd suggest approaching such data with a pinch of salt. Historically, computer work originated in Electrical Engineering field. Dedicated Computer Science departments appeared later on. It is entirely possible that focusing on "people with Computer Science degrees in the '70s" to give a skewed perspective of the period workplace demographics.

<comment><USER37> There are a number of articles on this theme from 2014. Here's one: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when- women-stopped-coding)

<comment><USER38> Pinch of salt. The data for electrical engineering is conspicuously missing. Furthermore, the article mentions two universities, Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. The CMU CS department was founded in 1988 [0] and JHU CS was founded in 1986 [1]. The article claims peak female ratio of enrollment in CS in 1984, before at least two prestigious CS departments were even founded.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Comp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Computer_Science)

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/](https://www.facebook.com/pg/jhuengineering/about/)

Edit. The NPR article [2] links to the raw NSF data [3].

        EE gender data for 1984:
        BS,  M: 19,252 F: 2,289
        MS,  M:  5,081 F:   438
        PhD, M:    579 F:    14

        CS gender data for 1984:
        BS,  M: 20,369 F: 12,066
        MS,  M:  4,379 F:  1,811
        PhD, M:    258 F:     37

EE BS male enrollment drops from 19k in 1984 to 10k in 2010, while CS BS male enrollment increases from 20k in 1984 to 32k in 2010, as if part of highly male dominated EE departments, about 10k, changed affiliation to CS.

We can also observe a decline in CS BS female enrollment, from 12k in 1984 [peaking at 15k in 1986, 2003, 2004] to 7k in 2010. Unclear what the causes are, but we can't dismiss the shifts in CS meaning itself that happens during this period. Alas, in the current climate, it is unlikely we can have an unbiased public analysis of this trend.

[2] [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when- women-stopped-coding)

[3] [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4...](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4266&id=2)

<comment><USER37> > Alas, in the current climate, it is unlikely we can have an unbiased public > analysis of this trend.

Presumably, like most phenomena, it involves a variety of factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Do we really have to discuss this every single week? It's the same thing over and over.

</comment><comment><USER40> The best theory is based on the fact that males can have an unlimited number of children while females can only have one every nine months.

Hence, being an extremely sexually successful male is much more rewarding for the propagation of their genes than being an extremely sexually successful female.

Thus, males evolved to take more risks than females since there is a much bigger payoff for them: if a male can become an "omnipotent king" he can father children with every woman and spread his genes a lot, while a female "omnipotent queen" still can only make one child for every nine months.

Hence, males have more variance, meaning that the top in any field are very likely to be males, but also there are going to be much more men who are extremely unsuccessful.

This also means that women are probably better off on average, since psychological (as opposed to genetic-propagation-related) utility is logarithmic and thus reducing variance is advantageous for the individual.

<comment><USER41> Even though the stereotype of STEM is single men who cannot get dates? That does not sound like "omnipotent king", but it does sound like a story we might tell ourselves.

<comment><USER12> As someone who grabbed coffee with women who churned through a lot of coffee dates with dudes from Amazon, I concur. My current partner had 3-4 coffee dates lined back to back every weekend. Other girls told me similar stories. I could tell when someone tried to slot me into one of her slots and I didn't appreciate it. My buddy in SF went through the same thing. Single women are so efficient in tech dominated areas like the Silicon Valley and Seattle.

PS one of the most entertaining things to do is grab the girl's phone and read through the messages on her dating app. We men write some hilariously shitty messages. None of us are becoming an omnipotent king anytime soon.

<comment><USER42> Here's an idea: Don't invade someone's privacy like that.

<comment><USER12> Lol we are laughing about it together. Or do you mean the poor omnipotent Kings? In all fairness there is probably some poor gal out there mocking my bad tinder lines too. One even sent me a reply asking if my stupid line ever worked on anyone. That may have happened more than once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can't read the article (paywall), so in classic HN style I'll just comment on the title.

The NSF keeps track of "Science and Engineering Degrees" in higher-education in the US, which basically translates to STEM degrees [0]. Assuming I'm interpreting this correctly, 50% of STEM bachelor's degrees are awarded to women [1], and 40% of STEM phds are awarded to women [2]. However, CS and engineering stand out: they are closer to 20% (for both bachelors and phds). So this isn't really a STEM issue, it's a CS and engineering issue.

[0] [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/#chp2)

[1] [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab11.pdf)

[2] [https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf](https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15326/pdf/tab25.pdf)

(For some reason, these tables group CS and math together. There's a separate table that breaks them down, and shows that most of the gender imbalance comes from CS; math is closer to balanced.)

<comment><USER23> > _in classic HN style I 'll just comment on the title._

Please don't! That makes HN worse. It leads to the sort of generic, predictable threads that sink discussion into mediocrity and which we're most trying to avoid here. Plenty of explanation at [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic) if anyone wants more.

(People generally post workarounds to paywalls in the threads, which means that it's ok to submit such articles, as described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989) and in the FAQ at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Someone ping this over to YouTube's recruiters

</comment><comment><USER45> Note that "Women naturally choose STEM less" and "The women who choose STEM are eventually driven out due to it's culture" are not mutually exclusive processes.

<comment><USER46> Except there's plenty of evidence for the former, and close to none for the latter. STEM is a field that has embraced diversity and equality of outcomes, with a genuine sense of desperation. STEM and especially technology companies are completely dominated by liberal and feminist thought. Sure you can point to a couple of 'bad apples', but you can point to far more examples where those ideologies drive organisations decision making from the top down. Not only is the culture argument weak to begin with (any competitive environment is going to be hostile on some level, to everybody), but it's entirely laughable to say this applies in STEM, an industry that has embraced 'diversity' above all else.

<comment><USER45> "Sure you can point to a couple of 'bad apples'" \- Literally every female colleague I know well enough to be comfortable talking about it has encountered more than a couple "bad apples".

<comment><USER46> I was referring to companies that are perceived to have 'cultural issues', like uber. Not companies that have a few dickheads working for them, which is going to be just about every company over a certain size. The presupposition is that there's systemic oppression (which there isn't), not that some people at work aren't very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This article still assumes that the preferences themselves are inherent rather than the result of gender socialization.

Even where you see girls excel more at verbal and arts and boys at STEM, how much of that is due to what they were encouraged to be interested in and spend their time on when younger?

I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. That suggests there's a significant cultural/social element at play.

<comment><USER48> IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where girls are slightly better. But abilities are not the same as preferences.

Regarding preferences: boys and girls show distinct preferences for toys and style of play from an early age (basically, before they could possibly be socialized). Even chimpanzee children show distinct toy preferences by sex (and they match human toy preferences).

Speaking anecdotally: I often speculate that the only people who could possibly believe that boys and girls do not have fundamentally different preferences are the childless. I live in Portland, OR. This is one of the most liberal, politically correct subcultures in the entire world. My kids are enrolled in a program at the local park and the person administering the program made sure to specify their gender pronouns. They had a discussion about the gender of a species of worm that is a hermaphrodite. And yet, everywhere I go, the boys are into monster trucks and super heroes and the girls are into dolls and princesses.

As the culture wars have heated up over the last few years, I have started asking parents we encounter about how they socialized their kids. Basically ever single one tells the same story: we went out of our way to make everything as non-gendered as possible, but our boy wanted to play with trucks and our girl wanted to play with dolls.

<comment><USER28> Even boy and girl _monkeys_ display the same truck vs doll preference that human boys and girls display. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys- pr...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys- toys/)

<comment><USER49> A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1]

Come on! If you actually open the paper, [https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex-d...](https://michaelfergusonphd.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/sex- differences-in-rhesus-monkey-toy-preferences-parallel-those-of-children.pdf)

You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why?

For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment!

Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does.

[1] [https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking- choc...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate- helps-weight-1707251800)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Cordola Fine's Delusions of Gender is an excellent counter to Pinker's naturalist essentialism.

Pinker tends to lean to the side of nature rather than nuture in debate around gender influence. The article assumes the readers believe the same. Perhaps Pinker's prior research justifies this language. But after reading Cordola Fine's works, which I think definitely throws salt on nature assumptions, id call assuming this language are held by most to be very bold of Pinker.

       Susan Pinker Vs Cordelia Fine:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender- gap-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth- cordelia-fine)

</comment><comment><USER51> "... educated women's career trajectories often have a different shape—based on their wider interests and a common desire to have flexible or part-time work when their families are young—and an accelerated pace later on."

She's getting to a point I'd like to emphasize. A new pregnancy changes a woman into what's almost a third kind of biological human: a mother. A father? Meh.

But meanwhile, our economic paymasters can only promise a new mother "If you take an unpaid 6 mos absence, we'll probably hire you back for a full-time (only) position". This seems unfair at best, and diabolical at worst. But that's the US.

I'm struggling to get across my true thoughts on this, but I think we should pay more attention to the mother-child dynamic.

</comment><comment><USER52> My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason. Often that it has to be a singular one.

It is tough, because headlines and short articles like this are easy to twist into misguided views. Too easy. And yet, I definitely want these fields researched. I can't imagine anyone doesn't want it. Having the patience to get real answers is not easy. :(

<comment><USER53> > _My knee jerk to the headline, "because they are taught to." More than just > them, we teach each other that there has to be a reason._

More often than not, today, we teach each other that there can't possibly be a reason -- other than "taught to".

<comment><USER52> Do we? I see more justifications on intrinsic differences than I see otherwise.

<comment><USER53> Back in the day or today? Because today you can even be fired for talking about intrinsic differences.

Let's put it this way: such talk wont make you very popular in the mainstream media and progressive urban folks. At best you have a chance on FOX and in the Bible Belt.

<comment><USER52> The problem, I think, is that you are phrasing it such that the intrinsic differences are assumed.

Could there be intrinsic differences? I don't know anything that precludes them. The evidence seems fairly strong otherwise, though. Lots of it. More, most of the people rhetorically asking about the differences, do so in a way that is clearly not in good faith.

Now, I am a little worried about the damage for people looking in good faith. But, by and large, the evidence doesn't appear to support this actually being a problem. Most of the complaints about not being "very popular" with these sorts of views are fairly weak when put into perspective of actual persecution.

Edit: Forgot to explicitly answer. I meant today. I have seen a lot of search for intrinsic differences. I'll try and pay more attention for a bit. I realize confirmation bias can easily paint what I see.

<comment><USER53> > _The problem, I think, is that you are phrasing it such that the intrinsic > differences are assumed._

I happen to assume them, based on everything we know about biology and various species, and how human life on earth developed for several thousands of years.

I also know that it's difficult to take any grants and have any sort of career outside of fringe right-wing sponsored institutions if your research is to chance upon any of such "intristic differences" today, so I take modern findings in soft-sciences on the matter with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER52> And I assume they are grossly exaggerated, for much the same reason. :)

That is, even assuming there are differences, I'd imagine they would be slight and barely noticeable except at the extremes. Think Olympic running. Obvious differences, but rather close. Especially when measured against what most people can do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Machine Learning Cheat Sheet for scikit-learn - <AUTHOR> http://peekaboo-vision.blogspot.ca/2013/01/machine-learning-cheat-sheet-for-scikit.html

<comment><USER2> Nice work. I wonder if there is a way to build the cheat sheet in a collaborative fashion kinda like a wiki. On thing I noticed, I am no expert in ML, but recently I was reading about K-means algorithm that enables you to quickly find the number of clusters with unknown number of clusters. This seems to be missing in your example where the clustering branch end with "tough luck".

<comment><USER3> " find the number of clusters"

Plot k against prediction accuracy (averaged over a number of runs). Look for a step, that is the correct setting of k. I don't believe there exists an algorithm for detecting that step as good as I can.

<comment><USER4> Prediction accuracy cannot be computed in a purely unsupervised setting: you don't have labels for the samples.

You can compare the cluster found by k-means run several times against what you get with a randomized version of your dataset though: <http://blog.echen.me/2011/03/19/counting-clusters/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see a cheatsheet like this for computer vision. I don't suppose anyone knows of one, or can make one?

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe they're using different names, but where are: Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, and SVMs?

<comment><USER7> Linear regression and logistic regression are covered by elastic net lasso, sgd regression, and sgd classifiers. Support vector machines are covered in SVCs and SVRs. I don't see neural networks on there (just saw this edit: "the chart is not really comprehensive, as I focused on scikit-learn. Otherwise I certainly would have included neural networks").

Some notes that may help clarify: regression is trying to predict a continuous number (e.g. how much a house will cost). Linear regression is a type of regression. Classification is trying to predict a category (e.g. condo vs apartment). Logistic regression is usually used for classification over two categories (even though it confusingly has 'regression' in the name). So linear regression will fall into into the regression bubble, logistic regression will fall into the classification bubble, and support vector machines are split into the two bubbles based on what you want to do with them.

The difference between sgd (stochastic gradient descent) and elastic net lasso is how the models are trained. The final model in both cases can be used (evaluated/predicted) in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So where would deep learning come into play in this flow diagram? (Or did I miss it?)

<comment><USER4> This diagram is only presenting algorithms as currently implemented in scikit- learn. Deep Learning models are not yet implemented in scikit-learn although baselines (stacked RBMs and MLP) will probably make it in the coming months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What do you experts think if a good use of genetic programming? Where would you put that into this diagram?

<comment><USER8> just as a point of clarification: "genetic programming" is not the same as a "genetic algorithm". Genetic programming is an area of evolutionary computation in which the AST of a program is created using a genetic algorithm. So while genetic programming is definitely "machine learning" in the truest sense, it's not terribly useful for classification and regression problems (what we usually think of when we talk about ml).

Now genetic algorithms are any algorithm that encodes solutions (typically parameters to a cost function) as a gene and performs optimization through an artificial evolutionary process. Now GAs are incredibly easy to learn how to implement, but it's much harder to figure out when they should be used.

In theory GAs can be used anywhere in this diagram that parameters need to be chosen. However there are two major draw backs to GAs:

1\. Cost function is a huge bottle neck 2\. In many cases there is a known, better method of optimization.

So for example you might want to use a GA to determine the parameters for training an SVM, however (given you have enough data) this runs into problem 1, since it might take minutes, hours or days to train an SVM. Which is too long and you would have to train 100s or more SVM for each iteration of the GA, with a least 100s of iterations.

Also GAs have been used to find optimal weights in neural nets, however here you run into 2 (and I believe 1 as well), as using backprop usually performs better.

All that said GAs are an amazing tool when you have some cost function you need to optimize that 1.) can be evaluated very quickly, and 2.) is weird, very non linear, or otherwise has no known 'good' solution already.

So finally to your question: most heavily studied areas of ML already have a better optimization algorithm than a GA (hence no GAs on this diagram), however in the real world you never know when you my find some very strange, difficult and poorly studied optimization issue and then GAs can be very useful

<comment><USER9> Here is my intuition. Hopefully adding to your explanation.

GA are a way to solve search problems. But there are other ways that are more efficient and more specific. <http://www.pearsonhighered.com/samplechapter/0136042597.pdf>

But solving a problem with GA may sometimes be cooler and more interesting.

<comment><USER10> genetic algorithms are just randomized hill climbing with the added assumption that variables "physically" next to each other in your data structure are correlated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> some other things that might be useful

<http://eferm.com/machine-learning-cheat-sheet/>

<http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/mlbook/tmp/mlbook-iptr.pdf>

[http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/wiki/index.php/Introduction_to_Ma...](http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/wiki/index.php/Introduction_to_Machine_Learning)

<http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/creed/Notes/ML_Compendium.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER12> comment from the author: "2) if you need a flow-chart to know what to do, I don't think you will be successful in working with structured models ;)"</comment>


Documentation is terrible - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/documentation-is-terrible-part-1-18805115edef <comment><USER2> Well done!</comment>


What are the full implications of 2/3 of the world pop using a mobile phone?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=2879

<comment><USER2> Lots of numbers, but as usual _none of them are relevant_. The author is trying to make the point that "we are all connected". Not only do they not provide any evidence for this claim, they don't even explain what they really _mean_ by it. This is pointless journalism at its best (worst?).

</comment><comment><USER3> Business which are based on restricting access to information are threatened, even in the developing world. Information velocity among, say, Vietnamese shrimp fishermen has increased in the last 10 years by an absolutely astonishing amount.

</comment><comment><USER4> Given the importance of mobile phones to civil unrest from the Orange Revolution, to the Tulip Revolution, to the recent Iran protests, I think there are some very important political implications for the 2/3rds of the world that is now connected and living in an information-restricted society.

Even North Korea has had to deal with cheap Chinese mobile phones being smuggled in across the border, briefly allowing families separated by the Korean Civil War to contact one another.</comment>


Experts concerned scientific advances are giving rise to neoracism - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/experts-concerned-that-advances-in-genetic-sequencing-are-giving-rise-to-neoracism/story-fn5fsgyc-1226828291896

<comment><USER2> Blah blah blah black, blah blah blah white. Same story every time. Apparently Asians don't exist.</comment>


Picture Swap [NSFW]: Upload a picture to discover what the last visitor uploaded - <AUTHOR> http://pictureswap.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> This seems like one of those ideas that could have been cool on the web of 20 years ago, but just won't work now. Internet users aren't trustworthy anyway as a whole when given anonymity. This is quickly going to turn into a stream of porn, most likely of the illegal variety that you don't want to be caught hosting.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the time being I'm getting a surprisingly low porn rate (less than 10%). There will always be some jerks, but one of the Web 2.0 principles is trusting the community to balance the content out.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Btw Im looking for ProductHunt invites in case you got one ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> JESUS, it (might) be very heavily NSFW. Don't use this site at work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it might. I totally forgot to put it in the title. It's fixed now. My apologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Definitely got NSFW from my experience. Hope someone enjoys a gif.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, looks like 4chan is really into it.</comment></comment>


Eric Enge interviews Seth Godin - <AUTHOR> http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-seth-godin.shtml <comment><USER2> This is really just a big ad for Squidoo. Still interesting though.

<comment><USER3> I agree it's pretty ad-like, and that's an amazingly great marketing lesson itself. Most founders squander their interview opportunities talking about stuff that's far too boring for potential users to care. I'll take a passionate pitch-like interview over a boring dry one any day.</comment></comment>


A social network around physical products - <AUTHOR> https://prod.ly

<comment><AUTHOR> Before prod.ly I was always tweeting my opinions and sometimes a photo about something awesome I discovered. But those posts are drowning in the flood in very short time.

That's why I built prod.ly with a friend. So that our interaction with awesome things stay tied to the thing and remain discoverable by other people.

It's like a ProductHunt for the physical world.

Please also upvote prod.ly on ProductHunt: [http://www.producthunt.com/posts/prod- ly](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/prod-ly)

cheers Oliver Drobnik

prod.ly Developer Evangelist</comment>


The Meson Build System - <AUTHOR> http://mesonbuild.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious as to why one needs this in a CMake world?

<comment><USER3> Being the best of a bunch of bad options doesn't make CMake a good tool. I don't know the quality of Meson, but CMake leaves much to be desired.</comment></comment>


Guy Retweets Particularly Entitled Christmas Tweets, Becomes A Phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/wtf-i-wanted-an-iphone/ <comment><USER2> Is this a "this generation is so spoiled" article? I got an iPad that I didn't want, didn't ask for, and it's engraved with my name so I can't very well sell it. What do I get for being the spoiled generation outlier? Do I get to keep it guilt free?

<comment><USER3> Nope, being spoiled is getting lots of stuff. Nothing wrong with that. This article is about expecting, demanding, or thinking you deserve lots of stuff. That's "entitlement".</comment></comment>


A Land of Monopolists: From Portable Toilets to Mixed Martial Arts - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-land-of-monopolists-from-portable <comment><USER2> The key word/concept I got from this concentrated finance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Monopoly is clearly an important, natural and desirable objective for capitalists, see Peter Thiel's _Competition is for Losers:_

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is- for-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for- losers-1410535536)

Note that Thiel is describing the inevitable goal of capitalists, because in the long run of perfect competition, all profits tend to zero. Technology and innovation are certainly one way of ensuring that the _ceteris_ do not remain _paribus._

However, Thiel is not recommending monopoly as a policy for society. Only the most ardent libertarians argue for pure _laissez-faire_ anything-goes capitalism that results in lazy extractive rent-seeking monopolies.

The best balance for society seems to be free markets, which are _as free as possible, but no freer._

A free market needs rules against: monopoly and oligopoly; price gouging but also dumping below cost; predatory acquisitions that concentrate markets; monopsony in the supply chain and the labor force; collusion, corruption and insider trading.

It also probably requires positive requirements for truth in advertising, verifiable product standards, open data, published product specs (like food contents), health & safety in the workplace, and protection of the commons, in the form of environmental rules against dumping toxic waste and pollution of air, water and soil.

Free markets also need low barriers to entry, which are in tension with some of these protections. The guide should be _as free as possible_ to allow competition. Many regulatory measures, such as professional licensing, put up barriers to entry that enable rent-seeking behavior for those behind the credentials & licensing walls. Obviously brain surgeons and nuclear power plants need some regulation, but perhaps real estate agents or hairdressers do not. The requirement for open data should make both brain surgeons and nuclear power plants publish their track record.

There may also need to be long-term strategic regulation for the climate. Again, it is best to leverage the power of free markets to achieve that goal. Some form of carbon/methane hydrocarbon tax seems worthwhile, as it will create incentives for new businesses and technologies. Also note that the free market will take care of other effects naturally: we will see falls in property prices for the eventually-to-be-inundated suburbs of Shanghai and condos of Miami (hint - don't park in the basement :)

It is counter-productive to tax things that are desirable, like income and employment, when what should be taxed are undesirable activities, like greenhouse gas emissions. So tax carbon, maybe keep some of the vice taxes on alcohol and drugs, but remove all income and payroll taxes. The Gulf states tax oil production and do not have income taxes. Let us tax oil consumption and also not have no income taxes.

I would go as far as to say, _only_ tax carbon if _all_ income taxes are removed.</comment>


My apps look ugly as sin. How do I improve my design skill? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on apps where packaged themes don't quite cut it due to UI requirements. I've never had technical trouble implementing ideas, but my layouts, colors, and general UI leave a lot to be desired.  How do I improve my design know-how? <comment><USER2> I just compiled a list of reading (and watching) materials for this yesterday. Here you go:

[http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2010/idan-gazit-design- for-d...](http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2010/idan-gazit-design-for- developers-making-your-frontend-suck-less-3704780) (great overview of the major design aspects - nearly 1hr)

<http://media1.kadavy.net/allthefontsyoulleverneed-kadavy.pdf>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4f83C8ANg>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkJ6fPPRA5Q>

18min <http://vimeo.com/1542721>

[http://journal.drawar.com/d/we-do-not-need-you-to-design- any...](http://journal.drawar.com/d/we-do-not-need-you-to-design-anymore/)

<http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/> (free)

<comment><USER3> Awesome collection! Cant wait to go through all of them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't.

Go here: [http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin- templat...](http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templates)

Purchase a theme for $20 that would take you weeks to design and more time to slice and code. Get profitable, then hire a professional designer.

<comment><USER5> I agree with dchuk .

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gathering skill will take time, so for that read up on the sources often linked here. But to get your apps looking less than fugly asap, just copy others. Buy some cheap wordpress themes, view source, rip them apart to pick and choose individual elements. Copy the CSS from the best designed sites out there.

Initially it will feel like you're cheating, but over time you will learn the patterns and develop your own style.

EDIT: This couldn't have arrived at a better time - <https://postgres.heroku.com>. Just look at that beautiful design. A lot to be learnt (and copied!) there.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. It's very easy to learn by example, and with all the great CSS frameworks out there you won't need Photoshop to produce good-looking widgets. A lot of my early designs were based on ideas from this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Web-Designers-Idea-Book- Vol/dp/1600619...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Designers-Idea-Book- Vol/dp/160061972X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314725103&sr=8-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are a number of resources that can be found via Google (i.e. "app design") but Smashing Magazine has some good articles relating to app design and layout in general. You can also try searching for "beautiful apps" which brings up links to collections of different apps that might provide an idea. As far as color goes, I like searching for web site templates or 'best web design of 2011' collections and finding a color scheme that I like or think would work well with the general feel of what my product does. Remember, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

</comment><comment><USER9> An easy first step is to focus on spacing and alignment. Make sure everything is consistently spaced with equal distance between items. This will make even a mediocre layout look better designed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used to stress about making my apps look good. Now I just use Skeleton (<http://www.getskeleton.com/>) to cover the basics and when my app is ready I pay a designer to make something that looks awesome.

Other options include Less Framework (<http://lessframework.com/>) and Twitter's Bootstrap (<http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/>)

</comment><comment><USER11> I like <http://colourlovers.com>. I can choose what I like as a color and then see 4 other colors that other people felt went well with it. Saves me the brain power.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you've got anything that needs work, maybe we can help demonstrate by critiquing it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971477>

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a great guide: <http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash- course>

</comment><comment><USER14> Copy. Modify. Repeat many times. Pretty soon you'll be doing "original" work that's really the sum of everything you've learned copying other people + your influence.

</comment><comment><USER15> not out yet, but i like the approach of this book (i got some good tips from the mailing list)

[http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering- Bea...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering- Beauty/dp/1119998956/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314737114&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER16> Google: "PSD UI" you will find tons of elements to make a web app.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hire a professional designer and spend your time programming. I personally don't think skill of "designing" can be learnt, it's something you already have, adjusting and refining all the way.

<comment><USER18> That is as silly as the myth that mathematics is either something you have or you don't.</comment></comment>


A Post-Human World Is Coming. Design Has Never Mattered More - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060742/a-post-human-world-is-coming-design-has-never-mattered-more <comment><USER2> Can we quantitatively measure how in love with itself a given field is? Design seems to be way up there.</comment>


B2B Startups Cloudant and Clustrix Enter Y Combinator Index Top 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/b2b-startups-cloudant-clustrix-enter-y-combinator-index-top-10-april-2013/

<comment><USER2> I wish the exact methodology that was used for this ranking is public, because it will help non-YC start-ups compare themselves accurately against this list.

The factors that goes into this ranking like 3-month Alexa Rank, Inbound Links, Facebook Likes etc.. are lagging indicators of a company. I wonder what the leading indicators could be. Maybe, current pipeline?</comment>


Poor Teen Sleeping Due To Lack Of Blue Light? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/rpi-lom021610.php

<comment><USER2> My school started shortly before 9, but I'll never understand high schools that started classes at 8am or earlier. That's just too early.

When I was older I attended a commuter college and our 8am classes meant I had to be up before 6 to get there on time, but what they actually meant was that I usually didn't show up, and when I did show up I was too tired to really pay attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> The impact of light exposure on circadian rhythms is, as far as I can tell, entirely mediated through melatonin. Until evidence to the contrary appears, why should anyone worry about phototherapy for advancing circadian rhythms when melatonin supplements are ridiculously cheap, completely safe, and demonstrably effective?

<comment><USER4> Melatonin supplements have been putting me through college. I don't know if I have a non-24-hour sleep cycle, delayed sleep phase syndrome, or I'm just lazy (I think it's the first choice), but until I discovered melatonin supplements about a year ago, my sleep schedule was hopeless. Now, I have no issues whatsoever.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep-wake_syndrome> Isaiah 34:14

<comment><USER5> How much do you find effective? The standard dosage, or more? I should have been sleeping 6 hours ago.

<comment><USER4> Walmart around here carries two different dosages: 3 milligram and something else. I can't remember what the other dosage is, but I buy the 3 mg and a single dose works great. I've read that no benefit is gained above a certain very small dosage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was a teen my poor sleeping was because I had to be in homeroom at 7:15. In the winter we had already left homeroom by the time the sun was up. Just insane.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you want to wake up, go outside immediately after you get up. Looking at the bright sky will get you waking up properly. Applies to all ages, and especially applicable to getting over jet lag.

Also. lay off the late night web browsing. The bright monitor light makes it harder to fall asleep.

Finally, get some exercise. When you've exercised you sleep much better.</comment>