I knew exactly how she felt - <AUTHOR> http://trishkhoo.com/2013/04/i-knew-exactly-how-she-felt/ <comment><USER4> I will offer an experience which is the inverse of this!

I am a male software engineer who works in fashion (and before this I worked in wine.) I knew nothing about wine when I started, and my fashion sense is prototypically, well, male-software-centric.

People in the wine industry are palpably aware that people view it as "hoity- toity". Professionals I've worked with are usually very gracious in explaining what it means when you say a wine is "dark" or "buttery" because that pretentious image is something we want to overcome.

Fashion is a bit different. "I like that chambray shirt!" What? "Erm, that's, uh, that denim material you're wearing." Oh.

Or "I saw someone next door with an Hermes bag; it was gorgeous." Everyone had quite a laugh when I asked who Hermes was. Or expressed surprise that the Vogue Spring edition is the one where they show off new styles, which is why it's so thick and has so few ads. Or the difference between hair paste and hair gel.

I feel like there is a bigger lesson in this story: I've got to stop making people feel silly for not getting my Star Wars references, and they've got to understand that there's no logical reason I'd know anything about the big names in fashion. I occasionally meet people who get this - you know your domain and I know mine, and we can still talk to each other without othering.

And that skill - of being able to get along with your PM even though they "clearly don't know anything about code" - is one worth developing.

<comment><USER5> The problem isn't PM's know jack about code. The problem is the set where a PM would even be required. That means there's a structural flaw in your process.

The idea of having a project manager is ridiculous. People _should_ manage themselves and take ownership of the project. Making the PM useless.

<comment><USER6> That's probably why, when building a skyscraper, modern construction practices dictate that all the subcontractors just "do their own thing" and sort out with each other when it's OK to put in walls, pipes, wiring and structural alterations.

The N^2 communication overhead is OK, because PMs are just useless overhead anyway.

I heard sometimes building projects fail because the PM only understood what was supposed to be happening and who was responsible for what, as opposed to having advanced plumbing, HVAC, electrical and structural engineering knowledge.

</sarcasm> (I don't usually resort to it... promise...)

<comment><USER7> That would be great if software were exactly analogous to building skyscrapers, and developers were idiot construction workers who do nothing but put the sheetrock and nails where they are asked.

(Note: I am not saying that construction workers are idiots, I am saying that programmers are not idiot-construction-workers.)

There is not just one way to organize a project.

<comment><USER8> Construction workers and programmers are both tradesmen, for most values of the word. I know you added a disclaimer already but I figured I'd just emphasize the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see plenty of insightful comments here but no one acknowledging the conclusion.

>It's funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT.

How many of these articles/talks put the impetus on changing women alienating women from tech? How likely are you to see some twitter post about girls like this acting "not cool" even though it's a widespread problem? Feminist discourse is usually 1 dimensional. More often than not it's only interested in black and white narratives where women are victims and men are perpetrators. In the few cases where other women are shown as the problem they are framed as victims of patriarchal socialization not responsible for their behavior.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely - women sometimes internalize and participate in misogynistic and cruel behavior, and it can be hard to talk about.

I've seen this happen with the "fake geek girl" phenomenon - some women who feel that they are legitimate parts of the community participate in this kind of destructive policing because they've bought into the cultural misogyny and are often rewarded and have their status reinforced in their community.

On a much more damaging level, this happens with slut-shaming and sexual policing. One of the major factors in the recent suicides of teen rape victims was the rejection and shaming by their female peers.

<comment><USER11> Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? When women bully other women, it's because they're agents of the patriarchy?

<comment><USER10> I'm honestly not sure what seems ridiculous to you. In these instances, the female bullies are acting out misogynistic discourses. Can you clarify what your sticking point is?

<comment><USER11> And what do you call it when boys bully each other to enforce arbitrary social norms? Because I don't see a substantial difference between the two cases.

<comment><USER12> If you accept that our society suppresses women, it's pretty obvious what the difference is. One type of behavior directly reinforces the status quo, the other doesn't.[1]

And if you want to talk about societal problems, that's pretty bloody important! Yeah, both types of bullying feel just as shitty to the individual, but the broader ramifications are definitely different. Nothing is isolated.

If you disagree with the fundamental premise (society is sexist) that's a whole other issue, but you should be at least able to see why others see a distinction.

1\. Keeping in mind that you seem to want to compare arbitrary bullying to the more specific type persimmons references.

<comment><USER11> It still doesn't follow from the premise that "society suppresses women to the benefit of men" that "any time an individual woman is suppressed, it is to the benefit of men". How do men even benefit from social taboos enforced my women against other women being geeky, or for that matter, slutty? That's probably the opposite of what would benefit men.

Society is more complicated than that. There are more forces swirling around than patriarchy. Any insular group will eventually enforce arbitrary social norms on each other, and since people tend to socialize with those of the same sex, both genders form insular groups in our society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure the author quite understood the seeing Star Wars thing was a super low bar fitness test. Once long ago my new wife asked me why geeks always wear tshirts with obscure references that no one gets. I was slightly put out by the question until I figured it out. They're a uniform. It's how we id the friendlies on the battlefield.

<comment><USER14> > I figured it out. They're a uniform.

I think it's just a way of showing off. Case in point:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of- mil...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12532552/what-part-of-milner- hindley-do-you-not-understand)

The guy has no idea what the notation means by still wants to wear the t-shirt.

<comment><USER15> You're both right. It's social signaling:

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

Your Star Wars or Hindley-Milner t-shirt tells people who see it that you're a particular kind of person. This encourages people who are like you to approach you, because it signals that you're safe -- you're "one of us." Likewise, it discourages those who are unlike you from doing the same, sparing you from having conversations with people you find boring.

If you work in a community where high intelligence is seen as socially valuable -- i.e., where a way the high-status individuals distinguish themselves from the rest is by highlighting their intelligence -- like tech, it's not surprising that you'd want clothing that would signal that you are a high-intelligence person, even if you aren't one. It's an attempt to get your foot in the door of social groups that would otherwise be closed to you, by camouflaging yourself as "one of us."

<comment><USER16> Let's say you started a company and named it after a technical concept from computer science (for example a higher order function that computes the fixed point of other functions in lambda calculus) would that be an example of this signalling?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm going to annoyingly meta on this one because I'm feeling really philosophical today.

There is a constant dissonance in the western world between assumptions about "ideal" or "moral" statistical probability distributions and actual statistical probability distributions over a large sample size when it comes to any politically sensitive topics like the one implied in the article (i.e women having an interest in science and technology).

This happens over and over again. There are thousands of articles a year on this kind of thing and millions of human years spent mulling why the ideal curve doesn't match the actual curve. It's the perfect topic for non- productive rambling because it's always dissonant and it never goes anywhere.

The dear reader probably already knows this, but to the idealist, the ideal always equals the actual in a just world and evidence of a mismatch is evidence of injustice. Those who accept or tolerate the actual not matching the ideal are presumed to support injustice.

These arguments are endlessly repeated. Nevertheless, seemingly endless repetition is a very effective means of political discourse. I realized this most profoundly when studying religious texts. Points that are intended to be remembered are mentioned over and over again to the point of mind-numbing boredom. Repetition is good for remembering and people only believe what they can remember. Thus the most effective strategy of any activist is to repeat their message over and over again and have the adherents do the same and approve the same and ostracise those who criticize and those who don't care, thus spreading the idea through the society via social psychological principles and the pure intellectual brute force of repetition.

<comment><USER18> What we are experiencing is a particular flavor of secular religion called "cultural Marxism". Marxists believe that social forces are best understood through a model of _class conflict_.

Economic Marxists explained the ills of society through the conflict between rich capitalists and the poor working proletariat. The rise of the middle class threw it a curve ball that it couldn't explain and it fell out of favor (outside of the Soviet union and American academia).

Cultural Marxism uses the same conflict between dominant class and under class to explain social pathologies in the under class. Thus, we all hear about statistics where under classes are not meeting the same performance as the upper class, with the implication that it is the upper class's fault. This is called "oppression".

So we know that women make less than men, but we don't hear much about how men are falling behind in college degrees and high-school education because this does not fit the Marxist narrative.

Furthermore, when there is an underrepresentation of an underclass in some desirable area, we take that to be de facto evidence of oppression (nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners). We all except the collective guilt for the sins of our class and nobody questions whether or not the Marxist narrative might just be fundamentally flawed.

Modern academic feminism and racial theories are based on Marxist models, which causes them to make many errors of reasoning IMO. There is also a lot of data that they can not explain. For example, racial Marxists have no problem explaining why some minority races do worse in school than white children (oppression!). But I've yet to hear an explanation from a Marxist as to how other minority groups (Asians) do way better than white children.

<comment><USER19> > nobody cares that there are no female garbage collectors or miners

Just like nobody cares that there are very-few/no male prostitutes or strippers.

The underclass you speak of is split along gender lines too - unfortunately.

<comment><USER11> Prostitution and stripping can be very lucrative professions.

<comment><USER19> So can mining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _I said that's what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren't that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT._

I can't really speak to this point, but I am curious, when did computer science and software engineering get rolled into IT?

15 years ago, I would not have said software developers, software engineers, or test engineers were part of IT. IT was that department that kept the corporate computers working and worked for the CFO, not part of the department that shipped products and worked for the VP Engineering.

In the past 5 years, it's become much more inclusive (or so it seems to me.)

<comment><USER21> Outside of Silicon Valley anything that has to do with a computer has always been called IT.

<comment><USER22> This is entirely wrong. I've always thought one of the peculiarities about the UK is that they refer to all things computer as "IT" while the rest of the english-speaking world differentiates.

I don't work in IT and I never will, it's a different job with a different skill set. I'm not tech support, a dba, or 'the network guy'. I'm a software engineer and I work in R&D.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure it is - in the same way the battle for the word >hacker< has been lost, I know that in New Zealand >IT< is a catch all that means someone does computer stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I understand the author as a fellow woman in I.T. (programmer). I never fit in with the gossipy fashionista crowd either. I was a total geek in the library. I don't wear the geeky t-shirts though. I like to wear pencil skirts and kick my high heels off under my desk. Only downside, like noonespecial mentioned, is that nobody just assumes I'm a programmer since I lack the "uniform". Anyways, that girl she spoke to in the article seems very smart and ambitious. I wish her the best of luck in her future career :) Be who you want to be

</comment><comment><USER25> I read this about 2 hours ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Growing up in a Latino/Black community and being of mixed heritage, it was never socially easy. My parents divorced, so I'd spend half the year with my dad - who was Jamaican - in Patterson, NJ, and I'd spend the other half with my mom - who was Italian - up in Canada.

I always found it interesting how I felt more comfortable in white-as-the- clouds Ontario, than in Patterson, where there weren't just more black people, but a lot more mixed race people. I didn't quite like Star Wars or Dr Who, but I did read a lot of Tolkien, and science, tech, philosophy, or anything, really, wasn't just something I learned in school so I could do homework; they were actual things that I engaged with - not that school was any less boring for me; believe me, it was. It wasn't enough to read Catcher in the Rye, I had to find out about Salinger, the times he lived in. I liked to talk about things. What was mostly just school stuff to people were things I actually liked to think about or talk about or even do. This never really fit very well into Hip-Hop and girls, and "looking cool" Patterson - though I did rock this sweet leather jacket once, but I drew some blanks when I channeled my inner James Dean. Brampton, OTOH, was interesting. It wasn't that people were any more like I was, or that people automatically liked me any better - <USER2> there was a weird fascination with my hair - but the fact that I liked the things I liked wasn't something I had to hide. It wasn't that they understood everything I said, or that they were even all that interested, but very rarely did anyone ever alienate me for dropping a Hume quote, no one ever told me to "shove that nerd shit up my ass" when I mentioned the possibility of planting a radio in someone's skull; no one ever tried to make me socially handicapped for being interested in any intellectual development.

Reading this, I felt like this girl had just touched my mind. If only I could touch hers. The feelings of isolation when people who are physically like you aren't just behaviorally unlike you, but very actively alienating to you. The feeling of shame when the teacher calls you to give the answer and you don't know what to do - give the right answer, contribute to the stigma; give the wrong answer and have others spitefully mock you for "not being as smart as you think". The absolute feeling of insecurity when innocently mentioning you don't know something, a privilege available to everyone else, is met with mocking comments about how they thought you knew everything. If only I could meet this girl and let her know that it gets better in the end. Hopefully she finds her own Brampton, ON - somewhere she can be herself with other people without the feeling of being an artificial limb, rather than a part of a fully functioning body.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have quite a few female friends who have mostly male friends (just because of being interested in a particular technical field). And, to be honest, I have never got idea why someone _needs_ to have friends mostly of the same gender.

Once someone has interest beyond cliche "gossip, fashion, diet & nail painting" or "football, cars, sports, binge drinking", well, then why to lock contacts inside only one's own gender? And if it turns out that most of people interested in X are of the opposite gender, is it wrong? (Unless it is them who make a barrier.)

Especially as when there is a heated discussion between two people interested in (say) the respiratory system of Drosophila melanogaster (a fruit fly, not to intimidate anyone), then the simplest social characteristics (i.e. gender and, to some extent, age) very often go away.

And, in fact, what I like _the most_ about people being passionate about their interests, is that very, very often it goes beyond social status (sometimes even if one is talking with a professor, who is 50 older than a teenage geek).

<comment><USER27> Sorry, but you're arguing against no one. No one said she needed to make friends with girls because she's a girl. She clearly _wants_ to become friends with them. And it's unfortunate that she clearly wants to be friends with some people of her own gender, and yet has such a hard time of it because she's alienating the other girls and they're alienating her.

<comment><USER26> It wasn't an argument, it was a side comment, supporting her approach (similar to one of many of my friends) and to some extent mocking the (culturally implicit) premise that one should align with one's own gender[1], see in e.g. "[...] and how none of the other girls in her class understood anything she was talking about".

Would ever a tall person said "but none of tall people at my high-school can understand my jokes"?

[1] And to some extent supporting also:

"It's funny because the evening started out with a lady giving a speech about how the IT industry is alienating women. But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I fundamentally disagree with the idea that consuming cultural artifacts that happen to correlate with liking engineering has anything to do with liking engineering. If you think liking Star Wars is necessary for being an engineer, you're probably missing some pretty good people who just aren't that into Star Wars.

<comment><USER29> Sure, you will miss people, and you will miss good people. But since there is (according to you) some correlation, it might act as a heuristic, employed when it is simply not feasible to implement better tests.

<comment><USER30> But what if it's a better heuristic for finding young men than engineers?

<comment><USER29> I would argue it is also a very good heuristic for finding Star Wars fans. Your point being?

<comment><USER30> My point being that if 80% of programmers are young men, and knowledge of Star Wars jokes (or whatever) can find young men at an 80% accuracy from a general list, but good programmers at only a 64% accuracy from a list of programmers, you should just cut out the rationalization and just hire based on sex and race. You haven't discovered a heuristic for hiring good programmers, you've discovered a heuristic for confirming your own preconceptions, and for reenforcing stereotypes.

<comment><USER29> Take false positives into account – you will find more young men who are not engineers than Star Wars fans who are not engineers (for suitable values of engineers and personal experience). Since such false positives are extremely annoying[0] when looking for interesting people in a party, you want to minimise them first, not the false negatives.

[0] A false positive takes you n minutes to discover and abandon, whereas a false negative ideally doesn't concern you at all, assuming there are enough interesting people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _She then talked to me about robotics and physics and programming and how > none of the other girls in her class understood anything she was talking > about. They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into > Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars. All the > other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would be > bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None of > them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened to > her podcast and asked her what "Marvel" was. One of them told her to stop > making them feel stupid all the time._

She sounds very cool.

And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story.

Those girls in the school never had any encounters with such sexism in the tech workplace, but they still didn't like the thing even as a hobby.

Which reminds me of my university years (computer science). Those days (early to mid-nineties) we didn't even have internet at home or any outlet to know how a "tech workplace" even is. We expected to work in some bank, some big company IT department or teach CS ourselves. How that work environment would be, we had absolutely no idea.

Still, it was mostly men that preferred CompSci, whereas biology was mostly women. Math and applied math also had more women.

(In actual university CS nobody cared if you were a woman or a man. And we had the outmost respect for geek girls that were in the whole thing. There was just no sexism of the kind people complain about in the US. If you could do it, you could do it. And high school kids enrolling to the university had no idea either -- they were the typical high school kids, having typical high school relations).

That said, it was mostly boys who cared and nagged their parents to get them computer systems and game consoles. Girls, being more socially mature earlier, had a larger social life and could not care less about spending hours every day in front of a screen.

It's like girls give up the "dolls" phase much earlier, for a more serious and balanced social life, whereas boys extend the "toy guns/race cars" thing into puberty and early adulthood even, substituting their toys for FPS shooters, fantasy novels, superhero comics and RPGs. Which builds some ties to computers early on...

<comment><USER32> _And it goes to show that "sexism is the barrier" is not the whole story_

This is true but possibly not in the way that you think. I'm not sure that girls are _choosing_ that different way of life quite so much as they're conditioned to do so, and this is discriminatory. I think it's possible to explain the phenomenon described in the OP via "intersectionality" - in other words, there are multiple forms of discrimination and they overlap in ways that sometimes confuse us and deflect us from the true course of treating people equally. About the best intro I've seen to it is here: [http://miriamdobson.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/intersectionali...](http://miriamdobson.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/intersectionality- a-fun-guide/)

In this case, both geeks and women suffer from discrimination in different contexts. Being a geek and a woman is doubly difficult because mainstream society (both men and women) say "you're a woman, you shouldn't be a geek".

This ends up producing some pretty weird conclusions like this: [http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/the-nerdy- ge...](http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/the-nerdy-gendered- situation-of-computer-science/) \- which argues that women can only be encouraged into computer science if we make it less geeky, which basically discriminates against those who got into computer science _because_ it's geeky and that's what they like. A properly intersectional understanding would argue for maximum freedom for both women and geeks and, especially, female geeks who suffer from multiple discrimination.

<comment><USER31> > _In this case, both geeks and women suffer from discrimination in different > contexts. Being a geek and a woman is doubly difficult because mainstream > society (both men and women) say "you're a woman, you shouldn't be a geek"._

Sure, but why should society like everything? In this case, geeks.

Now, I'm a geek myself. But I still find it OK that society can like some things (and professions) more than it does others.

Especially since part of the geek essence is being "antisocial" it makes ever more sense of the general population to not like geeks. So much sense, that it's actually more like a tautology ("anti-social people are not liked by society").

Not to mention that geeks themselves do the same distinctions all the time. Who would waste a second's thought to think a McJob guy or a city cleaner as somehow "inferior"? Or even people like "office drones" with their Excels and such?

<comment><USER33> why is it that being fans of a popular sport and wear you team s jersey is cool, while being fans of more niche interests like geeky movies or tech isn't, to such a degree that kid who like it gets teased? there is some thing inherent in being more intellectual that provoke those who aren't.

<comment><USER31> > _why is it that being fans of a popular sport and wear you team s jersey is > cool, while being fans of more niche interests like geeky movies or tech > isn't, to such a degree that kid who like it gets teased?_

Because one is "popular" (your words) and the other is "more niche" (also your words).

So if the many want to tease the few (which is how teasing goes anyway), it would be the people doing popular things to people doing more niche things.

> _there is some thing inherent in being more intellectual that provoke those > who aren't._

Yes, that's it's a niche endeavor. Nothing anti-intellectual only about it.

People would equally tease the sole guy who collects stamps or the sole girl who still listens to Milli Vanilli.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lifelong geek here, and I can totally understand the appeal of this story. Reading some of the comments is kinda depressing though. There's no "us" and there's no "them". There are groups of people in the world with similar clusters of interests, and I guess that one of those clusters corresponds to traditionally geeky interests. But sometimes it seems like people internalize the whole us and them thing way too much. I guess it makes social navigation easier but it gets in the way of really understanding people (and yourself) if taken too far.

<comment><USER35> Thank you for pointing this out.

A bias toward viewing situations as "us vs. them" is part of humans' tribal nature.

Any time someone points out that something _isn't_ an "us vs. them" situation (or that a particular position is predicated on a situation being "us vs. them"), you should really give weight to that criticism because it's a very easy mistake to make. Look hard at whether it really _is_ an "us vs. them" situation, and if it isn't, what are the consequences that flow from that?

In this particular example, the case is pretty clear: The parent's spot-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am a girl studying computer science. I never understood the whole geek girl mentality of "I don't get OTHER girls! They only like shopping! I like nerdy things!"

I like shopping and makeup. I also like nerdy things like Lord of the Rings and programming hackathons. I get along with girly girls AND geeks.

People are more complex than "I only like shopping" or "I only like Star Wars". It's not hard to make friends with people who have different hobbies than you - in fact it makes your social group more interesting, I find.

Why does there have to be a divide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like someone posted right below your, because everyone wants to belong to a Grandfalloon: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon>

It's easier to "belong to a club" by saying either "I like computers", "I like sports" or "I like my nails painted" than by saying "I like computers, sports and nails painted".

But didn't we learn that the world isn't binary? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This was a great summary of what I have observed with some groups trying to inspire women in tech. Lots of marginally technical to non-technical women in events supposedly focused on women in tech. Instead of fostering the geek culture the cocktail and sex in the city culture takes over. Gender stereotypes are re-enforced and they inadvertently took the cause back a notch.

What we need are more Rails Bridge, Black Girls Code and that sort of thing to re-enforce feminist geekdom. When the critical mass of any group is slanted towards non technical people it is tough to convey a message of tech being cool and make it attractive for kids to want to enter. I would also love to see a meetup that had a similar makeup and mission as the systers list. I am a guy, but would actively do whatever I could to support that kind of effort because the members of that list are great role models for women in tech.

</comment><comment><USER38> This actually explains why more women do not get into tech careers. In the same way that this young woman felt alienated from her schoolmates, many women who are not into geek culture would feel alienated by CS classmates and the tech industry.

There's been a lot of talk about getting more women into this industry, and it's often looked at as a failing of the industry itself. What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't interested in the field.

<comment><USER39> > What's plainly obvious to me is that many (most?) women just aren't > interested in the field.

Which is exactly the problem. There's no strong reason to suggest that this difference is due to anything other than social pressure. Something in the way we socialize children is convincing half the potential talent pool that they shouldn't develop an interest in technology fields, almost certainly because they see few if any adult role models.

It's not really a failing of the industry, in the sense that we're probably not the ones who originally caused it. But it is a problem for the industry, and one that industry insiders are in a unique position to solve.

<comment><USER40> I've read about studies [1] which shown that boys and girls under 1 year old already show preferences which we attribute with stereotypical gender roles (boys were more appealed to mechanical objects while girls were more interested in human faces (=>social interactions)).

[1] Since there are also studies which show that a nontrivial part of results in social science papers are not replicable, it has to be taken with a tiny grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I found the references to geek pop culture items odd, what does liking Star Wars, Doctor Who or comics have to do with working in IT? I have nothing against those things (nor would I consider myself of fan of them) but, I certainly don't think someone who doesn't embrace geek culture is any less intelligent or less able to fit into the IT industry as this story seems to imply. I don't presume to know the entire situation for the girl in the story but, to me it seems as if this she was dismissing her peers in much the same way they where dismissing her.

</comment><comment><USER42> Isn't this just a density issue - like (for lack of a better analogy) being gay in a small town?

I can understand it's difficult when you are too young to choose geographic location - but once you can - the marginalisation is quickly solved by moving somewhere with a higher density of like-minded people.

The challenge, I guess, is to advertise that these places do exist - but I see so many 'Geek Girl Dinners' type events I can't believe that is really the case any more.

<comment><USER43> > The challenge, I guess, is to advertise that these places do exist - but I > see so many 'Geek Girl Dinners' type events I can't believe that is really > the case any more.

I wish it was that simple and this was already solved, but even in the Bay Area it can be frustratingly hard to connect with people who come from similar perspectives. I was just at a women in tech event last night and three of us went off for sushi afterward and we all talked about how frustrating it can be to find people who feel like us and how nice it would be if it wasn't so difficult.

I think the starkest variant of this I've seen was when one woman asked another: "Why should we even bother trying to increase the number of women in tech? Sometimes it's not even a good field, why should we be working so hard to get women into it?"

The other woman's response was simple and to the point: "I do it because it'd be nice to have someone to go to lunch with."

The truth of that statement isn't so much in that she couldn't have found anyone to go to lunch with ever, but the relative truth that exists when you feel less comfortable in a group because you're the one who is so different. For many people, tech is a place where everyone is different and different is cool and great. For women, different is often still just different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How old is the young woman the author spoke with? Don't most smart, geeky people in HS feel a bit out of place? There's a whole PG essay on that [1].

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

<comment><USER29> You should take into account that schools in Europe are not necessarily the same as schools in the US (it was an event in London). I felt quite at home in my school's physics and chemistry classes, and maths was sometimes boring, but overall okay, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "But for some girls, it feels like women are alienating the girls who want to be in IT."

For most children, up through high school, it feels like they're being alienated by their peers for being "different."

</comment><comment><USER46> > One of them told her to stop making them feel stupid all the time.

The world is full of idiots. What she experienced isn't unique to women, it happens to anyone who ends up spending time with people who do not care about knowledge.

<comment><USER7> You're glossing over something significant. Some subcultures (and demographics) suffer more from norms against intellectualism. It is more stigmatized as a woman, among the general population of other women in the US, to be into technical stuff, than to be a man into the same things. It is similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.

<comment><USER30> >It is similar to how bookish black kids may be told to stop 'acting white'.

As someone who was an absurdly bookish black kid (pre-edit: from a segregated black neighborhood in Chicago, lower middle-class, never knew a white person until I was 13) in the 80's I never heard this once except as a declaration by white people about the pressure felt by black children not to achieve.

I agree with your overall point, though, just not the example.

<comment><USER47> It is good to hear that was your experience, because it is disheartening to think that knowledge or education would be negatively stigmatized in any community.

Interestingly, Barack Obama is one of the big propagators of that idea. I think I heard from him first, and that's probably true of many others, when in his 2004 DNC speech (where many Americans heard him for the first time), he said, "Children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ugh. "Our people"? This post is alienating me.

I am a female software engineer. I also cannot stand sci-fi and love fashion, romantic comedies, painting my nails and all kinds of girly shit. I can gush over a beautiful Hermes scarf or my favorite chambray shirt one moment, and automate the fuck out of the iOS app testing process the next. (Just an example that the author, because she's in testing, might be interested in.) If nothing else, we share our love for programming. So, the next time you dismiss a girl because she dare wear heels and has never seen Star Wars, you might be missing out on a friend.

I totally get that it has been your experience that girls who are into traditional girly shit are lame and not worth talking to, but maybe it's because you're not giving them a chance. What happened to not judging a book by its cover?

(Unless you don't like Arrested Development. Then I hate you. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I second that emotion.

Though one could admire the issue moving away from "women in tech" to "non- geek persons in tech" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Had a hard time understanding the OP's point...but mostly because I don't understand what the event was about. Was it advertised explicitly as an IT/engineering event? I guess you could assume that from "Women in IT", but I think it's nice that such an event shows how information technology encompasses a lot of different fields. Even on "Hacker News", there are a good number of articles about marketing and law because geeks realize that being successful is not strictly based on coding skills.

As someone already pointed out, "IT" is a nebulous term. In my day, while at college, it was almost never used to refer to computer engineers, but was more intended for MIS majors, which was considered to be the "computer science of Excel". So it's kind of strange that the OP is calling for more elitism when the event used a term that's extremely vague and inclusive.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've observed that most people allow themselves to go along with the social norms gender wise, with a few exceptions. Then I realize what a wonderful geeky outlier of a spouse that I have. My female coworkers are amazed by my tales of my wife's exploits in auto repair, gaming, hunting and appliance repair.

</comment><comment><USER51> I know there's a bunch of quotes out there that all basically the same thing:

 _The more you repeat something, the more you believe something to be true, the more you will cause it to be true or real._

I suggest men, women, and everyone stop making this a bigger deal than it is (however big it currently is, it can be made bigger), and let's start focusing on real problems. Whoever has complaints about disrespect, belittling, or whatever, should just self-study and create something AWESOME, and then prove to the world by action, instead of blabbering off and causing pointless havoc that won't get us anywhere, let alone possibly make us take steps backward.

</comment><comment><USER52> Depressing that neither of them seem to have heard of <http://london.girlgeekdinners.com/>

</comment><comment><USER53> Feeling out of place, I can absolutely sympathise. I haven't quite found my place yet. It's made worse with all this talk about star wars, geeky t-shirts and other pop culture paraphernalia. We aren't all fans of star wars. We aren't all jumping at the chance to make pop culture references in conversation and we don't all own t-shirts with witty slogans concerning the dark side (I do confess to owning 2 wolverine t-shirts though). Now shows like the Big Bang Theory only help to reinforce this silly idea of what a 'nerd' is.

I was very into Heavy Metal growing up. Just as I was into comics. I felt like an outsider in the typical social circles at school and university and I felt even worse when I found the 'nerd' or 'geek' or 'metal' circles. Liking Metallica apparently didn't make me a true metalhead and so there you go, denounced. I'm not into D&D so there goes my invitations to D&D sessions. What about the girl in that conference that wasn't wearing a star wars t-shirt, that was just as interested in that talk? I absolutely _hate_ how each sub- culture tries to belittle the other and how its admission is dependent on whether you all like the same things.

I know that wasn't the main focus of the OP's post and I'm somewhat incoherent because I did just wake up, but I had to have my little rant. It's not just the IT industry alienating based on gender but also hobbies and interests.

\--- Amateur developer in Auckland that would like to meet other developers and not just to talk about star trek.

</comment><comment><USER54> She shouldn't feel bad. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Star Wars or Star Trek. Never seen Dr. Who or any of the Monty Python stuff. I've never seen a single Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie (or read the books).

But I keep telling myself that one day I'll binge through them all online.

<comment><USER46> Don't force yourself to sit through something you hate just to get an imaginary badge. I can't stand Dr. Who, I'm often baffled by British humor, and LotR is the geek equivalent of having read all of Dostoyevski's novels.

<comment><USER55> Heh. Even though I like fantasy very much (big Robert Jordan fan), I really can't stand Lord of the Rings. It's just so utterly boring. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it. By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this is a sexism or even IT issue.

</comment><comment><USER57> In India, the no of women that get outcasted for being a geek is phenomenal ! I mean really, I hate all those inferior girls who only aim to marry a successful guy to live off his income, and adjust if it isn't much, instead of going out there and doing something themselves, and if someone is doing so, let them be, or support them. My own sister have faced this problem, quite a no of times, when the girls in her class, come to know that she can play FIFA 13, they made fun of her! Can you imagine? Though she was strong enough to not get effected from it, but still, it isn't having zero effect at all.

As someone who values intelligence, I tell her, that it may require her to do more hardwork, but she can be actually beautiful+intelligent at the same time. I'm thinking about taking her to some start up events with me,to meet other women, so that she knows, and their is someone to look up to for her.

Thanks to this post, for making my decision firm.

</comment><comment><USER58> > All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would > be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None > of them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened > to her podcast and asked her what "Marvel" was. One of them told her to stop > making them feel stupid all the time.

Believe it or not, you can be a good coder without knowing who Doctor Who and Darth Vader are, or what Marvel is. Not even having seen Star Wars will make you a good programmer!

(A friend of mine who saw the linked post was astounded at the idea that girls are keeping other girls out of IT by not being enthusiastic about juvenile comic books and juvenile sci-fi. That is just about the single stupidest thing one could possibly think---unless, perhaps, the single stupidest thing one could possibly think is that it's somehow daring or transgressive to be a fan of Dr. Who. Come the fuck on.)

</comment><comment><USER59> "To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle."

If you want more geek women, you need more geek girls. (Girls, if you wait long enough, turn into women, funnily enough.)

<comment><USER60> "Geek" is not synonymous with "programmer" though. There are plenty of girls who are band geeks, or literature geeks, or even science geeks (especially in biology). They're just not computer geeks.

<comment><USER59> Yes, it was implied I meant computer geeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> > "They thought she wanted to build the next Terminator or hack into > Government systems, when she just wanted to build self-driving cars."

Maybe she doesn't see how this is similar in terms of amazing, but I would say those other women weren't far off.

<comment><USER35> The student was probably complaining about the unwashed masses' Hollywood- fueled fantasy of the computer hacker: Anyone who can write a program longer than 10 lines is capable of hacking into any computer system in five minutes or less, using or fixing any piece of computer-y, electronic-y, or science-y equipment, etc.

Hacking systems gets easier the younger the hacker is, the more important the data being protected by the system is, and the more resources its owners have to secure it.

All of these are of course ridiculous assumptions which suit narrative purposes but have no basis in reality. A lot of people don't understand that, and they can be really annoying to those who do.

</comment></comment><comment> copper-horse I'm sorry, but if people don't get your Star Wars humour, that does not make them stupid. May be they just didn't like Star Wars. And may be somehow they thought that being "in marketing or law or something" is just as worthy an occupation as writing spam filters for google.

I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and "the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive attitude of superiority that makes people fiercely unattractive and isolated. Men or women.

<comment><USER62> Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working _in_ IT. It's working _for_ IT, but it's working _in_ marketing and law. Would anyone seriously think that the sysadmin for a law firm could seriously present at a 'women in law' presentation?

<comment><USER63> > Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT.

It _is_ working in the IT industry. It _is not_ working in an IT profession. "Working in IT" can mean either.

I suspect that there is a group of people who would be interested in a presentation on issues facing "Women in the IT _industry_ " as well as one with interest in issues facing "Women in the IT _profession_ ", and I suspect that those groups overlap considerably. Though, I would also suspect that there is a substantial subset of each group that is _not_ in the other.

<comment><USER62> It would seem pointless to have an education faire for an industry rather than a profession. "Come and see what you can do working in the Water industry!" -> you could be a hydrologist, a lawyer, a receptionist, a pipelayer, a sysadmin, a farmer, a payroll officer... it's nonsensical, given the context. It'd almost be easier to list the jobs that can't be shoehorned into such a broad industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I was recently in Russia and there about 50% in computer science studies were women. We went to some IT companies like Yandex (biggest IT company in Europe AND THE competitor of Google in Russia) and there, from walking around, my estimate would be that about 50% was female as well!

This can be a tremendous advantage to companies in Russia I feel and it is something that we in the west, be it Europe or the US, should strive for as well.

</comment><comment><USER65> well, maybe the big part of what kills women's interest in programming/CS is the unnecessary nerdiness that comes attached with it. As if watching starwars or Dr. who or reading marvel comics is essentially related to competency in CS. Note that this is largely a US phenomena. I am not making a judgement about the value of said material, just that they need not be bundled and presented as part and parcel of computing.

<comment><USER66> How fucking stupid is that?

"Because the other guy interested in the same field watches Star Wars, I'm going to change career!"

Whether you like a field is supposed to be based on whether you like the field, not how cool you find the other people in the field.

So you're not describing girls who are interested in CS, you're describing girls _who want to get into a field full of cool people_.

Maybe if they are intolerant to having nerds as colleagues, said girls should aim for Hollywood instead of CS

<comment><USER65> " you're describing girls who want to get into a field full of cool people." No I am not. And you are grossly oversimplifying the process typically involved in vocational decision making. Seldom people go to a field based on pure passion, when most other things about it is at odds with their interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I agree that female teenage culture has a lot to answer for in dissuading girls from studying technical subjects. But this article is full of silly stereotypes. I'm not particularly interested in science fiction or playing video games, and I would not find software engineering very appealing if it were full of darth vader t-shirt wearing nerds.

<comment><USER65> "I agree that female teenage culture has a lot to answer for in dissuading girls from studying technical subjects" such as what? sounds like blaming the victim. Female teenage culture may happen to be just fine, and the techie culture is what alienates women from participation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> It's not just the stigma that IT isn't womanly, it's the idea that a young girl... already completely dejected by her peers, is forced to endure classes made up of 100% high school boys.

Unless the teacher is incredible defensive of the girl's position in the class, she will most likely drop it.

I am not surprised there are so few women in IT.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not just the stigma that IT isn't womanly, it's the idea that a young girl... already completely dejected by her peers (read "females"), couldn't integrate herself better in classes made up of 100% high school boys (which are her peers as much as the other girls). Unless this high school girl is incredibly hard to get along with, she will most likely make friends, males or females. I am surprised there are so few women in IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm a male software engineer and I had the same experiences going through school, too. Nobody else seemed to care about programming outside of school- related assignments. Very boring few years in school, those were.

</comment><comment><USER70> I wish I could understand what the relationship between Star Wars and technology/hacking/software engineering is, that everyone is talking about here. (P.S: I'm a Software Engineer but never watched Star Wars).

<comment><USER31> The relationship is that lots of people in the technology/hacking/software community like Star Wars and Star Trek and science fiction in general.

To the point that you get references to said things all the time in programming circles.

I'm sure you are aware of all this, but still wanted to make your point. But the fact that you have some outlier experience ("engineer who never watched Star Wars") should not come into the way of you researching the matter. It's as if I, as a fat person, say "who are those all those fat people with diabetes? I'm fat and I don't have diabetes".

<comment><USER70> > I'm sure you are aware of all this.

I'm not sure how you're sure. I haven't. I've heard Star Wars references before in general, but not particularly from the tech/software community. Your second analogy doesn't really make sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> One of my favorite concepts from Kurt Vonnegut was "Granfalloons" in Cats Cradle ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon> )

The idea is that people love to be part of a club-- not only for the feeling of belonging but for the feeling of being able to exclude others. Political parties, churches, etc. It's so fundamentally human to do this, and it's unsurprising that it should extend into the professional realm (though we should keep trying to rise above it).

</comment><comment><USER72> Most articles on this topic take the starting position that 'most IT workers are male, therefore the industry must be putting up barriers to female candidates.' However, I wonder if it's not more accurate to say that _society_ puts barriers in front of _anyone_ who's interested in an IT career, and males just find these barriers less difficult to circumvent. Nobody wants to be called a 'geek' but it seems more catastrophic for girls and women.

</comment><comment><USER73> Hi, I'm the author and I've written a follow-up post on this topic - <USER3> simple suggestion to encourage more women into IT [http://trishkhoo.com/2013/05/one-simple-suggestion-to- encour...](http://trishkhoo.com/2013/05/one-simple-suggestion-to-encourage- more-women-into-it/)

\- Trish Khoo

</comment><comment><USER74> This sounds like the equivalent of a male nerd complaining about "brogrammers"

<comment><USER24> Is a bro equal to a drunk idiotic party boy? If so, female nerds don't like them then either :)

<comment><USER74> My point was that disparaging someone because they have different tastes from you is stupid. Okay, so you don't like fashion or gossip, and you like star wars. That fact alone doesn't make you better or more interesting than someone who likes fashion and gossip, but not star wars.

<comment><USER24> It was hard for me to grasp your point from your previous post. Sorry, I just didn't realize the tone of it and I took it as sarcasm (didn't mean to offend you, if I did by chance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Obligatory Malcolm Tucker: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iRmPBve80>

</comment><comment><USER75> > makes a event for women in IT

> does not understand why women does not participate in broader (i.e. non > sexist) events in IT

sound logic.

</comment><comment><USER76> Sounds a lot like the way growing up as a software engineer in Utah felt... :D

</comment><comment><USER77> This was certainly a pleasing change to read. We need more women in tech!

</comment><comment><USER78> I knew exactly how she felt? That's really the best title you can come up with? This "use the original title" guideline is stupid, and makes for a shittier site because there's absolutely no way to scan headlines and decide which ones may be interesting.

Think about the difference between:

"I knew exactly how she felt" or "Is this what it's supposed to feel like?"

and

"Exoplanet discovery count by year" or "Earth's core far hotter than we thought?"

</comment><comment><USER79> Sometimes I feel alienated both by the "normal" crowd and the "nerd" crowd - it's like I am some hybrid that can't seem to feel a strong identity to either group (normal/nerdy because that is a common dichotomy). It doesn't help that being "nerdy" is now a hip/self-ironic thing, and people will flaunt how they are the most geekiest person ever because <Star Trek, math, programming, physics, geology, cosplay, [some incredibly specific interest]> \- and I can't really relate to feeling such a strong identity with an archetype.

I've also never seen Star Wars, for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER80> > All the other girls would talk about fashion labels and gossip and she would > be bored out of her mind, wondering why nobody else watched Doctor Who. None > of them understood the joke on her Darth Vader t-shirt. One of them listened > to her podcast and asked her what "Marvel" was. One of them told her to stop > making them feel stupid all the time.

Anyone else read this paragraph and think: "Yup, I bet she really was making them feel stupid"?

I was that judgmental dick of a teen and thank god I grew out of it. If I were the adult she was talking to at a party, I would have warned her against thinking that "different" meant "better." And told her that probably the best friends she'd ever make were not the ones who were carbon copies of her interests. If she would have the guts to leave aside the preferred pop culture and meet other people where, and how, they truly are.

</comment><comment><USER81> This post could have been a reddit comment.

<comment><USER74> You're talking about your post in the comment thread, right?

<comment><USER61> Username relevant?

<comment><USER74> Yes, actually. I made this user name after I got tired of numerous idiotic posts on HN going un-rebutted and not downvoted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A curated directory of engagement, retention resources and tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.tryetgo.com/directory/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

One of my biggest mistake I made in my last startup was not focusing enough in retention and engagement, so I decided to make a directory I wish I knew before building a product

I made the directory in a day but I have been collecting the resources for 3 years I want keep learning about this subject so if you have a good resource just leave it in a comment to send it to my email at email@example.com and I will add it to the directory

I would love to know your opinion

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice, check Designing for Empathy and Retention by DoorDash, it could be a good addition.

[https://medium.com/salesforce-ux/designing-for-empathy- and-r...](https://medium.com/salesforce-ux/designing-for-empathy-and- retention-c8f69b22ddf1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I'll check it now, thank you so much</comment></comment>


50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/10/50-new-useful-css-techniques-tools-and-tutorials/

<comment><USER2> What is most interesting to me is that you don't see giant collections of tips on how to fix WinForms or Cocoa layout bugs. HTML/CSS/JS is a surprisingly powerful and flexible combo, but I think that experience has proven it to be, at best, a hard to learn layout tool.

I see all these efforts for CSS3 and HTML5 and I can't help but think that we are going in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be making HTML/CSS/JS more complex, we should be making browsers lower-level while still preserving the isolation and delivery attributes of current web development.

<comment><USER3> If Microsoft implemented Cocoa on Windows and Apple implemented WinForms on Macs, would you really think it would work 100% identical on both platforms?

The problems are not web technologies but them being implemented inconsistently across browsers and platforms.

I agree though that the load of new features of HTML5 will increase this implementation diversity.

<comment><USER2> I was speeking with respect to even any single implementation. Anchor/Dock layout, centering, z-sorting, evenly distributing space, relative sizing, these are all thugs that HTML & CSS make fundamentally harder than try need to be.</comment></comment></comment>


Beat the clock: the surprising psychology behind being perpetually late - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/01/surprising-psychology-behind-being-perpetually-late <comment><USER2> Not much psychology and just observations. The premise was stronger than the actual insights.</comment>


Ask HN: What legal rights do I have over side project source code? - <AUTHOR>

Say I've been working on a project for a year. I'm not quite done, but I decide to join a firm as a software developer. Short of open sourcing everything I've done, do I have a way to continue development of this project in my free time? Does anyone know of any legal documents that are already prepared in this regard? Or of other legal strategies?
I can imagine that the company, and their code base, will perhaps legitimately claim that as soon as I start working on that -- I will be 'affected' by this code, and so it becomes difficult to determine if my side project code is my code any longer.
I could seriously see this being an issue in a couple of months. At any rate, do people remain independent contractors or consultants for this reason? Curious what other people's experiences are. <comment><USER2> I am not a lawyer, but the question doesn't require a "legal strategy" so much as it requires an agreement between you and your employer that your side project does not pose a problem. Why don't you talk to your employer, tell them that you working on your own time provides immense value to them ("Training that you don't have to pay for!"), and ask them to simply write a letter or memo saying "We're aware of it and have no problem."

Litigation is merely the penultimate stage of a negotiation which broke down many steps before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That sounds exactly right. For my purposes, this would be for future employers (I basically took a year off to work on this project). But I imagine a memo would be all I needed on a new job.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just another quick thought. I suppose to be completely safe, I could try to work in a technology area that was as different as possible from what my project is on (mostly real-time graphics, c++, etc.). Perhaps that would keep them separate if it were ever a legal question.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you in the United States? What state are you working in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, in California.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only state I'm aware of that for sure guarantees ownership of projects worked on in free-time while an employee is California. Otherwise, you're going to need to provide your locale.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know. Yeah, I'm in California. Thanks.

<comment><USER5> Since the state of California has decided that such "we own you" contract provisions are against public policy, the only risks you are running if you don't tell your new employer are that they might fire you if/when they discover your side project and that you might have to hire a lawyer if they sue you purely on these grounds.

If they aren't asking for pretty much all your available effort (hours per week and so on) and there's no real overlap between what they do and your project (so there's no legitimate possibility of trade secret law coming into play) I don't see any need to borrow trouble and bring this up. Better to ask forgiveness and all that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another good to know. Thanks.

I think I agree with your last thoughts there too. Very helpful. I mean I'll be honest with them as much as possible. But there's no need to confuse things until there really is overlap like you mention.

At a place like Google or Microsoft, where there are huge code bases, I would probably have to declare things immediately. But otherwise I could probably wait and see. Thanks again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/buy_our_devices_model

<comment><USER3> I'm skeptical about Siri. My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend, and we both did the requisite amount of playing with the new feature, and it was amusing, but after the first couple of days she pretty much abandoned it.

There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.

With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.

For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not _reliable_ , which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be _most reliable_ , like when you're in a rush.

Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.

[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: <http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack>]

<comment><USER4> I can't shake the feeling that the Siri of today is like the app ecosystem of the iPhone 1.

• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable use-case.

• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat- lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.

<comment><USER5> Unlike some of Apple's other features, UI, Apps, and operating software, Siri is not something that will be easy to improve. Siri represents the cumulative efforts of decades of computer science research by numerous public and private entities.

While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to this.

Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the next few years.

<comment><USER6> I'd also observe that "let's create an 'AI' by piling on the special cases until we have a generally-capable tool" has been tried numerous times, and it's a known failure case. After a certain point, the piled-on rules being negatively interacting with each other, and it requires one of 1. true AI (thus begging the question) or 2. treating the set of rules as one of the quirkiest programming languages ever to make effective use of it.

Many people are speculating about how wonderful Siri will be in the (near) future; I'd submit that the evidence suggests that it has pretty much come out of the gate with all the power it's going to have for the foreseeable future. Natural language querying seems to have been stuck at the same plateau for a long time, just like voice recognition technology has been.

<comment><USER7> Is voice recognition technology really on a plateau? I have highly accurate speaker independent speech recognition in my pocket now. I'm using it to dictate this response. It didn't require any training, and it's nearly perfect. I may be mistaken, but I believe this capability is relatively new. Even if it's not, it's so close to being perfect that there's little room for improvement, or so it seems.

And yes, I know that all of the smart are not in my pocket, but rather in the cloud.

<comment><USER6> I bet you're enunciating clearly and that the mic is not picking up much background noise. (Note that you may be in an environment with some noise but there are easy ways to create noise-cancelling microphones or directional microphones that are very effective. You'd have to check the recording to see how much noise is on it.) I could get the same results from Dragon's voice recognition software with careful enunciation and a bit of practice 10 years ago. It is also well-known how to get very good accuracy on a restricted dictionary. What has not been solved is improving beyond that. Situations in which humans will easily extract speech, so easily that we do things like casually lay music tracks over a speaker without much thought, software will still just fail miserably for, as far as I know.

<comment><USER7> Was Dragon's software speaker-independent ten years ago, and did you have to train it? I looked into this recently and couldn't find any speaker- independent PC software _now_ , and I think it all required training. Being able to just pick up and talk without _any_ preliminaries is still a pretty big deal.

I'm sure you're right about the other deficiencies. "Almost perfect" is very strong, after all. Still, it's really excellent, and in my experience is _much_ better than it was just a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple launches new hardware with new software features. ALWAYS. Siri is the, "What if I could just talk to my device, and it would be able to disambiguate and give me exactly what information I wanted." Okay, Siri explained.

Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.

And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's really a stretch to believe that Siri is how Apple is going to compete with Google and Microsoft on search -- Apple doesn't do search! Siri calls out to existing search services from Google and Wolfram Alpha to do the actual work.

Apple isn't good at services; iCloud may be the most satisfactory result after a long list of so-so and downright terrible attempts. There's no technology here that either Google or Microsoft couldn't do better.

<comment><USER10> "Apple doesn't do search!"

They really didn't do AI until a few weeks ago either. And they didn't do music until they did music. Would you really be shocked if one of the headlines tomorrow morning was that Duck Duck Go was acquired by Apple?

<comment><USER11> If DDG went mainstream it would probably hit the paid tier for the Google API that generates most of its quality content.

<comment><USER12> We don't use any Google APIs.

<comment><USER13> But Bing I think? Would DDG work standalone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's going to stop Google from creating an "open" alternative to Siri? Siri is just a technology, not a business model. Google is really good at recreating competitor technologies around their own ad-driven model.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.

<comment><USER5> Considering Siri is the commercialization of a lot of public research, it wouldn't be that hard for a company like Google to extend their existing voice actions technology using the exact same body of research. They might even be able to license much of the exact same technology as Apple did when they bought Siri the company.

My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a _complementing interface_ to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.

<comment><USER14> If I'm taling to my phone, I'm not looking at the screen for ads. So how does Google bring ads to voice-recog? Is the voice reply interrupted by voice ads? I wouldn't use it.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't have to be ads. Suppose you run a restaurant. When someone asks their phone about restaurants nearby, how much would you pay to have your restaurant preferentially mentioned before other restaurants? How much would you pay to get access to a list of questions people ask about restaurant-related terms near you, and how the person reacted to the results? Did they ask further questions about your restaurant? Did they view your page? Did their phone's GPS indicate that they visited your establishment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know if this is unambiguously a step forward from license sales or tacky ads... It could be just me, but don't "The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model" and "just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them" sound a lot like the way computer manufacturers competed with one another in Elder Days _?

_ Genuine question - wasn't there, myself.

<comment><USER17> Except a lot of the time, it wasn't a lot of cool shit, it was a bunch of crapware and you still had to buy software to actually do cool stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think much of the commentary misses the fact that Siri is not a feature, its a UI, and a very early-stage one at that. Criticizing Siri as less than useful in its current iteration is like criticizing WIMP as less than useful 20 years ago.

The fact that Siri is UI and not a feature is exactly why Microsoft and Google and many other service providers should worry about it - it commoditizes the back-end and creates a new interaction point around which Apple, and currently only Apple, is creating business value. Both Microsoft and Google have technology cards to play in this area, but neither has deployed a new user- interface in the way that Apple recently has. I would expect them to each go after a solid play in this area, in the same way that Microsoft responded to the Wii with Kinect - with a strong competitive urgency. Whether or not they are successful in their response is something we'll know in time.

<comment><USER13> How is it an UI? I mean it is voice input. OK, that's an UI, but it is an UI that has been around for thousands of years. Non-Apple phones also had voice input for years. Now Siri adds some things it recognizes, like calendar dates. What is so revolutionary about it? Other vendors will also add more tasks to their voice recognition. Google is arguably in a better position to do so, because they have worked on the problem for years (not voice recognition, but what do users mean when they search for "x").

<comment><USER18> I never said revolutionary, you did. Had you asked, I would have probably characterized it as "evolutionary" more than anything - but most innovation is.

I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.

If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - <USER2> had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that they can deploy in response to Siri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article he links to is a really fine specimen of inane tech punditry. Why are tech execs downplaying a feature of a competing product? Uh, gee I dunno, because it's a feature of a competing product maybe? Is there really nothing better to write an article about?

</comment><comment><USER20> I's suggest that Siri really is something new under the sun: it is the first large-scale, distributed AI system interacting with the 'real world' in an uncontrolled manner. It would not surprise me if somewhere in the back end queries are being looked at and humans are fine-tuning or making suggestions of possible responses. There is a scale here that's never been seen before. And Apple can afford a legion of unseen human beings helping in the background if it wants to experiment with this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Siri is a nice technology (though, after having seen 3 attempted uses, I have yet to see it work), but the sell-hardware-backed-by-nice-software/services is not some revolutionary business model; further, often, it's not one that is sustainable for long. The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales; now they are distributed across hardware sales as a per-unit transfer cost and become a cost-center; now investors and organizational politics begin to pay attention and the model of buy-random-shit-and-claim-it- is-accretive begins to sour.

This is why it is so hard to do hardware _and_ software together. There are few examples of long term success in hardware/software and Apple is certainly not one of them (except in the '00s). IBM is one. But, if one area of the business takes off, the pressure to drop the other is immense (see Thinkpad and HP's current flail-ures). As XCode users will recall, there are also issues with adding significant value to past purchasers: if you paid $100 for a product that had $20 of awesome value added later by an upgrade, the company who took your $100 of cash should only be able to recognize $80 of revenue now.

<comment><USER22> > The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the > pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales

I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free. It's a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device buyers._

BS, iCloud has paid upgrades, and I imagine those paid upgrades make the rest of the model break even or better, just like DropBox. It's not ad-model vs. devices-model, it's freemium product tacked onto device sales, further enhancing margins.

Glib, but wrong.

<comment><USER24> The statement you're quibbling with — "free-of-charge online services ad-free" — is unassailable. Anyone signing up for iCloud with the intention of using it for data sync (contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks), and/or application data, and/or the ability to track, lock, and wipe lost devices, will be hard- pressed to exceed the free 5GB.

Sure, iTunes Match or syncing several devices directly to iCloud might induce a heavy user to pay for more, but iCloud remains a bona-fide free service for the vast majority of its customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't have a 4S because I'm on the other upgrade cycle. i.e. I got the 4 at launch. After the initial "cool" factor I think Siri makes sense in certain situations, like when driving. I would love to have access to my iPhone by speaking to it while driving.

<comment><USER26> I was going to stick with my 4 for another year but ended up with a 4S through a rather circuitous route.

Anyhow, since if you have a 4S you're going to play with Siri, I've found that it's really quite useful even when not in a hands-free situation like driving. I've found it very useful for setting reminders faster than I would be able to manually, which I found quite surprising. I'm looking forward to finding more things like that in the future.

<comment><USER27> Here's what I have found works faster with Siri:

Remind me to... (like you said) Wake me up at/in... Call [name in my contacts] Call [place not in my contacts]. Siri looks up business for you. Note [something I want to make a note of]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Siri, block all ads."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

</comment><comment><USER29> Commoditize your product compliments

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the author's points is incorrect:

-When you use web search on iphone which ad network do you see ads from?

You do not buy an iphone to avoid seeing search texts as you still see them</comment>


Strongbox: Aaron Swartz's last gift to Internet privacy (May 2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/strongbox-aaron-swartzs-last-gift-to-internet-privacy-7000015455/

<comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion of The New Yorker's Stronbox implementation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5712030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5712030)

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/stron...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/strongbox- and-aaron-swartz.html)</comment>


ASK:HN- What should I teach my kids - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for discrete skills and facts that can help them get ahead, while making it age appropriate. Let's say that I'm starting at three and then working up.<p>Plan is to use a Spaced Repetition System where possible and then hands on activities for reinforcement. <comment><USER2> Great question. I was thinking about this myself and found it very difficult to answer so I thought about what they absolutely cannot do without learning instead.

My answer is to teach them english (reading, writing and speaking) and computers. If I can teach them these basic skills they can learn anything by themselves.

We live in Thailand where its very expensive to get a good education in english. So I took my kids out of school and hired a teacher to give a very strong foundation in english. I'm teaching them computers. After a while I'll teach them basic maths and then I'll let them choose what they want to learn themselves.

My goal is to give them a love of learning, to help them find out what they love to do and give them the time and tools to become an expert in that.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1.) Love one another

2.) Learn to say please and thank you

3.) Watch TV and play video games just in moderation

4.) Treat others with kindness and be respectful especially to elders

5.) Make healthy food choices

6.) The ability to tell the truth

7.) Take public transportation

8.) Know when to say no

9.) Save money and spend wisely

10.) Listen carefully and look someone in the eye during a conversation

11.) Distinguish needs from wants

12.) Cook a meal, do the laundry and household chores

13.) Developing good study habits

14.) Mom and Dad won't always be there to save you when you screw up

</comment><comment><USER4> Teach them to have a hunger for knowledge, and to find joy in learning. Of all the things my dad taught me, this is what i am the most grateful for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Humility, inquisitiveness and tolerance

</comment><comment><USER6> Get ahead of what?

</comment><comment><USER7> Teach them how to learn fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, yes, that's one of the things I'm teaching my first one. I'm also teaching logical fallacies, how to think about thinking among other thinking skills.

Obvious ones include financial, survival, social.</comment></comment>


Basic Mathematics for Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/towards-data-science/deep-learning-basic-mathematics-for-deep-learning-a82981e95e3b <comment><USER2> > Linear algebra is a form of continuous rather than discrete mathematics

No.

> The study of linear algebra involves several types of mathematical objects > they are as follows: (...)

No.

(0) Tensors aren't "arrays of numbers" any more than points in physical space are "arrays of coordinates". You can _assign_ them coordinates in several ways, and this is of course useful for computations, but this isn't what tensors _are_.

(1) The fact tensors can have contravariant and covariant indices, which is useful to determine what computations might be _meaningful_ , is not mentioned at all.</comment>


What's trending on Skimic? Sign up - <AUTHOR> https://skimic.com/trending <comment><USER2> If I don't sign up I don't see anything. So I have no incentive to sign up! The lack of information is not an incentive.

Consider an aproach similar to HN or Reddit, where you can read a lot of information before signing up.

<comment><USER3> Hi gus_massa. That was a mistake on our end and it's fixed now. Sorry for the bad UX. Please try again!</comment></comment>