knowitall

Maybe you are right in this case. However, nightclubs need women because a major reason to go there is to hook up. What is the reason to bribe women into showing up at hacking competitions?

Actual cynical me thinks "more sexy workplace" is part of the unspoken motivation for the "more women into programming" movement. But I don't think that is the official message they want to send out...

Then again, why not pick up a book for 20$ and get cracking?

I'll probably always be a bit wary of people who learn coding from a school or who need a school to learn coding. Since most of the time you have to learn new things while coding (new libraries, new languages, new challenges), I don't know if these people will be able to keep learning by themselves without courses provided for them.

Not sure how good a programmer you can become without being inherently excited about the whole thing.

In a way I believe everything can be learned the same way. I suck at design, but in theory I could see how I could learn it. The problem is I would have to be constantly absorbing new things. While talking a walk I would have to notice the typography on shop signs, when browsing the web I would make mental notes of designs I like, and so on. Totally doable, yet I am not doing it. On the other hand I read about programming all the time, even about topics I don't really work with atm like scalability, 3d programming, machine learning and so on.

Perhaps a course can be a good start, but I suppose it only gets you 1% of the way...

I must admit things like that make me angry because of the implied "women are victims" message.

Any citations for your latter claim? Never mind that you set up a false dilemma, as if it could only either be "both parents working and worry-free" or "time with kids and constant worries".

And what about that is racist in your opinion?

Still, it's not racism, just the way the human visual system works. What do you think is racist about it? "People don't even care enough to remember the name"? That is not what is going on at all. If they wouldn't care, why would they talk to them at all?

Who knows, perhaps they even have an advantage because people actually remember them. They only get their names mixed up sometimes - other people are simply forgotten completely. How often do you forget the name of people you have just been introduced to?

"There is a slight correlation between the egalitarianism of a household and a fairer division of domestic labor"

How did they measure "fairness" of the division of domestic labor? I suspect that their evaluation is very biased.

To assume 50% division is fair is just wrong.

Edit: to explain, you have to take context into account. For example one person might care more for some things to be cleaned than another (for example some people like to clean the house to perfection EVERY DAY). One person might do more other work. And so on. Where does the assumption come from that people are forced into disadvantageous relationships? Possibly people know exactly what they sign up for, and whatever division of domestic labor they end up with is exactly what they negotiated for (consciously or subconsciously). And before you mention the children, note that painting the job of caring for children to be so horrible is just pure ideology. Maybe some people actually enjoy spending time with their children - more than spending time with Excel and Power Point.

Also, how is the division of domestic labor even measured? In time? Or awfulness of tasks? Is filling the washing machine equivalent to cleaning the toilet?

Yeah it's really annoying that once you have kids, you also have to spend time with them.

"marginalized" implies discrimination

That may be so, but then it wouldn't be the fault of discrimination.

I've read somewhere that most open source contributors started their own projects, rather than joining existing ones.

"more than 8 in 10 open source developers are white"

According to Wikipedia 72% of the population of the USA are white, so maybe 8 in 10 is not really that much of an indication of discrimination or disadvantage. (72% boils down to "more than 7 in 10").

"we updated Chrome’s certificate revocation metadata immediately to block that intermediate CA"

Dumb question, why then does Chrome on my computer show "Google Chrome is up to date."? Shouldn't there be an update ready? Or is there a different (silent) way to update certificates?

By that logic the whole computer industry is worthless because it's comprised of worthless ones and zeros.

What is the secret ingredient of graph databases? The presentation linked from the presentation mentions physical addresses instead of IDs. I get that that would be a speedup, but I would expect it to be more like a constant factor?

Then maybe you can save all links from a node in the node, so you can get all the links with one read access. Fine. But as soon as you get to the second or third level, I would expect the magic to be gone. Say every node has 100 links. OK, so the first 100 links you get in constant time c. But to get the second level, you already need 100 requests (one for each node and it's attached link list). So 100c time. For the third level you need 10000 reads, 10000c time. The next level would be 1000000 requests.

Just saying I'd expect things to get ugly with a graph database pretty fast, too (not as fast as with a relational db, but still).

I haven't really coded a big graph based app, but my expectation would be that get really good performance, a hand coded solution would always be required. For example trying to squeeze as much of the relevant data into memory in a compressed way. Am I wrong?

Oh and also I am not sure how good relational DBs are at query optimization. Just because the visible model is "one row per link" doesn't mean the db couldn't do some intelligent caching internally.

God forbid anybody could be interested in other things than you are.

Btw your submission singlehandedly increased the amount of Bitcoin articles on the HN front page by 33%.

Always the volatility remarks - because in contrast the world economy is so very stable, as recent years have shown?

Unfortunately once I typed it in, I can not trust the password anymore.

Is "pump and dump" illegal? Seems to me all they were doing is selling a lot of BTC in one go, then buying again?

I actually find this Twitter orchestrated "pump and dump" a rather amusing concept. I don't think it comes with any guarantees of success, though.

Also, taxes

There already is a transaction fee - miners will ignore your transaction if you pay too little or nothing.

The original whitepaper already mentions a way to reduce the size of the blockchain using Merkel Hashes (iirc) - they show that it is sufficient to only remember parts of the blockchain. It hasn't been implemented yet, but I suppose if the problem becomes really pressing it will be implemented.

I suppose some of the fun parts would go away then, such as the possibility to view every transaction that has ever been made - in the Merkel Hashed blockchain not all information would be preserved.

Edit: I suppose it would still be possible to monitor all transactions and remember them by some other means, just not in the blockchain.

People code bitcoin clients. People vote for a protocol change by using those clients instead of the old ones.

A change can not be enforced. If a significant subset of clients decides on a different path (for example stay on the old protocol), a fork of the blockchain would be the result. I guess then if you would own 1 BTC before, you'd suddenly own one "old Bitcoin" and one "new Bitcoin".

There are already clients that only download parts of the blockchain, trading storage and bandwidth for reduced security - for example the mobile clients, or Multibit (afaik). I suppose they rely on trusted nodes (not sure).

But suppose SHA256 would be broken and the "vote" would be to change the mining protocol to scrypt. Why wouldn't the nodes and miners change? It's not so different from updating your web server when there has been a security bug. Some people forget to update their web servers and get hacked. The next time, maybe they won't forget to update. Maybe if you installed your bitcoin software with a package manager, it will be automatically updated.

It would be interesting if there was an attempt to enforce "tainted coins" (forcing clients to reject bitcoins that are known to have been through criminal hands). I suppose governments could require businesses to only accept btc that are not tainted. I honestly don't know how things would play out - maybe the community would addopt it, maybe not, or maybe there would be a fork...

All just from my limited understanding, please correct me if necessary.

Sure dodging taxes is of course illegal. But you don't have to dodge taxes just because you barter.

I didn't mean it to deride Bitcoin - I like Bitcoin. I just don't think it will lead to an Utopia were we are all just friends and forever without debt.

What exactly does that mean? Is it illegal to, say, pay for a house in eggs (I give you 1 million eggs for this house)? Any kind of barter is illegal?

While I like Bitcoin, I doubt it will lead to an Utopian future. It doesn't change the basic economic problem ("there isn't enough to go around") or human nature. It's just an utility that makes some things more efficient.

It is economic equality: everybody owns the same, which is nothing.

Envy is a powerful force...

"A definition of sexism : "behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex""

That's just plain silly. So anything that suggests any gender in a person is sexism? Good luck with that.

"Is there a stereotype that women are the toy/reward for a man doing a good job?"

Women liking a man in general is something men want, likewise vice versa men liking a women is something women want. Therefore both things are being used in advertising. If an ad is targeted at men it will often show women liking the man, if an ad is tarted at women it will show men liking a woman.

Do you believe there have never been any ads showing how a man falls for a woman?

Do you believe it is sexist to assume men like being liked by women and vice versa?

Do you believe in general wanting to impress the opposite sex is negligible as a motivational factor in people wanting to do a good job?

Women in print media are necessarily objects - they are blots of ink printed on a 2d page.

The "women as objects" discussion also needs to be questioned. What does it even mean? Men shouldn't be allowed to be attracted to the female physique? Before having sex, they should require women to pass an IQ test and recite the names of all American presidents?

Funny enough the other day there was a post about a guy complaining about guys hooting for Marie Curie. Unless he thinks they were into her grey hair, apparently being attracted to brains also is not OK. I suppose wanting sex in general is not OK because it objectifies people.

"In fact I don't think the average guy knows squat about where we are in this cultural evolution"

I believe you don't really understand what is going on. You and the feminists are actually fighting to rob women of their privileges. Good job! (Hint: children)