rorymarinich

Ah, but there's the rub: Dustin doesn't have a great product and he isn't right. At best he's a good marketer: the only things he ever stands out for are his gimmicks. His best posts were gimmick posts ("watch me redesign airport passes!", "let me show you how stupid commercial graphic designers are!"); his only creations are good marketing creations ("you should follow me on Twitter here", "kudos!"). Occasionally I've seen him get halfway towards having a decent thought, but I've never seen him follow through.

Compare that to John Gruber, who's talked before about how he painstakingly selected the Daring Fireball color before he launched his blog (which has displayed his thoughts, gimmickless and unchanged, for a decade now). Greatness is a matter of finding big ideas and sticking to them; the only thing Dustin's stuck to in the few years he's been promoting himself is that people ought to remember him. But he's forgotten to create something worth remembering.

Curtis writes:

> One of my main goals for this new writing interface was to encourage myself to spend more time writing and less time presenting.

Which is admirable, and I've noticed that his writing in this new iteration is somewhat less surface-irritating. But he contradicts this in this very thread, when he says of his jackass slogan: "It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it." He cares about being remembered; it never seems to occur to him that there's more to writing good things than making them memorable.

It also makes me more aware of the clipped, cold feel of the dialogues we have here. Most (though not all) exchanges here read to me as humorless and either blunt or overpolite. I don't know if I entirely like it, but I wouldn't immediately say it's a bad thing either. It works better, I think, in the tech discussions, but elsewhere it keeps me feeling distant from the conversation.

Now, the question I'd have for people who post more than I do is: How do you feel about comment threads where you see your score but nobody else's? How's that change your perception of threads when your score's high, versus when you have a comment or series of comments in the greys?

I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.

Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.

> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.

I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.

Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.

It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?

I think we're getting to the point where we can't discuss this alternative reality meaningfully (but don't get me wrong, this was a very nice discussion!), but I'm curious. What makes you think that without Android nobody else would launch an App Store, or that nobody else would have the clout to get the sorts of apps that users are interested in?

Sans Android, the iPhone would still have the limitations inherent to a closed system that it has today. Anybody else could have added the background multitasking, or the free GPS, or any of the features that made Android popular, to their own OS, and attracted the same audience that made Android big. I mean, Microsoft is by no means a company that can't afford to compete with Apple financially, and RIM's no slouch either.

I can agree with that statement, to some extent. The composer Brian Eno once said of prodigies: "The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities." Programming fits the "discontinuous possibilities" mold very well.

The question is whether or not you want to keep teaching programming in a way that only clicks with those more prodigious people, or if you want to come up with approaches that let in people who may not have the same instant intuition. And, just as in classical music, if you encourage only the people who have a certain sort of aptitude, you're also encouraging people who will only ever approach programming in one certain way, and the result is that the medium as a whole suffers from lack of diversity.

> They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.

It's not that they ask people to program that's problematic. (I'd like to see a citation for that 60%, as well; it sounds fishy.) I've taken several programming classes at several levels and I don't think anybody who gets what they're doing finds programming difficult.

The challenge, rather, and this is not only a challenge that comes up in programming courses, is figuring out how to make people get it. You need to develop a manner of teaching that makes all these actions somehow intuitive; why is it that we program in this particular way? What does each word mean? Why's each language constructed in its particular pattern, and how does that affect coding?

Teaching programming without putting serious thought into creating a comfortable abstraction for students is not really teaching programming at all. It's like teaching a creative writing class without simultaneously teaching literature (and, sadly, many creative writing classes are guilty of this). You can pretend that writing is an obscure, difficult art that only a select few minds can master. But I'm a skilled poet and I teach poetry to middle schoolers and I think it's safe to say that the reason most people can't write a good poem is that they don't understand the reason why they're writing a poem in the first place.

I had a teacher, in a high school Java class, who was actually very good at teaching this; I didn't recognize how good he was at the time. He took a class composed mostly of people who knew literally nothing about anything code-related, and in a year turned them without fail into programmers capable of making competent programs. No student dropped out or switched the class; he worked with what he had and didn't fail a single one of us.

The guy-to-girl ratio was pretty close to 1:1, for what it's worth. We had a surprisingly diverse class. And it was really surprising who ended up really showing a knack for coding and who didn't. Frequently the really good coders struggled for longer than the rest of us did, but when they hit upon how to get something done their approach was a lot better than the rest of the class's.

(And by the way, I'd like to mention that this is the best discussion of gender equality that I've ever read on Hacker News, and that I'm in a way really proud that we're having this conversation right here. Cheers to everybody on both sides for keeping this a relatively civil conversation; this is not an easy subject to discuss politely.)

Nope. The ideas behind programming are extremely basic. The rules, so to speak, that dictate how programming works are simplistic. And the actual method of creating programs — essentially, breaking down a single task into lots of little pieces — is a method of problem-solving that's existed for a long, long time.

The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly. This isn't inherent to the nature of the task. I've handed a lot of people who literally knew nothing about how to program things like Game Maker, RMXP, and _why the lucky stiff's TryRuby, and it's impressive how quickly they both learn how programming works and begin making things with what they've learned.

"Extreme brain activity"? Hardly. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, programming's simple enough that lots of programmers get started when they're eight years old.

I think there are two reasons for this. First off, he's a perfectionist when it comes to timing and arrangements. Apple execs in general are pretty good at knowing what the public cares about hearing and what they'll find boring; not so with other companies, whose executives are usually hilariously awful. But even among Apple's top presenters I think that Steve's timing is particularly terrific.

The bigger reason, however, is that Steve displays a really sincere love for almost all the things he shows off (and it's very obvious on the rare occasions he doesn't like what he has to say). It seems really clear that he genuinely thinks all the things he shows off are as terrific as he says they are. It's magnetic to see somebody talk about how much they love something. It's also rare to see it coming from a corporate event.

> (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)

It's because we all like kneejerk downvoting opinions that disagree with ours! Kneejerk is fun! Sometimes we also curse each other out too. It's an awful joy.

(I wish Hacker News would stop with the downvotes. We derive enough data, I think, from masses of upvotes to sort threads by popularity. The only people who deserve downvotes are spammers, and we have the "flag" option for that.)

Consumer phone market? iPhone was up against every single cheap phone that called and placed texts. Those phones are still popular for the majority of the population.

Enterprise market? Blackberry was king. Nobody else came close.

Gaming device? The DS and PSP were and still are powerful competitors. The DS in particular, because Nintendo's one of the king game makers and they restrict all their games to their own console.

The iPhone competed very effectively in all those markets. But it never had a risk of dominating a single one. Compare that to Windows — if I wanted a consumer operating system that ran the best/most popular programs, I had to get Windows, because there was no other operating system that had anything like the programs I'd actually have to use. (Mac OS? Not even close.)

If Google didn't have their huge amounts of cash, we'd still have the Blackberry OS, which is still enormously successful (though it's taken a hit recently), and we'd have Windows Phone 7, which is actually a really damn decent operating system.

The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless. The term interface design uses to describe this is "mental model"; good designs let users form a model of how something works before they even touch it. (So on iTunes, the metaphor of seeing album covers immediately makes me think that to play an album I click on its cover, which is exactly right.) It's very difficult to create a program that forms a good mental model of every single function at once, especially if you're making a complex program like iTunes. But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok, where, looking at that screenshot, I can't tell how I would look at other artists' music or how to form a playlist or a number of other relatively trivial tasks.

I personally use "they", because I'm a badass linguistic prescriptivist who's fine with using a neutral plural to indicate singular. But I don't see a problem with stopping the male singular from being the default. Language describes reality, but it also defines it; languages that assume maleness as a default suggest to its users that maleness is the superior form to take. I don't think it's a particularly devastating result of language, but I also don't think it's particularly annoying for women to ask that they not be diminished by the language. If it doesn't mean anything, why not just alternate it and not raise a fuss?

(I draw the line at stuff like "womyn", though, because that's when for me it becomes noticeably silly.)

The fact of the matter is that programming is very unglamorous. It's not a job that often entails the sort of creative passion associated with making music or film or literature; even when we're talking just about the kind of programming that's meant to serve that kind of creative function, it's still rarely as visceral as a good rock song. (The only piece of programming that ever moved me like that was We Feel Fine.) So using the term "rock star" serves to inflate the egos of people who might otherwise not feel like their work was important or meaningful.

When I hear a company say they're looking for "rockstar programmers" I usually take it to mean that they're looking to genuinely care about the programmer they're hiring. They don't just want a code monkey, they want somebody awesome and colorful who'll really be a meaningful part of their team. (Whether these companies actually believe that is another question. I'd bet most of the people who use the phrase are full of shit.)

Look at the screenshot included in this post:

http://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok2.4.0.png

It uses a three-panel layout, for information that is not essentially equal. The left panel determines source, the right panel browses through music, and the center panel shows related artists. There's a lot of unused space in the title (now playing) bar and in the lower left corner.

So if I'm picking music to play, I have to first choose an option on the left. Then I skip OVER the center panel and look at the newly-updated right panel, which doesn't seem to be showing me very much music at once. The middle panel only matters if I'm actively looking at similar artists.

iTunes, on the other hand, has a clearly delineated (smaller, different-looking) left panel that lets you decide what sources you're using to play your music (playlists, the online store, podcasts, etc). The bulk of its interface is dedicated to letting you browse as much music as possible. It has an artist recommendation that shows up as a similarly delineated bar on the right, and which is disabled by default.

Also, look at how many untitled icons there are on the Amarok interface. And how many repetitive images there are. That one band's album image repeats five times — is it adding extra relevant information? And in the center pane there seem to be two separate Settings icons. Do they do the same thing, or do they serve different purposes?

iTunes has bloat, but on a WAY different magnitude. Here's a screenshot of what mine looks like right now:

http://cl.ly/191a0U1o411X0O433Q0g

There are only three groupings of unnamed icons. The one at the top right pretty clearly depicts the viewing style; the one at bottom left is all the playing controls (though the Add Playlist and Hide Artwork buttons are a bit ambiguous); the ones on the bottom right (AirPlay, Genius, and Show Sidebar) are the only ones that I think are a little confusing to new users. Everything else is very clearly labeled and pretty much explains itself.

I'm not a big fan of iTunes but it's operating on a different level of UI design than Amarok, currently. That's not to say it's prettier (although I think Amarok is a little clunky), but it's a program that a team of expert interface designers have thoroughly tweaked. I wish KDE had more interface designers working for them; it's one of those fields that sounds like a lot of unnecessary bullshit but goes a long way towards making experiences more enjoyable.

While the iPhone's very competitive, and while it has a near monopoly in terms of media popularity — I've seen many iPhones in movies, and no Droid — it by no means came remotely close to a monopoly. Just as the iPod was never a monopoly — it had an enormous marketshare, but there were many successful MP3 players that competed with it and served as a viable option for people who didn't want an iTunes lock-in.

I'm wondering why its code name is "Slipstream", though. Is that a name that refers specifically to a new feature? Or are all Amarok releases so colorfully titled?

(As an aside: If you haven't listened to the Mike Oldfield composition Amarok that the program gets its name from, remedy that immediately. It's an absolutely stupendous hour of music, perhaps my favorite album ever. Excerpts on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs3NgTIXqfc)

Well said!

We are bound to the patterns we create in our own life. Everything we know and do we fit into systems, so that we can understand and process the information we've got. The problem with this is that while these patterns help us they simultaneously limit us, so that if we are not consciously aware of those patterns we find it hard to escape them.

Look at anybody who's made anything worthwhile and you'll notice that they always made it by consciously looking at what limited them and defying those limits. I just read a series of interviews with Stanley Kubrick, the legendary director of 2001 and The Shining; one thing that emerged every time he talked about film was that there was no extraordinary leap of genius that led to his masterpieces. He simply made sure to look at what he was limiting himself to and then, time and time again, do things that forced him into new areas.

This isn't just advice for entrepreneurs. It's advice for anybody who wants to truly appreciate what life's capable of, experience the truly sublime moments that make all the other moments worth it. (But I guess the difference is that entrepreneurs, and all makers, really, are striving to create new things which will help other people break out of their own patterns. And what a joyful career that is!)

The argument isn't whether or not some people, including many women, are turned off by the current culture of programming. They absolutely are. The argument is whether it's the responsibility of the current culture to try and adjust its ways to let more people in, or if it's okay to let it stay the way it is. People in this thread are making arguments for each side.

I don't associate with many geekier types of people, despite a lot of overlapping interests, for precisely this reason. I'm very sensitive and easily hurt/annoyed by that kind of behavior. So I avoid a lot of things that I'm actively interested in because the crowd is so abominable. The gaming world in particular; I don't even look at games which draw is online play, because I've never found an online gaming community that I've felt comfortable being a part of.

That said, I'm going to bet on them surpassing themselves. The iPad is a truly extraordinary device, and Apple will spend years and years making it more and more powerful, more accessible to the public, and easier to develop for. (At least, I hope that last point is true.) At the same time, they're continuing to evolve the Mac OS X to a point where it's really differentiated from Windows, and serves a different kind of purpose for different consumers. I think they might see a resurgence in laptop/desktop popularity. In fact, I'm certain their desktops will become more popular, especially with the huge screens; the laptops will get more popular unless they're eclipsed by some future brilliant iPad.

I'm also going to bet on the Apple TV seeing a lot more attention than it's received so far. I have the latest one and it's a beautiful little box. I can see them doing a lot to innovate in the world of streaming video and music. They've got the iTunes store, after all, which is still expanding. And they've shown hints in the last two years that they're looking at new innovative ways to deliver content. I know the iTunes LP hasn't seen much attention recently, but systems like that which add more content to the music we listen to have the potential to really invigorate the music world, especially if they give indie artists access to those tools.

It's possible that the iPhone will soon see a peak, especially if competitors finally rise to the occasion. But I predict it's still going to rise in popularity. And the iPod touch still hasn't got a decent competitor. Certainly no music player comes close. Maybe the 3DS can compete with it as a gaming platform, but the 3DS isn't attempting to be a universal device like the touch.

The new millennium has been kind to Apple. I don't know if they'll be able to keep up their momentum for another ten years, but I wouldn't rule it out either.

I mean, it's a phone OS. Neither iOS nor Android is going to have a monopoly. Some people really don't like the idea of a locked-down phone, and they're completely happy with Android. Some people care more about the excessive polish that Apple's so good at delivering, and they're completely happy with the iPhone. Some people aren't completely happy with either, so they either jailbreak iOS or they come up with some other compromise. But really as long as there's something for everybody, it doesn't matter if other people are enjoying their other phone.

(And on the flip side, I know a few programmers who are incredibly nice and patient people but still have problems talking to girls. So I'm not denying that some guys find girls intimidating. But I think that inexperience isn't necessarily what leads to poor social skills in other areas.)

Statements like:

> Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.

ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people; I know plenty of guys who are sympathetic and warm and caring. It does not do you well to make such generalized statements about complex subjects.

Paragraphs like:

> With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".

are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still? Because last time I checked we had a handful of women CEOs proving they could run Fortune 500 companies. I'm pretty sure some of those CEOs are happily married and have families. Sure, the male-to-female ratio is heavily imbalanced, but that's because women are fighting against centuries of irrational bias against their gender. Irrational bias that statements like yours don't help whatsoever.

For what it's worth, my mother has been a corporate executive at AT&T since before I was born, and she managed to be an excellent mother to me and my brother. So if you're going to say things like:

> that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake

then you are insulting not just an entire gender in general, but my mother in specific, and I'll ask that you meet me at dawn with your pistol loaded.

Finally:

> So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.

This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social traits, inherited more from society than from genetics. Just because a girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — and let's pause for a minute to note how absurd it is that you'd say that; literally every girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — doesn't mean that she won't decide she wants to get a job before eventually settling down, or maybe that she doesn't want to settle down at all. In fact, this is more likely the more permitting society becomes of women in the workplace, because working will seem less and less unfeminine the more it's shown that women can hold their own.

There are more women working now than were working a hundred years ago. Did women somehow evolve? Of course not. Society evolved. And society is continuing in the direction of affording women equality. Your attempts to study women like they're simply a byproduct of their genetics ignores what's actually happened in the last century.

My youthful experience was that nerds tended to be just as sexually active as jocks. They just tended to be active in different ways.

This is an argument that's popped up in a dozen varieties over the last century of slowly bringing equality to a bunch of different groups. An extreme example would be the "separate but equal" line that promoted racial segregation in America; if there is no codified barrier, the argument goes, then there must be no barrier at all! Right?

The problem is that scripted barriers are not the only barriers that exist. Social barriers are much more prominent and damaging. If the culture around technology has been built in a way that encourages a certain type of usually-male character and discourages anybody else, and I would argue that this is the case, then even if everybody's invited they're not necessarily going to show up.

This isn't a tech-only problem, mind you. The acting world is famous for its cliquishness; certain sports and school sports teams also have a certain exclusive attitude. It's not that you can't participate equally in theory; it's that the prospect of participating at all is so unpleasant to certain kinds of people that they choose not to of their own volition.

The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds. It's very late at night so I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not defining just what sorts of minds those are, but I know that I find programming a hostile and unapproachable subject in general. There's nobody out there teaching it or explaining it in a way that appeals to me. The programming courses I've taken in college failed to spark my interest entirely. So it's not just that women aren't in tech; there are a lot of sorts of people who simply aren't represented, and so the entire field misses out.

This doesn't matter if your only goal is to maintain the status quo of programming — but I think that's a remarkably shallow ambition. The more people we have programming, the more diverse and creative we'll find programming becomes. Everybody benefits from such diversity, because each potential new approach to programming will yield discoveries that bounce back to benefit people in each field. Fact is that programming is still an incredibly new industry; we haven't begun to see the extent of what it can do for society. And our progress will be limited to the sorts of people who are able to develop a passion for programming. If we don't strive to invite and encourage new sorts of people to join the fold, we're hurting ourselves as well as those others.

You're technically right that everybody's equal in tech. But in practice there's a severe discrepancy in gender, and that discrepancy will only naturally balance itself out very slowly. If we make an effort to push towards real equality we can speed up the process immensely, and it's also a nice thing to do, so I don't see much of a reason not to do it.

Posterous is prolific, but it's not omnipresent. And I doubt it will ever become omnipresent, because it doesn't offer enough to differentiate itself from Tumblr and because it's nowhere near sexy enough to capture the vast audience that only cares about things being sexy.

No, it's not. Maybe it was when we didn't have RSS and other "push" systems like Twitter and Facebook to handle people who didn't know who wanted to see their updates but assumed somebody might. Now, however, there is little reason to push content directly to my inbox rather than letting me specify the sorts of things I want there.

I'll put my email address down on a web site if they haven't launched and I want an email notifying me of launch. I think that's a reasonable time to email me. I think it's also a great idea to offer an easy "sign up to have us email you our blog posts" for people who don't have RSS but would still like to benefit from receiving updates. People who release specifically-made-for-email newsletters are either not taking enough advantage of modern methods of online communication, or they're assholes who care more about my seeing their name than they care about whether or not I want to see their name.