stmchn

Just because other issues exists in the world doesn't invalidate issues elsewhere. There will always be someone who has it worse than you.

The next time you talk about your "feels" as you put it, see how you'd feel if someone guilted you because at least you're not a starving impoverished child with ebola in a third world country.

I think the part where she pointed out that not every sexist thing is overtly sexist really resonated with me. Not everything is so blatant that you can report it. If I confronted people every time something subtly sexist happened to me, people would think I was an oversensitive bitch. But at the same time, those little things add up.

I think you hit the nail on the head here and probably why so many engineering jobs are gained through personal referrals instead of cold resumes. I know that's how I got hired at most of the companies I've worked at.

The company I work at building a way to capture those recommendations and that concept of trust through peer-to-peer reviews: https://www.roikoi.com/

The site asks you to play a anonymously game comparing your most relevant coworkers to one another and a users' score is generated by their aggregate results from their coworkers playing the game. It essentially crowdsources gauging those qualities that can't be gathered from a resume.

I just started using this and I'm already a complete convert! I've been using google keep, any.do, and google calendar to keep track of slightly different things since no one app fit all my needs. But moo.do actually seems flexible enough to handle everything I use those 3 apps for!

I've only been using it for a couple hours but I've already transferred everything I have from my other apps to it and I'm already fluent in using all the shortcuts. I also really like the flexibility you get from being able to add any number of panes emacs-style. I'm able to have a normal pane open focused on work stuff, a timeline pane open filtered for @today, and another normal pane open to capture random thoughts and to-dos I want to jot down. It's already made me insanely productive.

One nitpick I have is that I wish that searching on certain dates would also pick up equivalent references to that date. For example, I've entered some tasks as @wednesday but other tasks as @october1. It would be awesome if I were able to search on @wednesday and also pick up the tasks tagged @october1. Also having recurring tasks would be awesome too.

You're right, she totally should have "battled for relevancy" despite being called a "slut" and a "whore" while the CEO does nothing about it. Obviously, she just wasn't trying hard enough.

It also seems quite arbitrary to compare LOC's between all those products. It seems like it would vary greatly depending on the language and other factors (No idea of the metric includes comments/whitespace etc).

It really gives "famous last words" a whole new meaning since all your tweets and Facebook statuses are forever immortalized. It makes me wonder what seemingly mundane thing will be the last thing people see from me on social media and will in turn be the first thing people see on my page when they find out I'm dead.

It reminds me of Cory Monteith's (from Glee) recent passing. His last tweets were, "what the crap is Sharknado" "oh. IT'S A SHARK TORNADO." Just seems so odd to be remembered that way.

It's very unsettling. I'm still in college but I've had a couple friends who have passed. I just don't have the heart to unfriend their accounts. Once in a while, I'll be browsing Facebook and their account will pop up. Some other friend will comment on their page or something like that, and for a brief instant, you think they're still alive somehow (which makes no sense of course) before you realize it's just someone interacting with their page.

This happened with the first friend I ever made taking my CS degree. We were in a lot of classes together and corresponded on a semi-regular basis on Facebook over school breaks and things. I had talked to him a couple months prior to this school year starting, but once I got back and noticed he wasn't in any of the classes we were supposed to have together, a mutual friend of ours informed me that he had committed suicide over the summer. It was so jarring that just a few months had passed and he was gone. I looked back on our Facebook messages. I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. The last thing he had sent me was some funny cat gif and I hadn't responded. I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.

I think this is an interesting point. I remember being so intimidated when I started my CS degree thinking that software developers just "know" all these things. Now, I know me and my co-workers look stuff up on Google all day long and it's not a big deal. But that's not something you learn to do in school.

In fact, I think there's some kind of stigma related to not knowing the answer without looking it up. The vast majority of my schooling at least involved a lot of memorization. As a student, you take a test which gauges how well you've memorized things for the most part and that's what determines your "worth" in terms of grades as a student. But that's not how the real world works. In reality, trivial things can be trivially looked up.

I think the results we get for our coding interviews are pretty telling. Everyone that applies for a software developer position where I work has to take an online assessment. They've got 30 minutes on 3 questions and it's made explicitly clear that you can look up information for it and give the sources. Out of the many people that have taken the quiz, only one or two people have given any sources. It's as if people think they'll be penalized for not knowing everything off the top of their head (which I guess is in fact the precedent in traditional whiteboard technical interviews).

I think it's definitely possible to flood the market, it's just difficult to make that generalization because STEM can mean a wide variety of things. There's so many STEM fields that it's kind of silly to lump it as one. Just as an example, according to the BLS, chemical engineer jobs are projected to grow 6%, slower than average compared to all occupations. In contrast, software developer jobs are projected to grow 30% over the next decade. Not all STEM fields have equal opportunities so it's certainly possible that some areas get (or already are) oversaturated and not others.

Well, frankly, STEM has a reputation of being hard because, well, it IS difficult. It requires certain kinds of critical thinking that the K-12 education system can fail to adequately teach.

I know plenty of people who started college in engineering or computer science knowing there's good paying job opportunities in those fields. But a big chunk of those people drop out once they start taking the more difficult courses.

Retention is just as important as getting people into STEM in the first place but it's hard to retain students who aren't adequately prepared for the challenge.

Hell, my job is programming and even the estimates I give are probably wrong.

Yeah, same thing for me. The action was too quick for me to notice that it was intentional. I would just leave the help window open on first time use until the user decides to close it. Very nicely done site though!

This is a bummer but I admire how they've handled the acquisition. I was an avid user of Punchfork until its acquisition and was bummed with the way they handled user data (More info here: https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes#the-story)

I'm really glad they're giving users complete control to acquire their data and, even better, that they're encouraging developers to use their data and import it into other tools.

Really neat. I was really itching to use CTRL+Z though.

I screwed up the first image I tried to clip. Maybe have a walkthrough of the features when the user first uses it? I didnt notice the help button until it was too late. I thought if I closed out of the editor and clicked on the image again, it would let me start over but it just takes you back to the editor. It would be nice if there was a way to redo editing the image from the start.

Endorsements have lost all meaning whatsoever. 3 people have endorsed me for OS X for some reason even though I don't have it listed in my skills. I've never owned an Apple product in my life except for an iPhone so my skills with OS X are average at best.

My boyfriend's dad, who is not technical whatsoever, endorsed me for git. I'm pretty sure he just saw the word git and thought, "Hehe, she's a git!"

I think the problem too is that LinkedIn offers people the path of least resistance to endorse people. Occasionally I'll see a message at the top of my profile saying, "Endorse X for Y & Z" and a button to approve it. I'm sure more times than not, people just approve endorsements without giving it a second thought.

There's always this one: https://twitter.com/Horse_Recruiter

Meh, doesn't seem worth paying $350 just find out about new Dropbox products when it'll probably be on Hacker News the same day they make the announcement anyway. :)

To be fair, Django has excellent documentation and a great online community of bloggers and people to poke with questions. I've rarely come to a situation where I was truly off on my own. Although, yeah, I would love to see more Django books out there.

Well, it's interesting to note that Tammy Glotfelty, the prosecutor who decided to giver her two felony charges, but decided not to charge another (white) teenager who shot and killed his younger brother with a BB Gun the week before: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/02/1206443/-Would-a-Wh...

Now obviously, the Daily Kos has its own slant so take this with a grain of salt. But certainly seems like the two cases have radically differing reactions from one another.

There was a blog post a couple days ago that said it really well: http://trishkhoo.com/2013/04/i-knew-exactly-how-she-felt/

"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."

There's so few women in tech that groups like this tends to draw some women who are not even remotely technical (I remember for our women in tech group in college, we held an annual networking event where we invited "real women industry professionals" but the vast majority of them were marketing or HR). I'd like to optimistically think that "women that do technical things with other women" groups will become more prevalent the more women enter the field. I'd love to join a group like that but it's difficult in my area where there are two female CS students in my senior level classes (one of them is me).

While I agree it would be silly or her to refuse to go just based on some club she was in in high school, I'd be willing to bet she's been exposed to more women in tech groups throughout her career as well.

This is just speaking from personal experience but a lot of these groups are the "clothing teddy bears and sipping cocoa" variety. It's a little bizarre actually how patronizing some of these events are and it's all self-imposed. It's just too easy to fall into a circlejerk of meaningless talks and discussions about sexism and empty compliments, awards and recognition. I know that's kind of a generalization and not all organizations are like this but I doubt I'd ever go to a women in tech luncheon again either.

I'm really glad to see an article like this and it's exactly how I feel about a lot of women in tech events. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only woman who feels this way and it's a betrayal to denounce these groups in the midst of all these gender debates we're having in the hacker community.

I joined a women in tech group in college when I started Computer Science. I was super excited and sincerely believed in the cause and I threw myself into it 100%. By the end of the semester, what had I accomplished, really? I had made countless posters and pink ribbons and cutesy giveaways for our school fair booth and what felt like zero progress on making things better for women in tech. Instead, it was just a monthly meeting where we patted each other on the back without really doing anything.

I'm sure there are groups out there that accomplish real and admirable things but I think it's far too easy to fall into just self-congratulating each other and approaching all the wrong issues.

Have you seen the state of some government websites today? Sure they're "minimal" (often not, sometimes they're just plain ugly) but almost always difficult to navigate. You underestimate how difficult it is to organize information-dense government websites. I think people will ultimately get more value out of a well designed site.

Have you considered using Open Recipes? https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes

I saw it on HN a couple weeks ago and it's basically one big project to scrape and index food blog recipes. It doesn't include preparation instructions but it uses schema.org's recipe format, which includes ingredients and other useful things: http://schema.org/Recipe

This is great! I've seen a couple similar sites but not anything nearly as well executed as this. Good job!

If you had told me 5-6 years ago that Twitter would be one of the top social media platforms and have 500 million registered users, I would have been completely flabbergasted.

I'm still not sure how I feel to be getting these advantages though. I feel like, the more advantages like this are offered, the more it dilutes my actual accomplishments. I feel like there's a subtext of resentment and doubt saying "Well, she only accomplished that because she received certain privileges."

I recently won a competition, which is great and all, but I always wonder in the back of my mind if I won it because I was the only woman in the competition.

And I know that's probably crazy but judging some of the HN comments about these kind of things, people clearly do think that way. I just want to be recognized solely for what I accomplish and not "Good for you, you're a FEMALE software developer!"

AP Computer Science isn't very challenging. It's essentially a watered down version of the introductory programming class you have to take in college the last I checked. It's also geared towards the AP test so it doesn't exactly foster that much creativity and innovation.

Sadly, a lot of high schools don't even offer this class in the first place. I think the program at my old high school even got shut down.