JCThoughtscream

Tango is male-dominated, mostly because of its internal culture. Dressing-up is, again, cultural pressure and can conceivably be changed with altered values. Plus, guys dress up to - only, when they do, they get called a fag and suffer detrimental social effects. Guys gossip all the time - Hacker News is /full/ of gossip, if you haven't noticed. Genitalia has nothing to do with technical merit. Or, rather, as my point has been this entire time, it /shouldn't/. Most of our cerebral functions are a good long ways away from it - that is, unless you really do think with the smaller head. Trying to say that there doesn't need to be explanations for these only demonstrates the limits of your own range of exposure. In fact, there has been plenty of discussion, academic and otherwise, as to the roles and functions of cultural norms. It's call anthropology.

Yeah. Common saying amongst my friends, mostly techies.

"The plural of 'anecdote' isn't 'data.'"

To counter that, though, I would say that your presents to your nieces, while a great idea and well-encouraged, palls in the face of parental and social pressure. Their friends are playing with dolls. Playing with legos by yourself can be fun, but not quite as fun as playing with their friends.

Note that the use of gender-specific industries is a bit of a sham when you can't demonstrate that the tech industry /itself/ has any overt gender-specific targeting, outside of the occasional attempt at tech fashion. In fact, it isn't too hard to imagine a culture where cosmetology /is/ male-predominant - just switch the zeitgeist around so that peacock behavior is seen as sexually beneficial.

I'm afraid your underlying logic is full of holes. At the very least, it's unimaginative, and fails to at least ask "actually, /why/ is this so?" As for the 70%, Wiki's "Science in Iran" lists it as specifically degrees in science and engineering. While Wiki is, at times, unremarkable in its factuality, this specific assertion is actually backed by citation.

Furthermore, biology being /also/ male-dominant in the US, your point doesn't hold well. What makes biology more female-oriented than chemistry or physics anyhow? What basis are you making such a claim?

70% of the technical degree holders living under the Iranian patriarchal theology... are women.

That's problematic to me. That suggests to /me/ that the gender disparity in Silicon Valley has very little to do with genetics. In fact, the role of genetics in intelligence is too heavily disputed to be considered anyhow - the tech field being a supposed /meritocracy/, and genetics having little to do with personal /merit/, it instead suggests to me that the problem is how our culture is defining "ideal merit" to our women.

The reason why tech conferences can't find enough women speakers is because there aren't enough girls encouraged /socially/ to enter the tech field. And by "girls," I don't mean to use disparaging language, but indicate that the problem is rooted all the way in how they're taught and influenced, be it in schools or amongst friends and family.

When mathematics, science and computer programming are considered culturally gender-neutral, that's when female representation in the tech industry will be less of an issue. Until then, we remain unable to tap a good half of our population's intellectual resources.

That's a bit of a problem.

For the same reason why DARPA has projects codenamed "BATMAN" and "ROBIN."

They're staffed by geeks and loons.

Peace of mind can just as easily be interpreted as "comfort within one's madness."

By the time hydrogen supply becomes a problem, though, we'll either be long gone, or able to harness it elsewhere. Probably true for other hypothetical civilizations. Hydrogen is, after all, ridiculously abundant - and, if nothing else, weighed down by other elements.

Peace: the church pushed for peace between principalities. Islam's notable for stressing nonviolence between fellow believers (at least, outside of fundamentalists, whose hypernarrow interpretation of their holy texts arguably makes them more of a deviant cult than fellow believers). Though even Buddhism isn't without its history of violence, humans being what they are, it is explicitly a religion of pacifism.

Life: The practice of medicine was often spearheaded by the churches. Most religions mandate successful propagation and child-rearing. The Judeochristian religions in particular stresses that to save one life is equivalent to saving all lives.

Acceptance, tolerance and openness: A progressive thing; the idea of trans-societal equality can be said to originate from the idea that all are equal before the eyes of the faith's deity. Buddhism especially, even without a deity, puts emphasis not on material wealth or power but the attainment of personal enlightenment, regardless of background.

Women's rights: Surprisingly true. Islam in earlier centuries actually spearheaded the idea of women having innate rights, even if said rights were often inferior to those of men. Buddhism, again, puts no special emphasis on gender. The Tao considers male and female to be equals of different properties.

Advancement of sciences: The Church outright /funded/ many pioneering scientists and experiments, if they weren't involved outright in its process. Mendel's studies of genetic inheritance was done as a monk. The Vatican was responsible for postulating the Big Bang theory of universal origin. Many scientists see their profession as a way to better understand the mind and intent of their deity.

Art: If you think I'm just talking about the stuff commissioned by the Vatican, you are /sorely/ mistaken. And Eurocentric too, so double-shame on you. The history of art is nearly inseparable from the history of religion - and the first forms of art were often means of religious expression.

Pithy sayings are just pithy sayings. It takes a bad man in good clothing to profess piety and pacifism on one hand and victimize with the other. What your quote describes is "hypocrisy," which is a universal problem in human culture, and not particularly bound by religion. Atheists have no monopoly on ethics and morality - we simply have a more concrete theory of origin on the subject, and better predictive elements on its formulation.

Bah. Religion is merely the excuse for the sort of behaviors we, in our modern context, would consider amoral. Religion's also /caused/ all of the polar opposites you list - peace, life, healing, acceptance, tolerance, openness, women's rights, and advancements of the sciences, of culture (especially art - really, are you kidding me?) and of the general wealth of knowledge in general.

Seriously. As an /atheist/, I don't have much qualms with the idea of faith. The institutionalization of superstitions , prejudices and epistemologically unsound foundations of moral judgment, sure - lots of problems there. But you can't really say with a straight face that religion's been nothing but a bummer for mankind without ignoring the vast realm of accomplishments made in its name.

But all achievements - and all tragedies - were made by human hands. Which is where at least my own stance is made: it isn't religion's fault that man is occasionally evil, as religion is nothing but a concept - and abstracts in a vacuum are value-neutral. It is, in the end, man's fault that man is, at times, evil.

Filter by account, then, instead of by post? With a sample body of, say, the ten or twenty of an account's most recent posts.

I disagree rather fervently with number seven. A person starving to death in the midst of a desert would see his life /quantifiably/ improved if given water, food and shelter. That's got less to do with his perspective and more to do with the fact that his probability of /dying/ is rather drastically decreased in the short term.

It gets a little murky when the fundamental necessities are taken care of, but it doesn't mean that the only reason a homeless person's not happy is because his or her perspective is wrong. Some things go a bit beyond internal factors.

No, but decrying the harms of cigarettes whilst puffing a mouthful's worth at once would certainly garner grounds for such an accusation.

While I support most of the man's political stances, Obama's take on the iPad and console culture is perhaps a smidge hypocritical, given that he is, after all, a known Blackberry addict.

This is quite possibly the most awesome piece of art I've seen all year.

In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more.

But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.

While multipurpose tools are always fun, how is the Chinese army shovel particularly noteworthy? I'm pretty sure you can get an almost identical model from, say, REI. Or the /US/ Army's surplus.

...actually, they likely all come from the same factory, huh?

And to play devil's advocate on /this/ side of the debate, paying for property of dubious ownership is considered a crime unto itself, and for pretty good reason.

Journalists aren't so heavily protected by shield laws that they can break crimes willy-nilly in pursuit of a story. Or any regular old story. It's one thing to break open Watergate - it's another entirely to buy a phone from a guy that they know doesn't have legal ownership of it, all for the sake of one-upping everybody else for the /review of a commercial product/.

It's arguably pretty bad precedent to just let it be. While Apple's, and the police's, actions have been comically overblown, /so was Gizmodo's/. If /nothing/ else, they really ought to be eating crow for engaging in sleazy checkbook journalism.

Doors and locks are deeply ingrained symbols of privacy and access. The police busting down his door is, as Stewart notes, behavior we expect for /meth labs/, not bloggers.

From the FAQ:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This one's a bit of a gray area, as it's heavily political in nature, but the mechanics of loan securities is of both intellectual and personal interest to what I'd imagine is a heck of a lot of HN readers.

If I recall correctly, there was some anecdotal evidence that time committed to video game actually improves a surgeon's capabilities during an operation. If a card game can do the same for pharmacology, cheers to Nerdcore!

Any spacefaring nation with propulsion technology sufficiently powerful that interstellar voyages are feasible... basically have technology that can sterilize planets. It's called "pointing the drive in the wrong direction."

Hopefully, any spacefaring nation smart enough to develop sufficiently powerful propulsion is also smart enough not to casually commit xenocide with it. Given our own track record, though, that's a pretty freaking big "hopefully."

The fact that they're facing death threats for it is made doubly hilarious in light of the episode's content.

I don't see Stallman's statement as to whether his birth had a good impact on the world or not as necessarily arrogant. Arguably, that's a question everybody needs to or ends up asking themselves: on balance, has my existence been a positive one?

While there might've been an open software advocate without Stallman, it can't be seriously said that the world would've been better off without Stallman's advocacy. And thus, on balance, the world's better off with Stallman than without.

It is mentioned in the body of the text that the author advises it to be used with clients that you've already established a history with. And whom have a significant personal stake in the product anyhow. So it's less a junior contractor and more a close friend going "eh, sure, I'll do it for you. Just pay what you think it's worth."

In response to some of the comments made in this page, doesn't the very fact that some jobs seem more "natural" to one gender or another actually only serve to magnify the problem here?

Why are plumbers and programmers alike seen more as a male profession, and cosmetology a female one? There's no evolutionary basis for it - feats of strength and endurance kind of go out of the window when we're all utilizing tools to minimize the job's physical impact. Lawyers certainly aren't reliant on any gender-specific genetic traits to perform their job.

It seems as if most readers here seem to be missing the picture: much of these biases, and they are biases, are entirely cultural, not sex-specific. There is a /cultural/ problem with programming that causes the field to innately repel most potential female programmers.

Saying that there's some things women do and some thing men do, and never the two shall meet, isn't just an obsolete 1950s attitude - it's like a bunch of schoolchildren whining about cooties. Asserting that the field /shouldn't/ try and attract a more diverse workforce has all sorts of nasty underlying implications that I'm sure most of you don't mean. The tech industry isn't and shouldn't be a boys-only club - it should be an industry that prizes intelligence and capability above all other factors, especially gender.

Yes, yes I did. Sorry, screwed up the terminology.

And if so, what are the ontological implications of it creating universes with a strong anthropomorphic bias?

Works just fine here. (SF Bay Area, CA)

Regarding deforestation, it seems less digital media's direct blame, and more a national and state-level issue of how we run our power grids. Coal's a nasty piece of work anyhow - the radiation they emit, along with the pollutants they generate, are enough to make even an ex-nuclear submariner acquaintance of mine shudder, and the guy's outright blase about anything short of actually being in a reactor without a suit. We should really, really be making effort to moving away from that technology anyhow.

However, e-waste? That's legitimate. The EU's e-waste regulations goes some way in at least limiting the environmental damage, but it's a far cry from enough. DARPA's callout for more energy-efficient computing devices helps, but pretty much the only argument in favor of electronics, in terms of how "green" they are, is that while they're more energy-intensive to make per unit, they make up for it in terms of information density and reusability by the order of quite a few magnitudes.

The perspective is selfish: nowhere does he ask "if I were to reveal my state of health, would the girl I'm dating care?"

Assuming the author falls in love, and the feeling is reciprocated, there are not one but two individuals that'll be involved in the decision to take it further. The author's trepidations aside, he /cannot/ know the willingness of the second party to pursue a relationship further, despite the high probability of cancer. After all, as of the status quo, that person does not yet "exist" in terms of the relationship.

As such, the level of suffering versus the level of emotional welfare that may or may not be elicited by the relationship is /entirely guesswork/. There is but the barest of frameworks to make an educated guess of it, and even that is open to many questions.

Overall, it is, in fact, in the author's benefit to pursue a happy, health, and - importantly - honest relationship. The potential drawbacks are impossible to know until such relationship is established, but the potential health benefits of being in a stable relationship /is/ known.