Niten

Looks like a rebranded Fit-PC3: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/fit-pc3-info/

For one thing, if gender discrimination were the major cause of the lack of female software engineers in our society, then one would expect other societies to do better. But that isn't the case. Even in famously egalitarian Sweden, only 30% of computing graduates are female, according to the ACM; Norway, Germany, and the UK actually do worse than the US on that statistic.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...

> It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.

I agree... there was another good comment along these lines in another thread on this topic earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061749

If the engineering gender gap is an issue we are going to address as a society, then we need to address it at its roots: childhood social pressures.

Likewise, I'll defer to anyone who can present hard data to the contrary, but my intuition is that you're spot on here.

I've always been a geek. When I was 12 my father's coworker gave me a BASIC compiler, and I would stay inside working through introductory programming tutorials while my equally intelligent sister spent her free time with her friends. As a result, by the time I graduated high school I already had significant experience programming in BASIC, C, C++, Perl, JavaScript, and Z80 assembly language (TI-86 graphing calculators).

Now when I got to college I still had plenty to learn about the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, but one thing I noticed right away was that my six-year, passionate head start on programming gave me a massive advantage over many of my peers. The ones who lacked this advantage eventually switched majors; the ones who had it stayed... and were invariably male.

I propose that the phenomenon of so many kids entering computer science and engineering programs with years of self-taught experience under their belts has unconsciously shaped these programs to the point that they are unfriendly to anyone trying to start programming from scratch. And maybe that in itself isn't a bad thing; if CS programs can assume a certain level of experience from new students, then perhaps they can produce graduates with an even higher level of education. Generally speaking it's not gender discrimination we see in these programs, it's experience discrimination.

If we're to go searching for the cause of the gender gap in software engineering, I think we need to stop trying to assign blame to phantasms of gender discrimination in higher education – or worse, trying to just shoehorn more young women into a career path for which they are not necessarily prepared. Instead, we need to look at the social factors that lead so many more boys than girls to engage programming at a young age, and discuss what might be done about that.

The christian bible also claims that a man gathered every species from the earth and saved them from an angry god's globe-encompassing flood by stuffing them all in a big boat. What point are you trying to make, exactly?

> mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it.

If that's your complaint, then your beef isn't with email in particular, but with the mailbox paradigm in general. But I for one find that paradigm useful, and I respectfully disagree.

Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice as email does already.

(Google Wave showed promise... but it also introduced a ton of new complexity, and given the pattern of messages "living" on the sender's server, it wasn't clear how archival should actually work.)

It seems most people who advocate this notion that email is "broken" would rather us all use some centralized, proprietary system akin to Facebook messaging. This would be an unimaginable step backward for reasons that I hope do not require elaboration.

Along similar lines, this morning I was thinking how wonderful it would be if whatever interfaces exist between the ship's computer and the rest of the 0x10c game world are rich enough to make security vulnerabilities in players' DCPU-16 code a real concern. Imagine disabling an opponent's ship by exploiting a buffer overflow in a custom communications protocol implementation, for instance...

The database tests are meaningless, I think, since they're comparing e.g. ORM in Django and Rails to a single, non-abstracted SQL query in Bottle. It's very apples and oranges.

No, not immediately, but Santorum and the American religious right in general make no secret of their disdain for this country's founding principle of the separation of church and state, and are clearly eager to impose their religious dogma on the rest of us – see the current far-right platform issues of abortion and now birth control, for instance. They really won't stop until they can impose christian notions of morality on the entire country.

So while Santorum himself is unlikely to bring on religious-based executions even if he did become president, a vote for him is a vote that the country continue down this frightening and destructive path. Stay on that path long enough, and eventually we end up where Iran is now.

I do value my own time, and I'll say it again – post setup, I really spend no appreciable time keeping my mail server running. My VPS provider handles all hardware issues (with zero downtime in the last two years), backups consist of a nightly cron job and require no manual intervention, and the last time I touched my Postfix configuration was over a year ago.

"Rolling my own filtering" consists of placing a single mailbox_command line in the Postfix configuration file, it hardly qualifies as a time sink. Writing mail filters for procmail takes no more time than doing so in Gmail, the difference is that the former lets you write much more expressive and fine-grained rules.

And yes, SpamAssassin does have a built-in learning Bayesian classifier. Which I previously used to learn from anything that I manually classified as spam, but these days I don't even get any spam to invoke it on. See sa-learn(1) for details.

I disagree on most points...

1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public newsgroups and forums.

2. It's a matter of preference. I too use Mail.app primarily, but I like being able to SSH to my server and read my mail in Mutt. As nice as Gmail's UI is in many regards, it's useless for threaded discussions on mailing lists.

3. Err, ever heard of procmail or maildrop, among (many) others? This is one of the major advantages of running your own mail server, actually; Gmail gives you very limited filtering options, especially when it comes to mailing lists.

4. Gmail has great spam filtering, but I find my Postgrey + SpamAssassin setup to work just as well.

> If you host your own what software?

Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.

A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)

Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.

I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?

Even leaving aside completely the issue of working conditions in the factories that produce all these smartphones running any OS, one could make a strong case that Apple is more "evil" than Google on account of its restrictive policies around iOS.

Apple wants a future in which we can't do anything with the devices we own which isn't sanctioned by them. No imagination is required to realize how this will be – and in some cases, already has been – abused by Apple themselves and by the governments which hold sufficient power over the company. Moreover, Apple is abusing the legal system of the United States and other countries, trying to eliminate competitors through bogus patent claims and lobbying for legislation that would make jailbreaking illegal, in order to hasten this future.

As others have stated here, I don't think there's great utility in arguing over which company is more "evil", except that it does highlight the absurd extent to which the Hacker News community in general defends Apple right or wrong, while freely calling Google and others "evil" for issues as negligible as a transparent terms of service consolidation.

It's well past time for us to stop deifying Apple around here. The future of computing is at stake.

No, this would be like Apple legally prohibiting you from porting any code you wrote in Xcode to other platforms. It is highly abusive, and sets a dangerous precedent if we allow them to get away with it.

Yes, but even on devices where the baseband has full access to main system address space, the baseband device is something that varies from one Android phone to the next; on the other hand, the Android Market is a constant across almost all Android devices.

So which would you rather develop: a different backdoor mechanism for every Android baseband out there, or a single mechanism for all phones equipped with the Android Market?

I would assume that the backdoor for Android devices is the Android Market itself.

Because Android is open source and each device manufacturer has its own build, it isn't really plausible to have a single backdoor within the core operating system. However, the closed-source Android Market application is the perfect candidate for such a mechanism; when you install an app via the market, all of the following happens:

1. You request the application from the Market and agree to any permissions requested.

2. The Market pushes an install instruction to the phone via Google's XMPP-based Android notification service.

3. The phone downloads and installs the .apk as instructed.

Step 3 requires no interaction from the user – this is how, for instance, you can send an app to your phone from the Market web site. But it also means that any government with sufficient leverage over Google can coerce them to use this mechanism to install an arbitrary SpyOnStuff.apk at any time.

But if this is the case it isn't entirely bad news for Android users, rather it yields two means of protecting yourself which aren't necessarily options on other platforms:

1. Use an open source Android build such as CyanogenMod, without the closed-source Market app installed.

2. Proxy Google's XMPP notification service and require user confirmation before pushed APKs are installed. I don't know of any Android mods that currently implement this capability, but it would be nice to see in future versions of Cyanogen or similar.

Can anyone fill us in on how they're collecting such accurate 3D detail for all these buildings? I mean are they flying airplanes with 360 degree cameras over the major cities at low altitude, for instance?

pkgsrc already supports Windows Services for Unix, it may well work on top of this too (though I haven't looked at Gow yet and I honestly have no idea how it differs from MSYS).

But when I think "Unix-like core plus package management on Windows"... well, Cygwin is already there.

Some people have legitimate complaints, there are a couple minor bugs and glitches in Unity still. But mostly what I see is knee-jerk resistance to change; even if Unity is a better UI, they hate it because it's different from what they're familiar with.

It's exactly the same kind of hang-wringing we saw from a lot of the GNOME 1 users when GNOME 2 came out.

(I'm the author of this module.)

Yeah, I admit part of me felt dirty implementing this by commandeering operators. But my brief time with Haskell and F# has biased me enough toward this style of function composition that I preferred to deal with the ugliness of my hack, rather than the ugliness of not being able to express certain functions in this style in my other toy projects. :)

I agree though, hopefully the language itself will support this one day, and then my ugly hack can go away. (I swear, Python always seems to stop just shy of being a fantastic little dynamic fp language...)

Thanks for the feedback!

This is such a silly complaint.

If the story is true, then Microsoft is simply making an offer. Either it's worth enough to the magazine to place a Microsoft ad without being paid for it, and they accept the offer; or it isn't, and they reject it. It's not like Microsoft was trying to get them to drop competitors' ads or something.

There's just no evil there. Maybe it would be nice of them pour cash they don't have to let go of into a startup magazine, but Microsoft isn't a charity. If their PR department can sell someone on the idea of running ads for them for free, that's not evil, it's just good salesmanship.

I might as well complain that I'm not getting a check from Apple when I go places with my laptop and its glowing logo. Never mind that on the whole, buying this computer was a beneficial transaction for me – just look at all this free advertising I'm giving them!

Some programmers having to use Microsoft software is a bigger deal for society as a whole than saving the world's poorest people from malaria and polio?

That is a simply insane stance, if you really believe that.

The point was that it kills parallelism – Node is just a single-threaded event loop, running on a single core. And since computing fibonacci numbers is a CPU bound activity, that type of benchmark would be relevant but for the memoization bit.

EDIT: Well also, the author would have to actually benchmark this vs. Node with many concurrent clients in order for it to be relevant; here he's just timing a single request from start to finish, which obviously doesn't say anything about how this scales.

nginx doesn't have to be a drop-in replacement for apache in order for it to succeed apache as the base system's web server.

But that's exactly what you're arguing:

> We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

In other words, women are in a minority in this field, therefore someone must be oppressing them.

> But if you think we're anywhere near [the point of everyone having completely equal opportunity] you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't educated yourself at all about this.

I'm of the opinion that modern young men and women have equal enough opportunities in education and in the programming job market that a lack of opportunity probably is not a primary cause of the gender gap in computer science, any more than I think a lack of opportunity for men accounts for the predominance of women in education for example. You keep talking about discrimination but you still fail to provide any evidence; if you want us to believe there is a legitimate gender discrimination problem here, the burden of proof is on you to show that it actually exists. At the moment all you offer is hand-waving.

Where are all these obstacles you refer to? You're immediately jumping to the dogmatic conclusion that if there are less women in computer science right now, it must be because someone else is setting up obstacles to hold them back. But we don't actually know this to be the case.

It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!" if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like tinkering with computers?

It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter), you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion about empirical truth.

So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other possible explanations we haven't ruled out.

We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same opportunities regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender distribution.

That they tried to exert too much control over their platform and lost out to competitors who could offer more choice and better value? Yes the same thing has happened here, but the answer is not for Apple to abuse the legal system as a substitute for competing on the merits of their product.

> What confuses me is why anyone would switch from Linux to Windows if they do anything where Linux had the upper hand?

Makes as much sense as switching to OS X. The Mac OS is not Linux.

If you're developing for Linux, or using something like GHC where the OS X version is a least-favorite stepchild, or if you need package management as capable as APT or the FreeBSD Ports Collection – then if you aren't running Linux as your desktop OS, you're most likely running it in a VM, regardless of whether your host OS is OS X or Windows. In fact the author explicitly says he's doing as much.

So "somewhat but not quite like Linux" isn't something the author would strictly need to look for in his host OS. Intead he can take other factors into account, such as reliability, performance, available applications, and hardware choice, quality, and cost.

These poorly-designed adapters have a history of shorting out and catching fire. Yes, I am surprised that anybody would think "looks nice" is a more important feature than "won't burn our customers' houses down".