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bobwise

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Do "Women in Tech" conferences and workshops help to close the gender gap by actively working against the legacy of a male-dominated industry, the same way affirmative action works against the historical disadvantage of minorities?

Day comes over to shake her hand. Lori is laughing as Day declares her "the greatest Tetris player in the world," then turns to me to add, "And I must say, she's also the prettiest."

Maybe if gamers didn't think it's ok to casually objectify female gamers there would be more women playing and it wouldn't be such a big deal that this player was a woman.

For anyone (like me) who thought the headline meant that Netflix is no longer available on Chromecast, that is not the case.

Google and Netflix had partnered on a promotion to include 3 months of Netflix for free with the Chromecast device, but they've ended that promotion due to overwhelming demand.

Well obviously URLs are for people because raw IP addresses are unsuitable, but that doesn't mean that textual URLs as they exist today are our best option. Even well-designed URLs are too complicated. "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5498198 is mostly devoid of meaning even to me. I can tell that that URL is referencing a discussion on Hacker News, but "Hacker News" or the title of the article are not present in the URL.

Hierarchical URLs betray the underlying model of the internet as a series of interrelated documents. People don't care about understanding the layout of files on a web server; they just want to open Facebook, or their email, or perform a search. Nobody types "http://www.facebook.com into their browser. They either click a bookmark or type "facebook" into the search or URL bar. What happens next is up to the browser.

The best solution would conform to the already existing mental model that people have. They don't think of a website as a bunch of documents on a web server (despite the shared vocabulary with printed media - words like "page" and "bookmark"). Their mental model is probably something like buildings on a city block. You can pick one to go into, and when you're inside you can do things and learn things that are unique to that building. Rooms are connected by hallways and doors. There are windows where you can see outside or into other buildings. You can bring things with you into the building and take things out when you leave. To get back to a room in a building that you've been in previously, you can either go back to the front door and follow the path you took originally to get to the room, or you can "bookmark the page", which is like a shortcut directly that room.

Got distracted halfway through the thread, came back 10 minutes later, and read another 3 comments before I remembered it was a parody.

It's an app store for apps that only run inside the Facebook app. Facebook is a platform in a platform - the "Inner-platform effect".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

"The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using."