elohesra

Yes, but this is interns rather than apprentices. Interns are typically, as you've said, graduates. They're inexperienced, but they've had 3 years of theoretical training. Apprentices have had no training, much like the end user of askadev.

I agree it'd be fairly preposterous to hire a CS graduate for a very low or no wage salary. It just wouldn't be effective, what with the demand for CS at the moment.

EDIT: typo

Thanks for that information, that's interesting. Either way, I thought it was an interesting article, and it was well written too. I also agree with the core point that growth without retention is meaningless. I suppose I just take issue with the term 'viral' here, although your point stands even with business-to-business: if you've had a sudden influx of customers, then you'll need to fight to keep them rather than just considering them an unchanging constant of your business forevermore.

Not to sound like a naysayer, but while the idea that education shouldn't cost money is laudable, it seems fairly untrue given the fact that education as a professional sector exists.

I think the site is a good idea, and it'd be great if it takes off. But I presume it'll briefly take off due to the novelty/pride value of being a mentor, and then see an exodus of mentors as they figure out on their second lesson that education is difficult, and that's why people usually get paid for it.

It's essentially the concept of an apprenticeship as it works in the UK. The apprentice is paid a far below minimum wage salary, and is ostensibly trained by the company they apprentice with as part of their remuneration. The apprentice then works on commercial projects, again ostensibly with mentors.

Heck, throw in a ~$5/h wage and it's basically the UK apprenticeship model except with the guarantee of an actually qualified mentor. I agree that working for free is a bit of a steep ask, but I know I'd prefer to work for free with a properly qualified mentor than work at $5/h for someone totally unqualified (as my own apprenticeship turned out some years back).

EDIT: Yes, my last line is a false dichotomy. Ideally you'd be working for some sort of wage with a qualified mentor.

The article states that some startups succeed because "they’ve found some viral loop, the crack cocaine of startup-land". My question is whether these things actually exist? The only kind of business I can think of where something like this really applies is media-styled companies aimed at young people. But this type of company doesn't really seem to be the kind of company the article is talking about. I can't think of any business-to-business companies (as 'upselling' implies) that have any kind of viral loop, so it seems to me that the article conflates high-growth media-companies with high-revenue business-companies, and then argues against a hypothetical business company working on user acquisition as if it were a media company.

Am I wrong here? Is there some sort of viral concept for business-to-business companies?

EDIT: Just to clarify what I mean by the fuzzily defined term 'media companies', I mean companies whose product is in one of the low/no fee media spaces, like social media or digital media.

Yes, obviously.

If the reply is fallacious, then show that it's fallacious. If it is fallacious then it shouldn't be used as an argument irrespective of whom it's aimed it. If the reply doesn't contain some logical flaw, then it simply doesn't matter whether its opponent is black or white or anything else: neither truth nor logic are subject to whether people like them.

There is no way of 'redistributing power more equally': you will always answer to someone. In the case of any political system which pretends to 'redistribute' a given thing, then the person you answer to is the redistributor. Any philosophy which pretends it can halt ambition and greed is nothing more than a utopian philosophy, and any philosophy which relies upon a central authority to enforce fairness must first answer how it will halt that authority's ambition and greed.

It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though

Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.

The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must Hollywood find something that they can give.

Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number of people at a much larger price.

Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry.

And finally - although unscientific, the high upcount of this article suggests that it hit a nerve and that many here are unsatisfied with the quality of their friendships.

See, you used the term 'suggests' rather than 'proves' because you know that claiming a stronger relationship between upvotes and motive would be affirming the consequent. But this is precisely the sort of weasel-wording which I've seen in observational studies, and it seems deliberately crafted to trick an uncanny reader ill-versed in logic into misinterpreting 'suggests' as 'proves'. Of course, we both know that we cannot infer anything from a consequent other than one of the possible antecedents must have occurred, and we both know that the antecedents in this case -- motive for clicking upvote -- is huge, and thus nothing meaningful can be inferred about the consequent. I'm happy to have a discussion about almost anything, but if someone comes to the party with nonsense evidence pretending the discussion has already been studied and decided, I'm going to call them on it.

I also feel like you've also dodged every point I've raised (or perhaps I didn't explain my objections very well). With regards to #1, the issue wasn't that I think researchers are deliberately crafting leading questions, but that in order for the study to be valid they'd have to show that their questions either do not lead thus aren't confounding (which I've argued is impossible), or that they lead predictably thus can be countered in the analysis (which I also argued is impossible).

With #2 you're correct that this is an issue for all studies, but it's a particularly large issue for studies of things which are irreducibly complex, like people. Since we can't (easily) take specific facets of a person and study those in silo from the rest of a person, controlling confounding variables becomes a bigger issue. Even in other observational sciences we can usually demonstrate the core parts of our assumptions in a controlled experimental manner. For instance, in the study of global warming, we can demonstrate in a controlled, experimental way that the combustion of fossil fuels releases CO2. With studies of human behaviour this is rarely possible.

With #3 you're correct that the media is far guiltier of this than the scientists, but I'd argue that scientists need to be more vocal about this issue. I appreciate this treads a fine line between asking for more scientific social responsibility, and holding scientists responsible for the behaviour of society, but I feel this is a valid concern due to the way that politicians like to fund studies such as these to validate their personal opinion. The reason I believe this important isn't that I think scientists are trying to dupe us, far from it, but because it worries me that as burden the of proof for a posteriori logic falls from the strongly codified and philosophically justified rules of empiricism and falsifiability, so scientists move from being discoverers of truth to yet another controllable authority figure.

Also, thank you again for citing evidence for your point. I apologise that I have not done so, but I seriously doubt any scientists actually agree with me here. Having read your linked study, I would say it both stands to reason and doesn't really seem to prove the point it claims to prove. If you set out to prove that self-reporting isn't invalidated by confounding variables, and you do so by invoking self-reporting which contains almost exactly the same confounding variables, then you can't really claim to have proved anything. Relatives and friends of a sample in such a study would be just as likely to change their answers, consciously or subconsciously, to avoid internal conflict, and because they're tied to the sample in such a way that would produce a similar personality and similar self-identity reprisals if the subject's life choice were cast in doubt, it's also not a large leap of logic that their changed answers would usually change along the same lines as the sample.

Again, I can't really think of a better way of studying complex issues like human behaviour, but since we started at the point of 'science agrees self-reporting is fine' and are now at 'we agree it is the best we can get', I feel we're moving in the right direction. I do agree that well-controlled self-report studies are probably the best we can get in this field, it just seems to me that the best we can get isn't as valid as the best we can get in experimental sciences, and should be noted as such.

Wow, arseholes. It's hard to recommend any course of action really, because I can't think of any coworkers I've ever had who'd refuse a reasonable request like that. I guess I'd offer to buy them some flavoured nicotine gum and ask them to try that for a while?

I cannot cope with the smell of e-cigarettes

Okay, fair enough. Have you tried asking the vapers if they would mind not smoking them indoors? I know I've stopped doing so in confined conference rooms after a coworker commented that they didn't like the smell.

I appreciate it sucks that vaping is just one more thing which intrudes on your personal space and freedoms, but so do so many things at the office, from people chatting, to coughing, to cracking their knuckles or delighting you with the irritating buzz of their headphones. I'm not really sure that e-cigarettes warrant regulation any more than any of the other annoyances that are encountered throughout the day.

EDIT: Also, for anyone interested in learning more about the science of e-cigarette safety, Dr. Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health pretty vociferously supports e-cigarettes and writes a blog on the science and politics of the matter:

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/comparison.htm...

Yes, I realize that's a shameless appeal to authority.

Yes, this is correct. Most self-reporting relies on having the same question asked in different ways and places to catch people whose inconsistent answers suggest they should be removed from the sample.

However, my objection is that I don't believe language can be easily classified in terms of the response it'll elicit. Obviously, one can (usually) correctly guess the response that'll be received if one were to run up to a stranger and yell "You're a [swearword of choice here]", yet the fact that I've had to preface this with the modifier 'usually' betrays my point; some people will get aggressive if you swear at them, some will laugh, some will respond in kind, and so on. My concern is that if we can't even predict the effect of language in its most obvious state, we probably can't predict its effect in subtler states.

This unpredictability of language leaves us in a tricky position when it comes to asking questions on a self-reporting study. In order to solve that one objection, we'd have to come up with a method of using language which manages to communicate its point, without causing that point to make people feel emotion. This is further complicated by the fact that people are complex beasts with internal and external factors playing in to how they behave, such that a question formed neutrally for one person would probably not be so neutral with others. This also makes avoiding 'fear of reprisal' for one's response to a question impossible, as we can only remove external reprisal. It would not be possible for us to, for instance, removal the internal upheaval of a conflicted homosexual admitting to a survey that they were gay.

All of that is analogous to existing regulation regarding cigarettes

But this is why e-cigarette campaigners say that politicians are just meddling out of personal distaste, rather than any scientific backing. The two core reasons why cigarettes cannot be smoked indoors are:

1) Doing so (potentially) causes deleterious effects to people who inhale the second-hand smoke. At the very least, it can be agreed that it's not preferable to breathe smoke.

2) It makes it likelier that the smoker will give up their dangerous addiction.

Neither case can be particularly easily applied to e-cigarettes, which emit harmless water vapour, and are to many smokers a means of giving up their dangerous smoking addiction.

I must say I agree with the e-cigarette campaigners that attempts to apply the same laws to e-cigarettes as cigarettes is just yet another example of politicians wanting to control something absent of any scientific proof that they need to do so.

Oh, very well. Thank you for proving that the scientific community disagrees with me, and proving evidence for your point. I can't say I actually agree with those criteria; especially since one is wholly impossible: there is never a possibility that there's 'no fear of reprisal' when the reprisal can take the form of conflicting with one's self-identity. To be honest, to accept a self-report I'd have to see the following:

1) A study which shows that the questions themselves do not introduce bias. An actual study, where multiple groups of participants were asked the same questions in different forms so as to prove the language of the question cannot influence the result. Of course, this would cause every questionnaire and interview study to fail, because the language does indeed affect the results and is thus a confounding variable (which cannot be controlled without pretending that some language "just doesn't affect people", and yet still functions as language).

2) A proof that the demographic of the sample was controlled for all controllable factors other than those measured. For instance, in this study it wouldn't be good enough to test for the correlation between gender and friendship satisfaction by just getting a bunch of men and women: they'd all have to be the same class, race, wealth etc.

3) The study cannot draw conclusions, nor interpret its results as causative. This is really quite self-explanatory: correlation does not imply causation. Yet, especially in sociology and psychology, this logical maxim seems to get forgotten amongst the excitement of having produced a study.

I'm sure there's more objections, but you've already put up with me arrogantly berating the scientific community for 3 points now. If I were allowed to edit my post to state that the scientific community disagrees with me regarding the validity of the 2007 study, I would.

As for an experimental methodology for studying friendship, I can't say that I can think of any studies which would do so and get past an ethics committee (bloody ethicists), but making the study longitudinal over childhood through to young adulthood would help, as it would show what age-bound variables affect the output. It might just be that young adult men are, for instance, too busy developing a career to have friends, or too busy drinking beer to have friends, or whatever; either way, making it longitudinal would allow some of the uncontrollable confounding variables (such a life experiences) to become more apparent.

Has anyone actually read the studies linked by the author to back up his drivel? I'll save you some time: the 2007 study isn't valid even by the low levels of scientific burden required for psychological studies (it's entirely based on self-reporting), and the 1982 study support the opposite conclusion to the author's. In fact, the 1982 study [0] finds that men and women simply have different kinds of friendships, where men are likely to only engage in emotional sharing with their closest friends, and women are more likely to engage in emotional sharing with all their friends.

This brings me on to challenging the true point of the article: slating the traditional male gender role. It's no accident that the author turns to the authority of feminists for perspectives on men -- despite that being so laughly outside the remit of feminism -- because the entire point, unstated but present, throughout the article is that women have 'got it right' and men should be more like women. In lieu of any studies which actually support his point (note that only the first two studies in the article actually even discuss his point about male friendships, the rest are an irrelevance), he instead uses anecdote as evidence for a point neither study can support, and then goes on to blame the entire mess on the traditional male gender role. I won't defend the male gender role, because I have no stock in doing so, but I would at least ask that if something's going to be blamed for mens' terrible friendships then we at least provide some proof that men do indeed have terrible friendships.

Lastly, the article, like so many in the media, is yet another argument that encourages you to accept its faulty form by providing you with a false dichotomy: the argument begs the question that either type of friend (the emotional numerous friends of women, or the close few friends of men) is a superior type of friend, links some 'evidence' which doesn't support its point, and then encourages you to ask yourself whether men or women 'have it right' before even bothering to prove if there's anything to actually get right in this situation.

I will say one thing though: if this is the kind of stuff Men's Journal prints, then either its readership is mostly women, or men sure do love self-flagellation.

[0] http://www.peplaulab.ucla.edu/Peplau_Lab/Publications_files/...

Or, to play devil's advocate, that you aren't putting in the level of work in your day job that you could be putting in. If I were an employer looking at a candidate and I saw they had huge amounts of open source contributions, the first thing I'd ask is "how did you have time for this and your day job?".

It also tells you something else about a candidate: that their previous job probably wasn't particularly hard or that they didn't have much in the way of responsibilities. If you're the lead developer on a several hundred thousand line codebase, it seems less likely that you have time to build an open source resume than if you were a junior developer.

Honestly, I think open source is a bit of a mixed signal. If the code shown in the repositories is great, then that's fantastic, but if it's merely average then I think it makes you look worse than just not having it there at all. This is really my biggest objection with open source: if you want to use it as some sort of resume, then you have to contribute huge amounts of time to it in order to make it representative of your skill. Then it's no longer an open source project you do for fun, but just a second day job. Additionally, when it gets good enough for an employer to see, what interviewer is going to have time to read through it? This problem is magnified especially when developers start treating open source as a form of resume, and interviewers have to wade through shockingly poor repositories from every candidate to determine the candidate's quality.

Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry

Yeah, but I think this is what people like Notch fear, because it's not going to be of any use to just have their logo emblazoned on the device: they're going to want something more from it.

Given the way that they and Zynga worked together to drive casual gaming into the dirt, I'd actually rather Microsoft bought the device than them, because at least Microsoft have a major games wing which would benefit solely from using this device for its intended purpose (albeit by locking the device to Windows and Xbox exclusively).

It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.

I've never understood this mindset in gaming. Maybe I'm just showing myself as an introverted curmudgeon, but I only game when I'm not programming, and I just game to try to unwind. Being forced to do something 'social' when I just want to relax is just annoying to me personally.

I'm not saying I hate other people (I do), or that I don't want to ever be social (I don't), but social situations -- while often fun -- do require more mental energy than just shooting bad guys, or scoring goals, or whatever else the game has you doing.

Maybe I'm very unrepresentative of the gaming market at large, but I don't understand why numerous gaming companies (Sony and Microsoft have both headed down this path) want to cram social aspects into games. I'm not sure what they think the business case for that decision is. I assume they think it'll make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love, but that just makes me want to play games less.

Okay, let me play devil's advocate:

Perhaps Facebook are thinking "What's the one thing that could truly set us apart from all other social media sites, and place a prohibitively high barrier to entry on this otherwise very easy to enter field?", and perhaps the conclusion they've reached is to take social media to the next level, and have it simulate life in virtual reality.

Perhaps Facebook are going to aim to have a FacebookVR some time in the future, where you can meet up with other avatars 'in person' in their virtual reality community?

... Or perhaps this is just a sleazy cash in where they think they can recapture the video-game-enamoured youth market by shoving Facebook into every Oculus Rift game.

I can't honestly blame him here.

I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do want Oculus Rift for.

I assume Notch is worried about those implications. Will Facebook start demanding that every Oculus Rift game have tight Facebook integration? Will Facebook do something strange, like have Facebook wall updates appear in the game world irrespective of whether it fits into the game? If I were a game developer, this'd creep me out too.

The problem with clojure and all lisps, as I see it, is that they make it easy on the author, hard on the reader. It's so simple to create your own special DSL that everyone does it. Now i have to learn a thousand languages.

This is a bit of a problem in Clojure because Lisp gives everyone the ability to play at being a language designer, but there's a reason that most language designers are extraordinarily experienced computer scientists: designing easily readable languages is hard.

Where, in my opinion, Lisp's DSL abilities shine especially well is when the Lisper is just taking a well understood domain with well understood terms and translating those terms into Lisp. Where Lisp's DSL abilities can shoot the Lisper in the foot is when the Lisper creates a DSL for a problem domain that's less understood, and where the terms used in the DSL will be less immediately obvious.

A good example of Lisp's DSL abilities really shining through is Hiccup, the HTML compiler. For instance:

(hiccup.core/html [:body [:div { :id "divTop" :class "headingcontainer" } [:h1 { :class "superheading" } "Welcome!" ]]])

is understandable because we understand the concepts of 'htmlness' 'bodyness' 'divness' 'h1ness'. We understand what it means for something to be a 'body' in the terms of HTML. However, when the domain the DSL is modelling isn't well known to the reader, then the DSL becomes significantly harder to understand than normal procedural code.

So yeah, Lisp can be a bit of a double-edged sword, but it's also possible to see how it acts as a gigantic force multiplier for small teams who understand their problem domain really, really well. This is why I believe it makes such a fantastic startup language: to write really good Lisp, you have to understand the problem you're trying to solve really freaking well, and that's a big part of running a successful startup.

I'd check wealthy corporations by this logic, and check whether the average age of programming staff is higher than in SV.

It would certainly match up with my experience in London, where it seemed that a lot of the programmers over the age of 30 were working for large, established finance companies. The age of programmers around the 'Silicon Roundabout' startups tends to skew a lot closer to mid 20s.

Is that the elusive shinty six?

"Clojure: I want to use Lisp, and I want to actually have libraries that can get stuff done"

The point for me is, if the site uses so much javascript you can't even just see the text without javascript enabled, it's probably a bullshit experience. Or a neat WebGL demo. This is the former.

I totally agree with that, but I think it's a tangential point to the one I was making. I certainly think that developers should only use javascript where it's actually more convenient to do so than to use CSS, HTML and server-side code.

I personally find it extremely irritating navigating to sites which use javascript for something which naturally lends itself to another technique (like sites which request all text using javascript, as 'bphogan' pointed out above). When I visit sites such as these, it makes me feel like creating a parody site which draws the entire DOM in javascript just to illustrate the point that javascript is but one of the tools in the developer's toolbox.

The reason I get somewhat annoyed at noscript proselytizers (which I fully admit doesn't apply to any of the commenters in this thread), is that I've seen what happens when developers are forced to attempt to produce a stateful, interactive experience for the user without using (too much) javascript, and that thing is ASP.NET WebForms. As the line shrinks between desktop apps and web apps, we'll have to find ways to make overcome the web's shortfalls in interactive application development, namely state management and responsiveness. If the use of noscript increases, then this becomes harder to do, and makes it a lot less possible to make interactive web applications look like anything more than a poor mockery of interactive desktop applications. I truly want to see a time within the next few years where I can barely tell the difference between a desktop app and a web app, and unfortunately for noscript users, such an experience will probably require javascript.

So you've intentionally disabled a large part of your browser through NoScript and now it won't render pages that require the browser to work as intended? Isn't this rather like removing all gears but first from your car and then expecting everyone to accommodate the fact that you can only achieve 10mph?

I'm not meaning to have a go at you here, npsimons -- what you choose to do with your browser is your business, and you've not actually complained about the site -- rather I'm seeking to curb the idea that seems to crop up on HN from time to time that browsing without scripts enabled should provide a roughly equivalent experience to browsing with scripts enabled. It's not reasonable to expect developers to cater to a tiny fraction [0] of their audience when that audience wants the developer to essentially give up all client-side interaction other than POSTs.

[0] It's around < 2%: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript-d...

In other words, it's an argument-to-authority (discarding the Latin here). Claiming "some famous guy said it!" is no more a proof than claiming "crazy, homeless Bill said it!": a convincing argument should be able to stand on its own weight, without being stated by a credible source.

If the hypothetical 'crazy, homeless Bill' said that the sun were bright, he'd be correct regardless of the fact that it came from 'crazy, homeless Bill'. If Ben Horowitz stated that 1 = 2, then he'd be wrong, regardless of the fact that he's 'Ben Horowitz'.

but there's a well-known "ripple effect" from educating a girl

If it's so well known then either provide us with the research that proved such an effect, or stop spreading dubious, sexist nonsense.

Seriously, this strikes me as sexist gibberish. I know I've personally educated 3 people so far, as far as software development goes. With one, I've spent a great deal of my free time educating them. Yet you come to me and tell me -- with nothing more than folklore and a spurious link regarding an unrelated issue as proof -- that men don't educate anyone.

The more outlandish a claim, the more proof it requires, and simply saying "some famous guy said it!" isn't a proof, and nor is linking to a source (your PBS link) which is essentially irrelevant to the claim. I would also say that the surest way to ensure fewer men educate people is to tell them that educating people is a gendered trait that belongs to a gender other than their own; pay serious heed to engaging in sexist tripe like this, because it may set a terrible precedent for the generation that follows.

Zmitri (the person who raised this spurious nonsense) has seriously offended me here, and so have you by claiming it has any factual basis. Please remedy this either providing proof for the apparent-nonsense, or rescinding your support for this claim.

If I had to put my cynic hat on (oh who am I kidding? I never took it off) I'd say it's because the people who're 'comfortable' with any form of discrimination tend to benefit from it.

The men currently in tech who support pro-female discrimination aren't going to be affected by it: they're already in tech, and they already had a chance to enter it before their asinine discriminatory policies came into effect. They benefit from feeling they've achieved some good (irrespective of whether they actually have). The same is true of powerful people who aren't dependent on an equal playing field, such as politicians, the wealthy, and current business leaders. Such people won't be affected by proposing a piss-poor solution, so if they can feel like a champ for doing so, then they'll do so.

A less cynical view is that such people are simply bad at logic; that they don't understand that you form theories from evidence, rather than using evidence to support theories. The trouble with all gender politics is that it's too emotional an issue. All parties feel threatened, and all parties feel that they're the ones being shafted. In an atmosphere so hostile to reason, I'm just grateful that no-one has jumped to gulags and gas chambers as a solution. Oh wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Cutting_Up_Men

I don't actually think women are unsuited for CS, but I must say that I don't find the argument that 'in the past more women were in CS' very compelling, because it makes the pretense that all variables have remained constant over the past 40 years.

The fact is that CS -- or what people on HN call CS -- has changed massively in 40 years. For instance, startups barely even existed 40 years ago, and they certainly weren't as hyped as they are now. Furthermore, gender roles have changed in the past 40 years, as has female college admission.

There's something ironically conservative in democrat-styled liberals' [0] harking back to the CS of yesteryear where gender equality was the norm. Societies change, as do fields of work. If I had to take a pundit's guess at the reason, I'd probably say that we have similar raw numbers of women in the field now as then, but more men have flocked to the field as it's proved itself as an excellent means of generating wealth, thus upsetting the ratio.

In all honesty, if I were to guess at the reason there aren't many women in CS, I'd say it's because women don't tend to care as much as men do about generating wealth. Warren Farrell's 'Why Men Earn More' came to similar conclusions: that men are more disposed to taking nastier, more stressful jobs if the pay will be higher. If this is indeed the case, then it would seem that the easiest way to attract women to tech would be to get everyone -- irrespective of gender -- involved in CS at a young age, and allow them to see how fun it can be. If women genuinely do choose to work in careers that they find fulfilling, then this would achieve the goal of increasing the numbers of women in tech without having to discriminate in any way, simply by getting more women to self-select into tech.

[0] I must say, from the point of view of a UK liberal, there doesn't seem to be much liberalism in the US definition of the term. It seems closer to socialism from where I'm standing, with its heaps of top-down reforms and regulations. Yes, this is irrelevant, and no I'm not willing to defend this statement, since -- as a UK citizen -- I have no dog in this race.