jami

Meetings.

I bet they did occasionally check. And leaving it at, "Hm, that's weird. Oh well!" was where it went from problem to disaster.

It sounds like he's had money for most of his adult life, but he clearly still remembers that not everyone is as lucky.

It's great that this author's upbringing was such that a robotics class for girls wasn't needed. My mom also taught her daughters that we're people, so of course I wanted a computer like the other smart kids at school (in the '80s).

But some children are raised to think of things as "for boys" and "for girls", and for those kids, a class for girls is absolutely useful. It isn't that those kids aren't naturally smart enough; it's that everything in their lives is telling them that robots are for boys. It's a shame that someone botched the explanation of the robotics class to her son.

In a world of unlimited bandwidth, I'd prefer to leave my wi-fi open (I won't live in fear of terrorists war-driving on my specific block), but I saw this framed QR code for wi-fi password idea on Pinterest: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/share-your-wifi-password-wit...

I don't know how many other people track their book collection this way, but the ability to import a Goodreads shelf would be useful to me. I have an "own" shelf on Goodreads to track what I have in my home/Kindle. A one-click import would save me a lot of redundant bar code scanning. Documentation for the relevant Goodreads API call: http://www.goodreads.com/api#reviews.list

This is a good visualization of drone strikes in Pakistan: http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/

Edit: I don't completely love focusing on the technology behind killing innocent people in war. Whether the planes are piloted or not, people sitting in cafes, elementary schools, orphanages... get killed because we no longer arrest bad guys. We try to blow them up.

Whoops, I thought Hacker News' standards were generally higher than "whatever Google barfs up when I type in my prejudiced view point." But you're the one with the karma here.

At least 40% of the wage gap isn't explained by the factors you cite. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2013/04/09...

"All available evidence supports that notion."

Your citations for your assertions that feminists are liars and women like to be paid less are awfully thin.

So much wisdom. I don't know what the author does for a living, but I hope if it's product management, he get the piles of cash for it he very clearly deserves.

We had a fareless area in downtown Portland for many years. It was no sketchier than the routes going to the 'burbs, and it wouldn't have made sense as a "makeshift homeless shelter", since the free part was only a few miles. My understanding of why they started charging is that our country suddenly ran itself out of money paying for simultaneous stupid wars and giant tax cuts for wealthy people, and our city couldn't pick up the slack any other way.

You say "homeless people", I say "George Bush", I guess.

I'm experiencing extreme envy at these private room stories.

I had my first child in a great hospital with the same room all to my family for our full two-day stay.

For my current pregnancy, I switched care providers, but I chose the new midwife based on her ability to deliver at the great hospital where I had my first child.

Last month (when I was seven months pregnant), my insurance company decided they no longer cover the awesome hospital. My midwife said insurance companies almost never let you stick with the hospital you'd planned in these situations. So unless I want to pay for the whole thing (despite being insured at great cost to my employer and me), I can spend my first days with my new baby sharing a room with some random family of strangers and their new baby, at a hospital where there's a high likelihood that the other family's new baby will be enduring significant medical problems.

Hooray for privatized health care, right? Clearly better than any other possibility.

Yeah, I have HTML for Babies and have tried it on my kid a couple times. Very fun idea, not a fun read.

I opened the article in hopes of advice on improving my "hacking strength". Alas, it was about actual weightlifting, which... maybe I'll have time for again some day.

But I clicked the "my son" link in the post, and might.net has a free pass forever on making me accidentally spend ten seconds scanning something irrelevant to my current interests. Fascinating story, and I hope the tenacity they showed in getting a brand-new diagnosis pays off with effective treatment: http://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/

I disagree with the suggestion that the American minimum wage is in a better place because it is lower. Keeping working people poor so wealthier people can afford more things (whether they are things the likes of me understand like bread (...) or things "this audience" understands, like video games) is gross.

I suspect that you and the original commenter think extremely impoverished American children are an acceptable price to pay for cheap video games. Like I said: America. Heck yeah!

I don't think you mean to suggest that working families should live in poverty (America, heck yeah!) so the leisure class can spend less on video games.

I think disclosing ahead of time is the best advice. Think of the interview as an opportunity to start working with your company on how to get the most from you. With three years' experience, you may still be very young, so you may not have that all figured out yet. But if you let the interviewers know that you can communicate effectively (even if you have to do the interview via Skype chat in the same room), that will help quite a bit.

Also know that some interviewers, given a candidate who otherwise meets the requirements, like to find buried treasure. Persisting until you find a whole team of those interviewers could work as well.

Whoops, I meant that judging by c.o.'s username, we're all on Team More Ladies In Tech Good. I recognized her username because with more time, I would have liked to use her company's API on a project I worked on.

Judging by the username, you are preaching to the head of the choir on women belonging in tech. Her point about getting attention for the wrong reasons is a fair one, as is yours about role models. Who knows what's ideal, besides continuing to prove we can do this stuff.

I would not have reacted the same way in this set of circumstances -- I feel sort of bad for those dudes wondering why their picture was being taken -- but I am far from "furious" with Adria. I will, on the other hand, never do business with SendGrid.

I worked with a bright, lovely young woman who had taken two terms of Java, with an eye toward a CS degree. One of her professors told her in office hours that she smelled really good. So she was doing marketing. Little creep-outs can have a huge impact, and you will unfortunately find so many of them in nearly every tech setting that if you hang in there, you just get accustomed to saying nothing. But saying nothing is not the ideal course of action, because based on the numbers, lots of women don't hang in there. Adria is right that the little girl on the slide might never make it to PyCon (in a dev role...) if things stay the same.

Imagine if roles were reversed, and lucrative, enjoyable, interesting jobs were mostly held by straight women, and every time you went to a professional conference, you had to endure non sequitur pictures of men in bikinis, and uninformed, under-dressed plastic booth bros, and people assuming you're an uninformed booth bro no matter how you look, and the after-party at a male strip club, and countless unattractive old women chatting you up when you'd rather write code and all manner of little, alienating crap. In this bizarro world, you would likely not believe the sense of relief when another man spoke up about all this stuff that had gone unquestioned.

Your comment about feeling uncomfortable around Adria is ironic, given that feeling uncomfortable is exactly what Adria was trying, however imperfectly, to fix. Unfortunately, the comfort of straight white men has again ruled the day, and SendGrid fired a black woman to preserve it. I hope she finds a truly wonderful lawyer.

If you're looking to marry a woman who is the equivalent of a diamond -- a pretty thing to have with you always (well, until she gets old and decays, on a much shorter time scale than the diamond) -- and she wants a diamond, give her the dang diamond. You're not marrying her because she's already thought about blood diamonds and wondered why diamonds are still expensive when they can be made in the lab from a very abundant element. You're marrying her because pretty! Shiny! Shoes!

If you want to marry someone intelligent, you may find that she considered the content of this blog post long ago and is astounded at its popularity on Hacker News, and she would prefer a ring from a bubble gum machine, or one made from ash from that volcano you hiked together, or an heirloom or something.

When I decided who to marry, I kept in mind that intelligence decays much less reliably than looks. But your mileage, gentlemen mostly it seems, may vary.

The answer to the first half of your question is no, so the whole question evaluates to false, whatever the second half may be.

Hilarious. It wouldn't take much "research" to find out that Automattic is the Acquia of WordPress. Poor kid.

Agreed! An MBA type at a hackathon abruptly told me that writing code (the thing I do for a living and often for fun) was too boring. I said that if you want to make something bad enough, you'll figure it out. He told me at the end of the day that he'd started learning HTML. It's a start.

Everything that goes online is kind of online for as long as the Internet Archive and Library of Congress decide it should be. But I started worrying about where my account info might end up (I should really worry about that before signing up for every dang thing...), so I just found this info on deleting one's account: http://posterous.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/36544-...

Maybe you can get to it before the Wayback Machine does.

I've only been to hackathons that last eight hours tops and usually involve terrific beer and food (ahh, Portland...).

Especially as a mom with a full-time job, I love the focus on getting things done at hackathons, as contrasted with other nerd gatherings, where the focus is on chit-chat.

Startup Weekend's 48 hours with no sleep model sounds very unhealthy to me, but an excuse to crunch away at a side project for a few hours with free beer and friendly nerds? Yes, please.

Awesomely honest and painful story.

This happened somewhat in reverse to someone I worked with. He was restoring from a backup. He didn't notice the "drop tables" aspect, assuming, as one might, that a backup would simply supplement new stuff rather than wipe it clean and go back in time to a few weeks ago.

He is (still) well-liked, and we all felt sick for him for a few days. Our boss had enough of a soul to admit that we should have had more frequent backups.

Pur claims to remove 99% of pharmaceuticals and Brita something like 97%.

Whether autistic fish have implications for human children or not, getting unnecessarily dosed with hormones, antibiotics, and psychiatric drugs doesn't seem like a good thing.