xibernetik

Asperger's manifests very differently depending on the individual, and does not necessarily block the ability to connect strongly. On average, it may be more difficult for an individual with Asperger's to connect strongly because they are not in tune with the majority of the population, but that's more a function of having trouble finding like-minded individuals than of not being able to connect.

The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided. The article even mentions individuals with Asperger's having stronger feelings, and there are theories that Asperger's individuals are actually more sensitive in general to everything, resulting in overstimulation both physically and emotionally very quickly. A world of Asperger's individuals does not mean a world of perfectly rational individuals.

I absolutely agree that Asperger's does not make an individual broken or inherently "worse" that others, and that the idea of "fixing" an Aspie through medical intervention is antiquated and harmful at worst, but I don't believe that an world full of Asperger's individuals would be logical, reasonable, or in any way inherent "better" than our current world. It would make the world different - not worse, not better - the same as how it makes the mind of an affected individual.

The PM role is not at all about finance or marketing. PMs at Microsoft are expected to be technically competent and depending where they're stationed, may regularly contribute code. Julie Larson-Green is noted for her expertise in UI/UX. If anything, this exemplifies a shift to focusing on the end-user.

I'm curious what the actual stats are with regards to that theory. More than a few historic immigration waves were prompted because things were so bad "back home" - for a variety of reasons including social instability - that the fear of setting out to a new place was far less than the fear of remaining. I'm not sure if that was so much an issue of individual freedom.

Examples off the top of my head would be the rise of the communist party in China and the Irish potato famine.

However, the first wave of Europeans colonists to come the US definitely did value individual freedoms over stability. I don't know how strong their influence is on the population itself, but their views are definitely reflected in the laws and historical document (e.g. The Constitution).

I'm going to diverge a moment here as say that it's incredibly difficult to prevent big budget software from leaking. When you have hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals involved in the process, some of which who inevitably just won't care about the franchise or value "internet" cred more than keeping the game a secret, you're in a hard place. Putting more internal controls in can drastically slow things down and get in people's ways, and it can build ire when people feel like they're being treated like irresponsible children instead of employees. Then once you start gearing up CD production... You've introduced thousands of underpaid laborers who probably don't really care about your franchise.

Back on point, you can absolutely blame people for playing the game and then maliciously attempting to spoil the ending for others. Pirating is not a passive action. Some people believe information wants to be free, but since my pay is dependent on information/software as currency, I'm not about to subscribe to that ideology. Since I like the products that have come about from people willing to pay for information, I'm not going to evade paying the creators.

Opt-in for the user, but not opt-in for the people around them. I don't get to choose to not be recorded. Compounded with modern law stating if you're in public, you can be legally recorded, and that it's already difficult enough as is to explain to people you'd rather they not tag you as being at a location or to take photos and instantly upload them... It's really worrisome. The only reason it isn't is because it's not popular.

If you "have nothing to hide", it's not a big deal. If you're fighting for custody of your child, transgender, gay, a targeted minority, visit a psychologist regularly, or even just happen to do a few things one day that could be misconstrued, all of a sudden, the potential of it taking off becomes a very big deal - sometimes much more so than current privacy issues.

Can't agree more with you. Just watched the video - definitely first-timers. Combine accuracy with (typical competitive) prediction of spawns and enemy movement - especially of novices - it would definitely appear to the uninitiated that there was a bot using autoaim and possibly hacks instead of a person - that is if they even survived long enough to see their opponent.

I'm suspicious of the game being UT2k4. It's a fast game with a steep learning curve that's long past its glory days - meaning a small player base. To someone unfamiliar with the game, even the AI that came in the box could be mistaken as human. To an experienced player, it'll be easy to identify newbie-ish patterns and see where the bots are straying from typical new-player psychology once they start toying with them. If the bot is acting experienced... Even the movement during combat in the game is complex, and there are a ton of areas an AI could trip up in.

If the judges were at a competitive level, colour me impressed - but if it was their first time, or even their first week, I'm a little more skeptical. I don't think a novice player would understand the game well enough to judge well. It would be like attempting a traditional Turing test with humans who can't speak English fluently and were raised in a non-English culture: impressive, but no indicator of bots reaching human-like levels.

I'm a former and returning Microsoft intern, who interviewed in her freshman year. I strongly suspect I got the interview as a result of being female and facing discrimination early on (but not because I was female and they wanted to hire someone of my gender).

Long story short, I'm used to being dismissed or looked over by my male peers - often in CS, but also in the hobbies I've taken up over the years. I found the only way to be listened to or respected was that I had to prove myself very quickly to anyone I had to work with. I got my interview after talking to a Microsoft dev doing recruitment for 10 minutes about a project I worked on after identifying he had a personal interest in that field. He didn't even look at my resume, but I saw him star it when I gave it at the end of our chat.

I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't used to being over-looked. I can signal that I'm competent and easily discuss projects or tech interests within a couple minutes of meeting someone because in the past few years, I've learned that when I neglect to do that, I'm going to get ignored. Because of that, I have an incredibly advantage in that many of my male peers CAN'T do that, simply because they've never had to until it came time to search for a job.

FWIW, one of the biggest reasons I'm returning to Microsoft is that it's one of the few places I've ever felt like I was respected off the bat regardless of age or gender. I couldn't imagine working with most of my peers back in school because of the lack of respect. There are bad apples everywhere, and certain teams are definitely geared towards older folk - but there are highschool kids doing internships there, in some very coveted areas. The guy was out of line, but he's definitely the exception and not the norm.

My family uses Facebook heavily to stay in contact since we tend to be in different countries, along with Skype and email. They moved to this long after the initial craze because Facebook offered some really compelling advantages.

For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.

It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.

It's not really solving the "real" problem... If I'm just mashing two audio files together, that's going to be different than someone talking in the middle of a train platform and there will likely be algorithmicly-determinable difference from the artificially generated words and the naturally generated noise.

All of this aside, removing background noise is not a huge issue anymore. We have pretty decent noise-cancellation technology. Speech recognition - the other big component - has advanced a lot in recent times and is actually pretty good, although not for every company/product.

Even if it would be helpful, you'd have to record an incredible amount of noise in the first place, seeing as you're getting millions of hits a day and if you have a small sample set, the attackers will just figure out the solutions to that sample set and be done.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying it's probably not worth it at this point. Captchas (in their traditional forms) don't make sense as a long-term strategy anyways.

Not really... Even if the code is difficult to patch, speech/audio recognition doesn't advance much when an attacker figures out how to remove the (non-random) noise added by a machine over the sound file. Actual speech recognition relies on the ability to filter out background noise - which is a lot more complex/random - added by surroundings, not a machine.

It's very difficult to generate some sort of noise via algorithm that a) humans can filter out and b) can't be removed by some algorithm. As a result, audio captchas are a huge vulnerability and the weakest link in almost any captcha system, although you can't get rid of them by law.

Hypotheticals aside, the code was easy to patch - note the footnote: > In the hours before our presentation/release, Google pushed a new version of reCAPTCHA which fully nerfs our attack.

If you look at the latest Windows Phones (seriously, Apple and Android have virtually identical interfaces - the odd one out is Microsoft) and Windows 8 (yeah, it isn't on the market yet, but they released the beta), that's clearly not true. There was the Ribbon too in Office, which was radical enough a lot of users complained during release. They released the Surface and Surface 2.0 as well, though I don't know how strong their market is. Bing has done some interesting things, particularly with video search and maps. I've just gone through 5/6 divisions, 5/7 if you include Skype.

All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?

If you are pitching to a potential investor about this idea for an app, and they ask you "So are you technical?" what they mean is "Are you a technical (co-)founder?" as in "Are you the guy who will build/design the prototype/app to a working level before we pour enough money in for you to actually hire decent coders?" When you say yes, but later reveal you don't know how to code but you studied nutrition, they are going to get annoyed.

Once again, it's context. In many worlds technical means other things, but to North American VCs looking at software/apps/etc, it means you know how to get the app/site/whatever running. Since we're talking about the startup world, I really can't see how a potential investor would see it as anything less than deceptive if you said "yeah I'm technical" and then revealed you don't have the capabilities to implement your idea.

In the (software/web) start-up culture, technical means writing code. If someone says "I'm creating a fitness app, yeah I'm technical" you expect them to mean "I can code" rather than "I know how to use CAD". Your argument applies in many contexts, but not this one.

Semantics. Someone else (Acheron Project) designed and built the submarine. Cameron organized and enabled the endeavor, but the product, the Deepsea Challenger, was not built by him.

You can argue what the words mean, but it's clear what "built" in this context means, and it's not enabling or organizing or funding, it's coming up with the full technical design and implementing it.

Yes, programmers get caught up in thinking they are the gods of business. They aren't. However, (bad) non-technical folk are quick to lose sight of how much their business or ideas are reliant on the technical prowess of someone else. It's not just "writing code" - it's coming up with the overall architecture, understanding how it will scale, being able to come up with something that won't fall apart the moment it gets released to the public. If this was easy, outsourcing would be a lot more common in the field and programmers would not have the sort of pay they do.

Non-technical skills are important. However, technical expertise is the difference between an idea and a product. Both are critical in order to achieve fantastic things. The problem seems to be that there are a lot of non-technical, unproven idea-men and -women who think just because they have people skills, they can fashion this "million dollar idea" into a business... They _just_ need a coder. It's easy to get blind-sided when you're not in a given field, be it the technical folk saying "well that business crap is just fluff" or the non-technical folk thinking just anyone can whip up a killer social app given a month or two.

As far as invasive surgeries (and birth control) goes, it's really not that invasive if it can be performed in 15 minutes without general anesthetic by a regular doctor. Even IUDs require more time than that.

Would you still be okay with the hormones if they caused you to gain 15 lbs of fat, lose your libido and render your SO unattractive to you? It's not as simple as swallowing a pill every morning and getting on with your life -- hormonal treatments have very real and sometimes significant side effects.

And current birth control methods for women include injections of artificial hormones, dilating their cervix and putting a piece of plastic or metal part their vagina and into their body, and surgery to open the stomach and clamp certain organs shut. Whether or not it's hilarious, those practices are accepted as normal.

Birth control that involves body modifications is anything but casual, but to draw the line of it being ridiculous at when it involves male genitalia is a bit narrow-minded.

However, she had to go above and beyond to prove she was that capable and talented - she and her family had to fight to get her placed in a non-trade school and she had to take additional tests to show that her scores were legitimate. If she had been a white male, she would have been placed in the appropriate secondary school immediately and she would have been hired on the spot without further issue.

It's a story about someone who, despite proving themselves to be capable and talented as their peers, would have been passed over if they hadn't fought to be recognized. Ultimately her race/gender didn't make a difference, but it certainly made getting where she wanted an ordeal.

If you believe that sleep's purpose is to weaken synapses/reset the brain, it's entirely possible going through less than three or four REM cycles before waking would be undesirable in that it may take more than one cycle to properly "wipe the slate clean". Granted, it's impossible to do much more than speculate at this point given the (relative) lack of research/knowledge on the topic so far.

It's not the same level at all. Telling a guy to stick to computers because he sucks at talking to girls in a technical industry is like telling a woman to go back to the kitchen when she's a chef.

Telling a guy to stick to computers because he sucks at talking to girls when his job is to run and promote a female-targeted wedding convention is a little closer to the mark.

As a female, getting told "stick to computers, you suck at flirting" when you're technically-inclined is a lot less offensive than "go back to the kitchen" -- not to mention that the first is a jab related to observation of an individual (presumably there isn't a stereotype that all men suck at talking to women) rather than a jab related to your chromosomes. It's exacerbated by the fact it's highlighting "something here doesn't belong with the others~...".

For those who don`t think this is offensive: Replace Women/Female with an ethnic minority (e.g. Japanese, Hispanic) of your choice, and then think about how someone of that background would feel reading that message. Then try it with other minorities - lesbian or deaf people, for example.

Yes, it's blown up. Proportionally? I don't know.

A lot of the people who are saying "get over it guys, this really isn't that bad" are the people who've never had to face continual prejudice regarding their coding abilities or competence because of their genetics. It's difficult to understand the perspective of a woman in tech unless you're experienced that. When you've been receiving subtle indicators that "you're not really part of this club", this sort of message can sting quite a bit.

You're guessing wrong. I wouldn't feel more welcome (nor do I understand why I should feel more welcome as a result of that sort of discussion) but I don't speak for all women. I want it to be a given that a woman can be in an engineering/tech environment, and that it's No Big Deal. Making a big deal out of prejudice and fighting societal conceptions just puts me off -- if I was into that sort of thing, I'd be browsing some sort of sociology site or attending conferences on the matter.

While I'd love a deep, interesting discussion on the matter... I love deep, interesting discussions. Just because it's about my gender doesn't mean it's more welcoming to me. That aside, I fail to see how women would be much more likely to get involved as a result of discussion on HN -- the issues run a lot deeper than a lack of conversation on the matter.

In response to your later comments, I absolutely agree that the subtle prejudice is a huge problem -- but I don't know if this is the right venue to attack it, or if there even exists a correct venue or method. (Perhaps it's just a matter of time.) I do know that a sudden influx of articles on "making women feel welcome" and "breaking prejudice against women in STEM" would alienate me for one, and most certainly cause me to leave if they became of regular prominence on the front page.

EDIT: A good explanation of my negative feelings towards bringing more attention to the matter is the current top comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732078

Fixing stupid mistakes like this is a lot more straight-forward than figuring out how to encourage young girls to participate in science - it's a completely different order of complexity and the former can be acted upon immediately and effectively whilst the latter cannot. It's the difference between having a recycling bin in your house and changing the idealization of suburbia and car-culture in North America.

It does help. From the perspective of a female, this sort of "overblown" reaction makes it clear that this sort of mentality is not considered acceptable by the community as a whole. If it was a case of people shrugging it off, if this sort of thing could occur without anyone batting an eyelash... I'd have a lot more second-thoughts about my career path for one, and I'd have turned away from the start-up community on top of that.

I'm female, and I'm not really offended by this.*

However... That doesn't mean I'm unaffected. If I saw this sort of "perk" for a local event, I would pass on going. If this was the prevalent mentality for all hackathons (or any sort of event) I would probably just not consider going to them an option. When you already have to deal with the assumption you're not really into tech or a competent coder in your daily life, having to deal with being confused for waitstaff/eye-candy on top of that is just plain frustrating. A company that sorts this sort of mentality is most likely I place I wouldn't want to work at, just as individuals drawn by this sort of perk are not the type I want to meet.

In some alternate universe, where tech was a female-dominated industry, how would you feel if it was condoned and accepted that local tech events featured muscular shirtless men in tight pants serving cosmos to attendees? It might not be reason for offense, but it's definitely not desirable/pleasant (assuming you're a heterosexual male).

*I think the people who should be (and probably are) offended are the would-be attendees and sponsors whom the organizers assumed would agree with that statement and all the implications it carries.

The difference between college and the professional world in CS versus basketball are quite different:

> In college basketball, you play basketball. In pro basketball, you play basketball.

> In college CS, you write theoretical solutions to theoretical problems. In the pro world you write real solutions to real problems.

That aside the argument and article are weak at best. I'm having trouble understanding what exactly we're supposed to take away from this aside from "College good! Skipping college bad! In basketball, and therefore CS!".

That's /your/ experience of depression, and not everyone goes through it the same way or can normalize to it. Some people do feel things during an episode, ranging from sadness to worthlessness to guilt, and may find their mind so clouded reflecting on their life just isn't a possibility.

You're not describing depression, you're describing your experience of depression. It's important to keep that in perspective lest other's understanding of the illness be skewed.

I've had a very similar negative reaction at times in waves maybe an hour long, though the general sense of doom tended to condense into very specific ideas: the sort of thoughts you might find when watching a horror movie, except applied to real life and impossible to ignore. As a result, despite having a legitimate prescription, I'm very sparing in my use.

I don't get the euphoria and I avoid using it while seriously sleep deprived - I despise the feeling of my physical body needing sleep. For reference, aside from caffeine and alcohol, it's the only (mind-altering) drug I've ever taken, so it's not due to interactions outside that sphere.

As of 2010 this is true AFAIK -- and it would be difficult to change seeing as many of the buildings are designed to maximize office space and lack the open spaces needed for cubicle farms.

It may be different outside of dev however.

There are different textures to pages from different books, and the design of some books to play with the shape of the media. (Douglas Coupland did it in either Microserfs or Jpod, forget which.) Also there is some difference in how you format the pages - Kindle books you can choose your own font and its size/spacing, while in a print book it has been chosen for you. It's small, not everyone cares about it, but you can notice the typography has changed if you compare books from 30 years ago to books printed in the last five.

You could really make the same argument about using a monitor to read books versus holding a physical book, just with the difference of a Kindle being designed around being held versus propped up on a desk.

The rise of the printing press lead to the decline of scribes and handwritten books. Illumination, for the most part, is a lost art.

The rise of gun-based warfare lead to the decline of sword-making in Japan. It never recovered.

The movement from an oral society, where stories were passed down by story-telling, to a written society in ancient Greece, lead to the decline of the art of story-telling.

Disruptive technological advancement can, and has historically, lead to the loss of an artform, even while granting numerous additional benefits. The decline of an art is sad - it is a loss of a form of expression we once had.

I love my Kindle, but I also love old leather-bound books. The subtle creases and variation that marks some of my old books as unique and the sentiments/bond created by handling a physical object cannot be replicated by my Kindle, and I recognize that even while choosing to use my Kindle for convenience for most reading.

Even small things like some books are designed around the structure and material, with pages or patterns that are dependent on having two sides you can view in parallel, are a huge difference.

It's a new media that, if it does replace the old for the most part, will result in a small loss. There are benefits (such as hyperlinks) but there is still a cost that should be acknowledged.