Aha! For the next twenty minutes, I went over the basics of electromagnetism, diaphragms, and sound waves. I explained how so many different components work together to make sure the sound is captured and recreated exceptionally well. I felt pretty excited explaining something I had known since I was a tinkering kid to someone listening intently. After I was done, I said "Isn't that amazing?" and she said "Not as much as you" and smiled. That made my day.

really ?

"The screen on my Macbook Pro was trying to auto-adjust its brightness in a semi-dark room. Because as the screen darkened, the light sensors sensed darkness, it increased the screen brightness.. and so forth. So the screen was basically glowing bright and dark on an interval.

She asks, “Why is your computer breathing???”

Which is interesting because Mac laptops are designed to appear is if "breathing" when in sleep mode, and this "breathing" is communicated via a pulsing light. It appears she'd picked up this subtlety better than her husband.

What a shame people still react like this. Three of the 5 best programmers I ever met are women. They're out there. Just not here.

What a shame she was lying about it...

whenever I tried to explain anything technical to her, her eyes would cross and the she’d get impatient, flustered, and frustrated.

I keep hearing this bullshit, both on HN and on other news sites. Do you really choose to spend your time such vacuous people? Or is it just that most explanations given are needlessly complex, so that programming and computers appear magical?

If you can't explain something properly, you probably don't fully understand it yourself.

But anyway, computers are hard. Let's go shopping!

She couldn't give two hoots about ruby or linux or some whiz-bang piece of hardware I'm all amped about. Sort of like how when she talks about women's life in the Victorian era my eyes glaze over.

Part of marriage is that sometimes you find each other boring.

She doesn't care (to the extent that the husband does). She has other interests and areas where she is the expert. I'd experience the same thing with my wife. I would start talking about something I'm working on, and she would follow for a while. But after a certain amount of time or level of technical depth, she would lose interest. Not because she's stupid, but that I had passed the point of her interest.

At some level, our work is just plain boring to other people.

It's sort of self selecting. Most people aren't hackers; they don't care how things work. They just want to use stuff, and... things. I don't even know. I can't understand that mindset, becuase I'm not one of those people. And neither are you, apparently. So yes, to you and me, it's pretty silly, because these things aren't that complicated, and we need to figure out how they work... but most people don't. Depressing, but true.

They've been married for forty years now.

My mother isn't vacuous, but she has appreciably little technical understanding. As it turns out there's quite a bit of complex decision making that goes into mate selection, competency in or appreciation of your technical field of choice being one small criterion of a myriad influencing such decision making.

Most people hate this kind of systematising, abstract, logical thought. Fewer men hate it than women so there are more men in these fields.

"For example, in the SMPY cohorts, although more mathematically precocious males than females entered math-science careers, this does not necessarily imply a loss of talent because the women secured similar proportions of advanced degrees and high-level careers in areas more correspondent with the multidimensionality of their ability-preference pattern (e.g., administration, law, medicine, and the social sciences). By their mid-30s, the men and women appeared to be happy with their life choices and viewed themselves as equally successful (and objective measures support these subjective impressions). Given the ever-increasing importance of quantitative and scientific reasoning skills in modern cultures, when mathematically gifted individuals choose to pursue careers outside engineering and the physical sciences, it should be seen as a contribution to society, not a loss of talent."

Or just think of the sex distribution of nerdery, which is to Asperger syndrome as AS is to autism, which Simon Baron Cohen has described as an extreme version of the male brain.

Additionally, there are so many similar replies, I can't be bothered replying to them all.

He says "She knows about as much as you’d expect an optometrist wife of a programmer to know about computers", but are we supposed to expect something different from an optometrist husband of a programmer?

There should be more links about programming and science at Hacker News, not some heterosexual male programmer's anecdotes about his wife, with a title which suggests that there is a pattern among the behaviour of wives of programmers.

"His eyes were all lit up. "

So that's how those who can not do FizzBuzz get programming jobs ...

They start with: "My [diminutive significant other] once asked me", "Jane Doe isn't just hot, she's also [common rank in technical field]" or "The best [common rank in technical field] I ever met was Jane Doe."

Replace [technical field] with cars, planes, motorcycles, programming and cinematography. Adventure travel, graphic design, marine biology and non-profit work tended to have more equal representation, and I saw less of this patrician attitude being slung around there.

Apparently, Programmer Wives Say The Darnedest Things.

And all you upvoters should feel the sting of embarrassment.