sh4na

If it's a data center owned by a third party, they probably can't talk about it.

It's fixed now ^_^

I hear the owner of the .xyz TLD is flooded with requests, so if things aren't registered now, they will be soon enough :P

Now to register all those names with the .xyz TLD...

I tried to read the whole thing, but gah my brain just couldn't get past all the spelling mistakes. :-/

Yup, same for me here. WTH is going on??

Who needs clones when you can have Ron Gilbert's Scurvy Scallywags! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scurvy-scallywags/id59329984...

I'm a huge fan of Match 3 games and I can honestly say there's plenty enough choice in that genre without having to rely on Candy Crush.

A Cleavage

/me runs

All the time. Negative thoughts are normal and increase as you learn more and can see where the flaws in your work are. The more you learn, the worse it gets, until at some point you'll be confident enough to look at your work and defend your choices (to you and to others).

This doesn't really have much to do with working alone, but it is harder to grow if you can't get feedback and aren't forced to explain your code to others.

If (like me) you are physically unable to get together with your peers IRL to discuss your work (for instance, because you're about 1000km away from the nearest person you can conceivable discuss things with), you should find other ways to do this. IRC is good, putting code up in github for feedback, blogging about it, these all help kickstart the next round of learning.

You may feel worse about your code once you get some external eyeballs on it, but it's likely you'll get positive feedback, which is always comforting.

There's no aboiding negative thoughts, it's a sign that you are striving to do better. Start worrying when you don't think you can do better.

I just call them "noobgrammers", it's much less gender-biased and so much more self-explanatory.

that rule was reversed months ago

yup, that's exactly it

Not at all, there are many different projects with varying levels of difficulty. Everything from documentation addins to web apps, build system fixes or runtime work. We don't care what your level in school is, we care that you're excited about contributing to open source and propose a project that you can do.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. There's 175 participating organizations, one of which is Mono, which has been a part of it since the very first year. I know it's a fad to not RTFA, but really, it's not that complicated :)

The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to. Their recruiters go out to mailing lists and linkedin and harvest emails, then contact those people and offer them positions. If you say yes, they start you on the exact same anonymous interview process, the interviewers having no clue that you didn't apply yourself and treating you just like any other generic wannabe. That's why a lot of the best programmers won't take offers from Google, they know they're going to be treated like cattle throughout the whole process by people who have no clue who they are or what they've done and don't really care to know.

It's important to know that googlers are encouraged internally to do interviews (for extra cookie points? I don't know :P), they're assigned randomly to candidates for most of the process, so they're not a part of the whole process, just a piece of the machinery. No one oversees the interviews to make sure questions are not repeated and that there's a logical thread from one to the other (especially the onsite interviews), and you might not even be asked the questions that are actually relevant for the position they're considering you for, when you're in the latter stages of the process.

The stories I've heard from the hiring trenches are all pretty much the same. It's a great company, but their hiring processes are very weird.

No.

They employ a lot of people that can write code on boards, and can certainly churn it out at high velocity. But when you start looking at the actual code... it's bad. When I first looked at the chrome code, the layer they dumped on top of webkit to make it out-of-process, the only thing I could think of was "this looks like something a kid fresh out of college would cobble up together". Same thing with most of their projects - lack of clear design, hacks, hard to maintain, lack of standards, no portability. The projects that get visibility end up getting better (more competent programmers assigned to them), the rest lingers in crappiness mode.

They're not all like that, obviously. They have very smart and very competent people there. But the general low quality of their code, the lack of polish in their products, it clearly shows the consequences of hiring people based on how fast they can dump code on a whiteboard.

Nod, I understand. At the risk of adding just a little more noise, a quick note: I initially ignored the comment, but then while reading other comments I started seeing the upvotes piling up, and frankly, it bothered me. I can't downvote, I can only comment, so that's what I did.

It's mind-boggling what some people consider worthy of an upvote around here... didn't read the article, guesses what it says, then pats self in the back for such a good job at commenting. Subsequent upvotes tell other people that this comment is somehow meaningful for the discussion. Cute!

Edit: and of course I'm downvoted. Thanks!

Edit2: I'm no longer downvoted. Even though this might be relevant to a discussion of the voting system, I don't want to intrude on the discussion of the article itself, so no need to vote anymore on this. Thanks for the upvotes, everyone. Nothing to see here, move along... :)

It's definitely something to do with the one of the points the article mentions: the fact that women don't even consider it as a career, unless someone introduces them to flying (relative, friend, whatever) at some point in life. It's an interesting thought, and I wonder how much of that also applies to women and technology, particularly CS and open source.

That's funny, I'm always trying to create a Google profile but I can't, because my main account is on appdomains and they don't do profiles for appdomains. Which means I can't check into places on latitude from my android, for instance. You'd think they'd be a bit more worried about the potential user base they're shutting out of their platform, rather than worrying about deleting private profiles. Oh well.

Some say it's probably due to the installer copying lots of things around, combined with slow IO on the VM plus the installer assuming reads are going to be slow (the source being slow CDs or floppies).

I call pish posh on that. What you're actually witnessing is The Microsoft Minute, as explained by http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990318

Yes, there is sexism. It exists everywhere, not confined to any particular profession. The company where she suffered that probably had women in totally different areas that also suffered from that. That is despicable, dishonest and repulsive. But it doesn't have much to do with the culture of software engineering itself, which on a technical level is very egalitarian in terms of really not caring whether you're male, female or a super intelligent shade of the color blue.

Regarding the part about being lucky at working in companies with a large % of women in It, there are a surprising number of women in engineering departments in large companies, especially when the companies are not actual software companies, they do business in other areas and have large IT departments to support the business internally. Because the culture in these is not really a startup culture, you really don't hear about most people in there. For the most part they aren't posting in HN or doing technical blogs or participating much in the "geek" community - and so this community doesn't actually realize they exist, and when people talk about the lack of women in IT, they're really talking about the lack of women in the open source and startup cultures.

In the end, it sounds like she had a really hard time, but she got out in time and in one piece, and she's more productive than ever, which is great. And good to hear that the COO got kicked out, it's good to know insanity doesn't go unnoticed forever. Thanks for sharing! Best of luck with the new startup!

In 14 years, this has never happened to me. Never in a corporate environment nor in a geek conference.

Frankly, everywhere I worked, be it a startup or a huge corporation, I never felt discrimination or disbelief at what I do. In the corporate world, particularly in finance and insurance, there are a lot of female developers. They're around 60% of the IT staff, from what I've personally seen in the places where I've consulted at. In the startup and more "geeky" environments, female devs are very rare. Currently I'm going on the theory that the type of person that seeks an IT job in the corporate world is different from the one that goes to startups. The degrees they have are subtly different (Business CS vs CS), their professional needs are different (stable long term employment with low risk, low % of innovation, high % of project/code maintenance in the corporate world). To me it seems obvious that there are many more women leaning towards the corporate profile than there are for the startup profile. Why this is, I'm still working on that.

Regardless of how many women there are, I have never witnessed the sort of disbelief that that phrase shows. I don't know why she says this happens, maybe it's a cultural thing where she's from.

Sounds like an Onion News item.

Oh, if only I could upvote a million times...

This stupid insistence on ignoring the background and experience of interviewees and instead rank them based on how fast they can write code on a whiteboard is the reason why 1) google can't polish a product to save their lives and 2) every time I look at the code they produce, especially small projects, I cringe with the lack of mantainability, header standardization or design coherence. Keep thinking the best people to hire are the ones that can spout basic cs theory at a moments notice on a whiteboard and nothing will change.

>Effectively, Readability is extorting publishers: give us 30% or we'll take everything

Readability has costs, and provides a service for free. They give you the choice of using their service for free (no revenue for them, no revenue for ad-driven content sites), or paying them a fee for the use of their service (which is strip everything except the content so you don't have to - a value-added service if I ever saw one). This fee gets forwarded to the content author, while they keep a commission for the service they're providing you. You, presumably, see a value in their service, or you wouldn't use it. You see a value in the content, or you wouldn't read it. They give you the choice of supporting the content and the service, where money is split to support the service you like and the content you like, or just use it without paying anything. The content author is denied ad revenue because you use a service which strips ads. This service now offers you the chance to support your favorite content authors directly, to compensate for the loss of ad revenue.

And you see extortion where?

>My entire point would be moot if Apple required 30% of all revenue >from Readability regardless of whether the subscription originated >from within the iOS app or from Readability's website

Your point is moot. Apple takes 30% from in-app subscriptions. People using the app don't have a choice between subscribing through the app or through the website, seeing as Apple does not allow linking to the website. Obviously, people using the app won't think of going to the browser to subscribe. Hence, even though it seems there's an alternative, toll-free way to subscribe, in practice there isn't. Even though it looks like it's optional, it's not, and content-based apps are going to be especially hit with this toll. The Apple 30% toll - encouraging people to develop for your platform, then putting up flat 30% fees on revenue - now that is extortion.

Just activate the Multiple Inboxes gadget on Labs. Then you can create n priority inboxes with whatever you want showing up. If you then can't find a way to filter your super super super super priority emails from the rest of the junk, then you might have bigger problems :)

You know, just putting co-founder in the title doesn't actually explain that he's not with the company anymore... it just means founded it with someone else (unless co-founder means someone who founded a company with someone and then left? could be my bad english failing me..)