waveman2's comments

One other factor I would mention is the massive uncoolness of Ada. This seems to come from three directions:

1. Invented by and for a bureaucracy known for its extravagance and wastefulness.

2. Verbosity of a degree only before seen in COBOL.

3. A focus on avoiding errors above all else. For people who have a positive/benefits focus like most hackers, this negative focus is very unappealing and provokes references to anal-retentive pedants and so forth.

I would agree with others who pointed out the other problem "won't run on a computer I can buy - and anyway I can't afford the compiler". This is not to criticise the compiler developers but nonetheless it was a problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

To put it another way

"It's the ecosystem, stupid."

Apologies to Bill "It's the economy, stupid" Clinton.

In a number of countries you are not allowed to ask someone's race, let alone record it on your computers.

In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yourself against lawsuits.

> it is their responsibility to fix it.

This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions.

1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices?

2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally failed intervention in social policy.

I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. The evidence for this is very thin, and indeed more ethnically diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust and social capital.

There is some evidence that diversity in terms of viewpoint and skills is useful but just eg having more white women in the office may not be the great boon people assume.

> I would hypothesize that this is false

Citation required.

And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics.

The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.

So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.

It's unavailable in the sense that you can actually buy it now. I just did. That is, in the sense that it is available. And right now the claim made is demonstrably false, if not a deliberate lie.

Seriously people you need to confirm your facts. Not everything you read in the papers is true.

> maybe older developers have a blind spot towards opportunities that have failed in the past

Yes. A lot of things have to come together for something to work. Something can fail many times before succeeding. A little irrational optimism can be a good thing. Hitting the ground running at the exact moment is very challenging.

Protip: the government scans and keeps the exterior of all mail that is sent. So, put the returning address on the inside of the envelope so that it is harder to work out who is sending mail to whom.

I think this reflects one of the fallacies that people from other languages bring to Lisp. They think that all languages are more or less immutable.

If something annoys you (like funky function names) you can alias them or add whatever you think is missing to the language.

E.g. You could define second as something like

(defun second (list) (nth 1 list))

and use it forever, just as if it were in the base language.

As an example I have a function L2HT which takes a list and returns a hash table:

(l2ht '((1 "one") (2 "two)))

(You can override the hash table type with various parameters if you like).

Two comments

1. Machine learning is moving more and more towards indirect programming i.e. you program the computer with a learning algorithm and let it work out what to do. Google reinforcement learning, or machine learning. This greatly reduces the programming bottleneck.

2. People underestimate how much processing power the human brain has. Think 100,000,000,000 neurons, each with 1,000 active connections on average and perhaps 10,000 latent connections (which are being updated via Hebbian learning). The connections (axons and dendrites) are the active processing units. The cycle time is .01 seconds or so. Only the very largest computers are anywhere near this processing power (~10^16 operations/second). My current desktop is about 10,000 times less powerful. Now imagine trying to build a tractor with a 1/100 horsepower motor - such a difference is beyond being a gap, it is a qualitative difference.

Given the limited processing power available it is amazing computers can do what they can. Back in the 1980s a large bank was run on the equivalent of (1/10 of a millimeter of brain tissue)^3.

From personal experience I suggest you never buy a children's book on your own account.

There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Amazon "Hey this purchase was a one-off, don't use it for recommendations".

His argument seems to be "computers cannot do X yet, therefore computers will never be able to do X".

> they're just far more likely to make wildly incorrect mistakes than understandably incorrect ones

Have you spoken to some members of the general public and asked what they think? People believe all sorts of wacky things. We are just a lot more tolerant of the mistakes people make. http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/things-americans-believe-in

One of the criticisms of the study is just this point. A lot of the "upward mobility" is people moving to more expensive areas where they get somewhat higher pay but the cost of living is much higher. They may well be worse off, but in $USD terms they have moved up.

The studies seem to be confusing causation and correlation. They seem to assuming that there must be an environmental cause for the differences in people's IQs. This may seem like a stupid assumption to make, but a lot of people in the social sciences take this as a given, even though the weight of evidence is strongly against it.

Perhaps I have missed something, but I would expect that, if they did not have ideological blinkers on they would be saying things like:

"We are taking particular care to separate environmental and genetic factors here by including adopted children, [identical] twins reared separately, other children raised by other than biological relatives".

But I see none of this at all here.

You may be interested to read "The Nurture Assumption" for a detailed analysis of the effect of parents on their children. The basic conclusion is that if you do not seriously abuse your children you don't affect them much one way or the other. Steve Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" is also relevant.

> though no one really knows at this point

This is half the problem. After 30 years in IT, I note the NBN has no feasibility study, no cost benefit analysis, and is running way beyond schedule. This is the sort of project you try to get off because it will damage your career. What could possibly go wrong? But there's more... It is what is known as a "CEO mandate" project, in this case it resulted from a Kevin Rudd thought bubble. These invariably end in disaster. NAB's ISI project was one example of these and resulted in $billions of write-downs (this is in the public record). Turnbull has promised an actual feasibility study and cost analysis. This at least seems sensible. People act as though it is obvious that NBN is a good idea. It is not obvious to me. NBN will deliver nothing to my area for at least 5 years - assuming NBN gets back onto its planned schedule. The conservatives' plan will deliver a major speedup much more quickly, and as others have pointed out, it retains the option to implement FTTN as an add-on later, if and when and where that makes sense.

No I am saying that trivia is trivia. What happened is at worst micro-bullying.

Actually I suspect the daughter did not want to do the course, was pressured into it by her mother and pickup on on this minor incident as an excuse to stop the course.

According to the author she did nothing about the problem at the time ie did not talk to the teacher, but is now more than happy to create drama by the track.

The author's qualifications in teaching appears to be zero, and her qualifications in programming seem to be that she is a tech journalist and author of a work of fiction. Why should the teacher have any notice of her?

The extent of the problem is that some people said things like "go make me a sammich" etc to her daughter. I would suggest that this is actually not a huge problem. I recall my days in high school, when I was beaten up on a regular basis for the sin of being good at Math and Science. I mean hard punches to the head and body, possessions destroyed, etc. I spite of my complaints to parents and teachers alike, nothing was done until I managed to create some bad publicity for the school. But it seems it only hatters if it happens to a girl (TM).

Bear in mind also that the salary of the teacher is probably around 60% of the salary that a production programmer can earn. So unless the teacher is a very idealistic soul, it is likely the teacher is struggling and knows little about programming. Which makes the teacher's job all the more difficult.

Finally, there is no proof any of this actually happened. Given past feminist false claims, it is quite on the cards that it didn't happen or is exaggerated... particularly given the acknowledgement that she did nothing about the problem when it counted.

Worth mentioning also that India has one of the world's oldest and richest cultures.

It is hard to describe the feeling visiting some of these places, perhaps it's a bit like visiting Delphi or the Acropolis. My favorite was the Red Fort near the Taj Mahal.

It's a lot easier to describe the bad things about India than the good things.

> You clearly meant billions of men.

Plenty of women believe this too.