Rob, I think that if you re-read knowtheory's comment you may find that your reply does not address its substance - and that, in fact, you are in broad agreement.
Knowtheory cited the case of male nursing precisely because it's a dissimilar example to women in tech. His critique is that it's not enough just to swap gender roles, because we carry along all of the mental and cultural baggage associated with masculinity and femininity. When we recontextualize gender roles, we're not really understanding the contrary perspective with any depth.
Put another way, there's a difference being a man in women's shoes and being a woman in women's shoes.
Anways, thanks for taking the time to write the article - it was enjoyable to read and thought provoking. I'm always appreciate of articles that try to promote understanding instead of enforcement.
You'd be surprised how many vendors and merchants simply do not care. I was employed with an e-commerce vendor that indefinitely stored CVV2 in plaintext (among other numbers).
I couldn't say. But it's implemented at the company headquarters and they are experimenting with it in the stores. They haven't gone back on their commitment to it. It's also been implemented at The Gap:
A Rails consultancy (I used to work for) in Atlanta called Highgroove also implements ROWE, going so far as to incorporate it into the way they deliver to the customer. It was a great way to work and operate as a business.
Only one minor point from me: the Dan Shapiro quote is a bit off.
> To literally handicap yourself by 50 percent is insanity.
From the figures I've seen, the handicap is in the 25-30 percent range based on the percentage of women in the industry.
But I like his line of thinking. It's an old libertarian argument too: racism and sexism will be rooted out the market by those smart enough to take advantage of the inconsistencies in the labor pool. It's a tremendous opportunity if it's as bad as it seems.
Yes 20% now. But think long term. If we get rid of the sexism then there will be more women in tech. There is a shortage of programmers, so we increasing women increases possible workforce, good for companies.
This needs to be more than just updates from friends. Facebook does that well enough. Simply organizing a certain type of update into a stream isn't a sufficient reason for people to use the app unless everyone else already is.
Here's what might work though: aggregate and map local, context-aware events: local as in things that are happening nearby, and context-aware as in things that suit my interests. Why not consume data from Songkick for example - like displaying concerts and music events. Or figure out a way to generate data from bars and nightclubs. Maybe mashup something from Yelp? Make it easy, fun, and intuitive to browse this type of information - with data from your friends mixed and layered in.
That way, there's a reason to use this thing without the luxury of having friends who are users (which, frankly, will be everyone).
I've been thinking a lot about this stuff myself - I'd be happy to toss back ideas outside of HN. My address is in my profile.
Thanks for the suggestion. We're already working on curating some top events for a bunch of populous cities. I'll shoot you an e-mail and perhaps we can talk further.
Edit: you may want to also take a look at our "nearby" events. While the list may admittedly be a little dry if you're outside of a high-populous area, it's a cool feature.
I think that you might be discounting the value of Kickstarter's execution - or rather, a hypothetical Joss Whedon would be discounting the value of their execution.
In the same way that Twitter is "just a database of SMS messages", Kickstarter is just a "payment checkout" - but of course they are both greater than the sum of their parts.
They have value, of course. But I do think that on the upper end they might be forced to lower their percentage in time. If for no other reason than someone else will come along and compete at a lower rate.
Their execution isn't that hard to compete with, it can be commoditized with enough resources, and for someone with actual fame I don't think they increase the amount raised by much.
If not Whedon, think Lady Gaga or JK Rowling. What would Kickstarter offer them that some private white label processing service couldn't copy?
Right. What you have to look at is, how much more money would he bring in by using Kickstarter? Hard to say for sure, of course, but Kickstarter is in a very good position now to argue that it's well over 5%.
Seems to me that for someone who doesn't already have a large fan base, a Kickstarter campaign could easily increase their take by a factor of 4 (if not 10 or 100 or 1000). For someone well-known like Whedon the factor will be smaller, but if it's 1.5 or even 1.2, the 5% fee is more than covered.
> You'll cut off the lifeblood of a community whose participants are moving very quickly past the phase where they're excited to be involved in such a community—people get successful, busy, jaded, etc.
I was about to respond to this with something to the effect of: "What have you observed that suggests in any way that the community is moving on?"
Then I looked at your credentials. It seems as though the kind of person you're describing as having moved on/become far too busy/etc is, well, you.
So it's possible that you might be conflating your own experience with the group's as a whole. Hacker News appears to me to be growing at quite a pace - independently of any such buttons or notions of elitism. In fact, I think the notion that it's growing precisely because of the elitism of quality, is worth considering.
(P.S. Love your work by the way - it's got such a superb sense of design.)
Thanks for your kind words. I don't consider myself one of these people. I love reading the content I find through HN and participating in the discussions from time to time. I really don't want to see it die due to the misplaced efforts to prevent the same.
Also it looks like they're back.