It's not about gender. From your point of view it's about character weakness. A woman has bad experiences with men, so she should be trained to seek haven among women? If she wants to get a mortgage, should she do so only through a female mortgage broker? If she wants to buy a car, does it have to be sold to her by a woman? Or more generally does she need to attend a women-only class that teaches her to negotiate with salesmen? Sounds like a form of community codependency to me.
A better solution might be to teach women (and men) to accept and understand different styles of communication. And that class shouldn't be gender-specific.
In regard to programming, another commenter had a great solution. Get some books, make a github account, learn to code. You have complete anonymity on github. It's a place where all aspects of your individuality can drop out of consideration except the most important in the context: your ability to understand and write code.
Also, I fear that groups of women programming might not get the same experience as if they were also programming with men. I'm skeptical of the value of gender-biased environments helping defeat perceived gender biases found in a particular activity. It seems it would only further promote gender biases.
The program fails if most of the women, upon exiting the program, start programming with men and say "This isn't like Ladies Learning Code!" and either quit programming altogether or simply join other groups of women to program.
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
When you understand that Hemingway quote, you will realize that all ratings services are inherently useless when it comes to the value of trust. In the case of Yelp, there really isn't any reason to trust them when their [financial] existence is maintained by the businesses that are reviewed on their site.
So when you're about to decide where to take your parents for Sunday dinner when they come to visit, don't reach for your iPhone. Go to a nice part of town and walk into a restaurant and be seated. And in the case that you don't like your parents, just take them to Denny's.
The problem with the 10x vs. 1x statement is that the 10x people are not constantly 10x better than the median. The environment in which they are placed has a lot to do with it. Circumstantial mediocrity is often a consequence of poor management, and the product release cycle is the petri dish of mediocrity.
So a common problem arising from this situation is the choice between leaving a 10x-er on the line or promoting him to do other things. It's a trade-off. If you choose the former, you maintain increased productivity, but the exceptional developer will eventually get bored and leave; if you choose the latter, you end up watering down your production pool, and risk placing the developer in a role where he might not be a 10x-er.
Constant [relative] mediocrity in a given developer pool is the stable state in either case.
I've been approached a dozen times by business people offering me equity for my development time. I committed to and completed three projects and nothing ever came of them. Thankfully it only amounted to ~1000 hours among the three projects, but it's still time I wasn't paid for.
A technical co-founder with no work experience doesn't sound like much of a "technical" co-founder. Has he worked on any sort of open source projects, done research at a university, or anything that could be considered experience? If not, then it's not a good sign.
If you can afford to spare the time, then by all means take the opportunity, but I'd ask for 33% and wouldn't settle for less than 25%. Just state that you feel you'd be playing an important role in the product's creation and expect a more equitable share. You're allowed to put any price you want on your time. If they're confident the venture will succeed, then they should relinquish some of their share, otherwise they're being a bit greedy.
Two data points, yours and mine, are hardly enough to draw a lesson from. Lesson: Don't jump to conclusions and teach others lessons based on your hurt feelings.
The majority of the comment was praising my female math teachers for caring enough to go outside their comfort zone to foster a love of mathematics. If more teachers in general had the temerity to venture into the unknown when educating their students, especially in math and science, we might not have serious gender gaps in most professional fields.
The study you linked is more recent, but such a massive swing in the other direction is probably not indicative of reality. Statistics reported by agencies are often interpreted incorrectly. The companies who run the survey are often biased and perform the tests incorrectly. I've been pitched statistics by marketers plenty of times and they usually don't know what they're talking about.
Nevertheless, your article goes to show that the spending gap between men and women in online social gaming is pretty small. My article mentions that women tend not to play console and PC games as much as men do, which supports the opinion that EA is not a good comparison point for Zynga.
I wish I could get male/female spending demographics for Dave & Buster's, but it would probably be closer to social gaming than console/PC gaming. Although you'd have a tough time teasing out money from men (husbands/boyfriends) who pay for their female companions vs. men on themselves.
Edit: Many years ago when I played Everquest some friends had a discussion of why so few women play games. One guy answered, quite aptly, "By putting scantily-clad big-breasted cartoon women and monsters bashing each other on the cover they catch the attention of men. If they wanted to bring more women in, then they should have smiling people sitting around a table and cooperating with one another."
Exploit doesn't always have a negative connotation, and neither does manipulate. Cheating is irrelevant to the discussion. If you think exploitation is only about cheating, then you will be a software developer your whole life, as your father was a cab driver for his.
VCs are exploiting a system. In fact, that is their sole purpose. If they win more than they lose, they continue to be VCs, otherwise they slip into irrelevance and are put out to pasture as a senior executive at some stagnant, but stable company.
Working smart is getting someone or something else to do your work for you. That's one definition, and in the case of VCs, it's how they work.
VCs don't invest in a company. They invest in a functioning system. They invest in individuals whom they trust to build and maintain a functioning system. The nature of the system is largely irrelevant to them, as long as it produces what they desire: money, prestige among peers, hope, relief from boredom, etc.
Understanding a system is essential to working smart, but even more essential is having the balls to exploit and manipulate the system - to add value to them system and to remove waste and inefficiency from the system. Functioning systems are often highly inert; they resist change. That's why I say you need balls to change it.
Your father sits in a cab all day driving people from point to point. He functions in a transportation system. But what did he do to exploit it? Maybe he didn't have the balls to exploit a system he understood. However, you can bet he hopes that, one day, you will.
I've tried Adderall a few times and never got the productivity burst that users claim to receive. It tends to have the opposite effect on me. My attention darts everywhere and my skin feels like it's being pricked by thousands of needles.
The reason why I was productive in college and pulled 4.0s most semesters is because I actually found my coursework interesting. It wasn't something I was plowing through because the degree would get me fame and fortune. I didn't need exogenous motivation in the form of a pill.
I know three people who swear by Adderall/Ritalin/Vyvanse/etc and I've heard the same summary from each of them: "It helps you get through boring work, but it kills your creativity." One guy will switch between pot and Adderall to do his work. He smokes when he needs to be creative and takes Adderall when he wants to bang out lines of boilerplate code.
The substance lifestyle really isn't something I can buy into.
I graduated right before the peak of the 2000 dotcom bust, and I got a two exploding offers that I didn't accept. The offer I ended up taking was the opposite of an exploding offer: the nebulous offer.
I was told I was being tendered an offer. Great! I was ecstatic because the company was a "leader" in the industry I wanted to work in. Ten days and several phone calls later, my offer was still being "worked on." At that point I got impatient and continued interviewing. I had two more offers come in during the formation of the nebulous offer: one of the exploding type and one without conditions. I informed my dream company of the exploding offer and magically the paperwork appeared for their offer the next day. I took it.
6 months later I got laid off along with 20% of the staff.
Lesson learned: a company that treats you poorly when you're in recruitment will treat you poorly when you're working for them.
No. Not all the users are real. Companies employ various methods to create the illusion of activity on their dating sites. You also have to account for spammers/scammers. If you want a more realistic gauge of activity, then take any user number (currently online, total, in your city, etc.) and divide it by 10. At any given time only one tenth of the user base is active and legitimate.
My source: I worked for an online dating company for 2 years.
Currently they're bandwidth bound, but I'm dissolving that. In the next year I imagine that it'll move to being more memory bound. Then that will turn into being bound by I/O, but that can be solved with memory and more clever caching schemes. CPU should never be an issue unless I move the video encoding back in house, but I don't see that happening soon, and I would separate that into a its own server farm.
We deliver video content. We have a CDN that properly encodes and serves our content. All I need is to handle the HTTP requests for the "directory" of videos. A shared environment would probably be fine. All the 4GB servers seem to have most of their RAM dedicated to caching when I check what free -m gives me. Our physical disk space requirements are low. As I shift more of our content to the CDN, our bandwidth needs are decreasing as well (from 12TB/mo to 7TB/mo since I started optimizing).
I inherited this setup, so to me it looks like the servers are overpowered. Also, the customer service is terrible, which is the primary reason for wanting to leave them. I want a service where I can easily requisition and kit out new servers quickly in an "a la carte" fashion.
I have 3 servers running on EC2 already using micro instances. They're mostly to handle minor services (email list subscription/requeuing for all the web properties, payment processing postback handling, etc.) They've been up for nearly a year without any problem.
I've been leaning toward EC2, but I wanted to hear what else is out there.
Can anyone else comment on experiences with Linode (and equivalent alternatives)? I'm considering moving a group of servers off expensive dedicated hosting ($400/server) to a VPS service. I've looked at Amazon EC2 but they don't seem to have a sweet spot for my needs.
How many social chat rooms can exist simultaneously? World of Warcraft, Second Life, Everquest, Facebook, Google Hangouts, Shaker, etc. Their success basically depends on marketing to individuals who are further from the neurotypical end of the autistic disorder spectrum.
I've taken psilocybin mushrooms twice. I've also read plenty of literature about psychedelics and the nature of reality. My experience is difficult to describe, because it was mostly "feeling." Language is a very crude way to express feeling, but the pithiest description I can give: it was extremely balanced.
In fact, on my first trip I listened to "Handlebars" by Flobots and the music (without the lyrics) accurately conveys what I experienced.
Did you check out Festival/Festvox/Cepstral? http://festvox.org/ Festival/Festvox are free to use. I built an Arabic speech synthesizer with it in the spring of 2002 for a class project. It's quite flexible. Cepstral is a commercial offshoot of Festvox.
I ran through a few of the foreign language quizzes (German, Spanish, Arabic) and they're pretty good. They do need a bit of curation, because some of the answers required superfluous punctuation (Food = "das Essen -"). Some data scrubbing is in order.
The quizzes with non-Latin alphabets are a bit difficult to do, but understandably so. The beauty of these languages is in their writing anyway. Are you planning any iPad/tablet apps?