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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
And with that, I'm getting back to work. I enjoy writing with Ruby, and Rails has made web development a joy for me. Beyond that, I don't find these kinds of things interesting in the least. I'd wager that most of its user base (Ruby that is) feels much the same way.
Yes, I did :). As mentioned below, it's not a comparable product. Custom Search is site-specific. It's an API for the "search this page using Google" forms you sometimes see on blogs and the like. It's not an API for "capital S" Google Search, while Bing's API really is their Search API.
Google doesn't have a search API (it was long ago deprecated https://developers.google.com/web-search/). So the API itself is the advantage over Google in this case.
I'd be curious to know the kinds of industries female founders in NYC gravitate towards - or if there isn't a clear cluster at all, and it's a fairly even distribution. If it's the latter, what does New York have that other cities don't?
As has been pointed out, I was referring to Geocoder's rates. I had the same confusion though. The request for donations certainly makes it seem like they are beneficent, but they are themselves selling the data. Not that that's legally or morally wrong (certainly not) - it's just a different position to be in.
Also it looks like they're back.