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USSR was feminist in some regards. Women had women-only spaces to learn math and science. There is a lot more equality of performance in STEM in former soviet populations.


As mentioned in the article, that might be completely explained by their comparative poverty.


> This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.

This isn't a complete explanation: we can see this by looking at other STEM fields. The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. You don't get such a dramatic demographic shift because of innate tendencies, but this was contemporaneous with a shift from programming being considered low-status to high-status work. Is this perhaps social, rather than directly economic?

To take an example from elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072): I can see the “you must use this method” prescription hitting girls harder than boys, since girls tend to drift towards copying / collaborative play, and boys tend to drift towards competitive play. This prescription might make mathematics seem less like play, to girls – which would be ironic, since real mathematics is an incredibly collaborative endeavour.

(Which raises the question: do girls inherently prefer copying play, and boys inherently prefer competition play? Who knows? I suspect not, but I think it'll be a long time before we find out.)


> The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested.

We eliminated the job women were dominating (programmer) by combining it with the one men were dominating (analyst).

At the same time law and medicine were seeing huge increases in the proportion of women practitioners, so the status thing doesn’t make a ton of sense as an explanation. Besides, it was not high status in the 80s when this was going on (or the 90s… arguably it’s still not, just high pay)


> We eliminated the job women were dominating (programmer) by combining it with the one men were dominating (analyst).

Gender disparity is usually shown as a percentage, but years ago I ran across one for programmers that used absolute numbers and the pattern showed a different story than usual - which this reclassification could probably explain.

I don't remember what year exactly the flip was, but before the flip the number of men and women were increasing at around the same rate. After it, the number of men skyrocketed while the number of women kept increasing at the same rate as before. As a percentage this looks like women lost interest or got pushed out, but the absolute numbers look more like men flocked to it without pushing anyone out. Or, perhaps, got grouped into it.


I communicated that badly. It doesn't matter so much how things are seen outside the workplace, but within it. Programming is definitely considered high-status in a software firm: ever heard of the concept of a "rockstar programmer"?

Low-status tasks (e.g. vital, but "unpromotable" ones) are delegated to women, and tasks that are associated with femininity are considered low-status. This is a well-documented (https://noidea.dog/glue) and easily-measurable phenomenon. I expect there are many harder-to-measure instances of institutional sexism that might make classes of workplace unpalatable, even if there's no gender bias in desire to do the actual work.

If this (or a similar) effect has been going on for a while, I'd expect that to have significant knock-on effects.


For a counterpoint: a friend of mine works at Google, and as an excellent SRE who also happens to be female she's steadily getting opportunities thrown her way; especially invites to speak at external conferences and other internal events. She's also gotten promotions.

It helps that she's very competent, but she didn't have to work extra to be noticed by the organisation.


Systematic discrimination isn't the same as universal discrimination.

If we're trading second-hand anecdotes, I've got a couple dozen of trans women programmers no longer receiving promotions despite flawless performance reviews, and half a dozen trans men programmers suddenly receiving credit for work they were previously ignored for. That's as close to a controlled test as I can think of – though, obviously, marred by the selection bias of anecdotes.

All this doesn't mean it's the same in mathematics – but I'm not sure how someone can deny that there's institutional sexism in the field of computer programming. It's well-documented. "One person at Google" doesn't refute that.


Now I'm playing a game of "find the earliest such anecdote". Here's one from 2006: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060714174545.h...

> Where Summers sees innate differences, Barres sees discrimination. As a young woman […] he said he was discouraged from setting his sights on MIT, where he ended up receiving his bachelor’s degree. Once there, he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”


Also a huge drinking problem that is not entirely but mostly concentrated in men.


I don't think this guy has really built or broken many habits. None of what he says is wrong per se, it's just wordy. You don't need such a deep understanding of the brain to build/break habits. You just need a reason.

If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it. A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.

One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant. These same people, without such a clear and strong motivation, would probably "slip up" and struggle with 9 months of sobriety.


> If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

This is ridiculously naïve. You seem to be completely forgetting the existence of addiction.

> One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant.

Because they weren't addicted to drinking, like most healthy people.

Do you think a single fat person wants to be fat? It's uncomfortable, inconvenient and embarrassing; nobody wants it, and they know exactly what causes it. The reason more than half of our population is overweight is they are addicted to food and our society not only enables it but encourages and reinforces it. They can't "just stop".


I think about when I quit smoking. I failed several times because I didn't really want to quit smoking. But then, when I really had had enough of smoking, and actually wanted to quit, addiction was in the way. I failed a couple of times because the consequences of stopping were so severe (headaches, anxiety, fatigue). Then I added a non-rewarding nicotine replacement (patches) to prevent the withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly quitting was manageable.

You can't just quit food, though.


Most people aren't addicted to bad habits. Thats why I said 99% of people. Alcoholism, real alcoholism, is not actually that common.


...and you seem to have quickly conflated habit with *addiction*.

It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'


This seems a semantic carving of the discussion to match the argument though.

> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.

> Person 2: I can't.

> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.

If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.


You seem to have taken the message 'want harder' from the original comment.

I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.

Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.


You're almost right. Habits don't just show up – we engage in them because they give us something useful back. The trouble is this useful thing is often optimised for the short-term, and habits can have negative long-term consequences.

The alcohol thing is a good example: when not pregnant, it gives us short-term pleasure, at long-term cost. When pregnant, the cost of alcohol is moved up to the now and so it's easier to get out of the habit. It's not about strength of motivation, it's about immediacy of consequences.

I have heard rumours that some people are able to channel motivation to pursue what's good in the long term even when it goes against short-term gains, but I believe this ability is more rare than it may appear. For many, it's more effective to try to re-arrange the environment such that the consequence profile aligns with the long-term goals.


Yep, all great points. If you want to go deeper, I think we can actually trick ourselves into being "pregnant" by creating some sort of urgency in our lives. An investor I worked with once told me the best way to be a successful entrepreneur is to become unhirable (through scandal or something like that) because then you would absolutely have to make it in business on your own.

When you live a high agency life, you have to screw it up in strategic ways to push you towards success. I actually chose to have children when I felt like I was making too much money and it was making my life a little too easy. (It wasn't the only factor, but it was a conscious factor).

And it worked - I have way less time, way more important things, and my software projects have become much more hyper focused and I goto market and test things much earlier, I simply dont have the luxury to sit around and think like I used to.


"just try harder" isn't a strategy or good advice.


I don't think the parent's advice is anything to do with "just try harder"...I think he's saying that we try to create habits for things we don't really care about...just stuff we think we should do for productivity or health or whatever.

You don't need to 'try harder'; you need to question your motivation for the habit in the first place. Either a thought will click that clarifies why a habit is actually important, or you'll realise you are pressuring yourself to take on a habit that doesn't really matter to you (when you strip away the bullshit)

edit: and if the importance finally clicks for you, you'll generally just start working on the habit. I struggled with weight for years, and then eventually motivation/understanding clicked and I lost 6stone/40kg/90lb in around 18 months (and have lost a little more since, and kept it off for years).


I'm not a dude, but yep you get it.

"Just try harder" is not the follow up to "You don't want it bad enough."

Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't want it. And that at some point the time will come when you will want it bad enough, like it did for you.


> A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.

Reminds me of the Eric Thomas speech where he tells the class they don't want it bad enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vuetQSwFW8


> Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it.

Most of us dont. I certainly have very little choice over my day to day life.


You could copy/paste this paragraph and create the shortest book on self-motivation ever created.

Jokes apart, what you wrote is really true and made really think about it.


Most motivation/self-help books are reiterating the same things in different ways.

And it's probably okay, because each wording/phrasing can make the message "click" for different people. Same thing with the timing. Reading something when you're 18 and when you're 30 can be totally different.


I think Shia LeBouf has this beat with “do itttt!”


Yeah, I was a recreational amateur beer drinker, to the point where it was almost my social identity. Would lie if I'd say i never tried to tone down

After I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, I stopped drinking it overnight without any problem. Very interesting, but it just comes down that the consequence overweight the immediate gain. Hangovers were never a big enough reason for me to stop drinking, but the overall negative consequences of being glutened overweighted that


I guess I'm the only one, but I love these. They seem so fun. I would definitely rather have glasses than to carry a phone around with me.


I'm willing to pay 50 cents per year for them to store it. That's already a 10x profit for them. But 10/month is a lot for virtually nothing?

Anyway, I ended up saving my stuff locally, closing my account and just not using their service. I found an alternative solution using a product I already pay for.


There you go. Good discernment.

If they're not offering you value then cancel the subscription.

But that doesn't mean the end of subscriptions. It means that services that don't offer sufficient value go away.


But there are interesting situations, e.g. video on demand. When there was essentially only Netflix, everybody was fine paying a subscription. But now there are many different services with exclusive rights on some content, so people have to choose between paying multiple subscriptions, alternating between subscriptions, or going back to downloading content.

Meanwhile the VoD services get more expensive and add ads on top of subscriptions. Not sure if that model "works".


A couple of questions - the end result is a video, technically, right? its not on top of the actual app.

Secondly, if I create one of these, I have to pay a subscription fee the entire time I use it? I can't just pay a fee for generating it and self-host?


product management. same money, more variety, less hours (imo). Although now that I have product experience I think I could have protected my energy more as a SWE.

After I quit SWE I tried to get public-facing jobs like making juice at a juice bar. I was told over and over I didn't smile enough or have the personality for public-facing work.

I think it's a fantasy to have a "regular" job. It's not really as relaxing as you think. Everything feels like a grind eventually. But jobs with a lot of variety (Like product or other types of management) I think are slightly better.


Can you elaborate on how being a PM changed your view on protecting your energy in SWE?


Just sharing my take but basically most devs don’t care at all and are super inefficient. If you care even a little and take some responsibility for the greater good of a code base then you are a better dev than ~90% of devs in my experience. It has very little to do with hours spent working


In the future, all content will have an encrypted signature if the content is not AI, that includes a release of any people featured in the content. This is just growing pains until we get there. We'll assume everything is AI/fake unless it has the signature.


well, anything is a fireable offense, we're all mostly working at-will anyway. but this seems goofy. Probably a lot of these laws should update.


I have the apple pencil OG and the apple pencil 2nd generation - my OG one is in pristine condition, and my 2nd generation one is already cracked towards the top even though I've used it less. (My OG one is used by my toddler now, too, and it's survived unscathed.)


It's a simplification. There's nothing "bad" about infant formula, but its clearly an ultraprocessed food that uses powdered milk that removes larger molecules from the milk. Sure, breast milk is better in most cases.

Aside: BF is better mostly because it adjusts based on what the infant needs with the biofeedback component. Pumped milk is shown to be equal to formula because it breaks the biofeedback loop.

There are tons of other uluraproessed foods that are fine too, and in certain cases great that we can manufacture them because they are beneficial in other ways.

The elephant in the room is high calorie ultraprocessed food designed for fast consumption.

In general, I'm on board, (I only eat real bread) but sometimes the people who rail against this stuff come off like luddites.


> There's nothing "bad" about infant formula

Many people disagree.


Okay? What do those people suggest for infants that do not have access to breastmilk?


Goat's milk, usually.


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