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Comment: Re:Girls taking shop class (Score 1) 325

by dhasenan (#46014801) Attached to: The Whole Story Behind Low AP CS Exam Stats

Similar reasons. Media discourages women from doing anything unladylike. Women internalize this. If one highschool girl tries to defect, the girls surrounding her will helpfully step in to enforce these rules. Unfortunately, there's little chance for a normal highschool student to avoid problematic people.

When in shop class with two girls and twenty boys, the two girls will feel quite out of place -- we're told constantly that gender is one of the core parts of our identity, and they have relatively few allies on that front in the classroom. This is true even if the boys there are all don't make an issue of gender, as befitting any human.

Then, for those who want to get a career in something tech-oriented, they need to get into the relevant guild. If those guilds have a strong reputation of gender discrimination, that will serve as a disincentive to people to start the initial training in that line of work.

Comment: Re:Do all schools even offer CS classes? (Score 1) 325

by dhasenan (#46014535) Attached to: The Whole Story Behind Low AP CS Exam Stats

Let's see. I can take a class that's entirely optional. I know I'm likely to be picked on. I have no one there similar to me on an axis that I am constantly told is all-important, so I will feel out of place. Other people who seem more like me eschew that course and will make me feel as if I am abnormal and therefore bad even when I'm not at that class.

Whereas if I am passionate about the subject, I can learn on my own, online, where nobody can discern many personal details about me, nobody who can pester me (constantly in myriad ways, where I can't escape) about my decisions and pastimes, and the biggest downsides are not being able to skip a 3-credit college course and not having anyone to answer questions in person. Guess I'll have to go to IRC and pastebin and Google and Stack Overflow instead.

You expect me not to factor that into my decision...why?

Comment: Re:Alarming? (Score 2) 325

by dhasenan (#46014365) Attached to: The Whole Story Behind Low AP CS Exam Stats

Trace it back to each dropoff point.

Is the percentage of female senior software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female software engineers? That's a red flag for discrimination.

Is the percentage of recently graduated female software engineers appreciably smaller than the percentage of female CS students? That's a red flag for discrimination.

Is the percentage of female CS graduates appreciably smaller than the percentage of incoming female CS freshmen? That's a red flag for discrimination.

None of it is absolute proof of discrimination, but it's enough evidence to investigate. Discrimination can take a number of forms -- maybe your high school had a CS class, and the teacher and the guidance counselor were both solid feminists, but they weren't able to enforce a non-hostile environment for women. Or maybe inertia is at play, and if there were two or three solid years with at least 30% female representation in that class it would self-perpetuate. Or maybe there are more general media and marketing forces at work telling women and girls that they cannot be nerdy and cannot be interested in computers, that they are broken and wrong without a husband and that having these skills will prevent them from getting one, that they must focus on family and not on a career, that they will end up being homemakers for half a decade or more so they shouldn't bother getting a high-skill job or worry about education overmuch.

Just saying "people are different -- who cares?" hides these problems.

Comment: Failure on Subsurface devs' part (Score 1) 282

by dhasenan (#45979527) Attached to: Intel Dev: GTK's Biggest Problem, and What Qt Does Better

The Subsurface developers failed to accomplish things that are common in many GTK+ applications. I'm not sure if that means the various GTK+ language bindings are a lot better than the native C library or what, but it looks like the main benefit of switching to QT was a forced rewrite of the UI.

In-place editing? Not that hard.

The ratings stars? Banshee has it. So does Rhythmbox.

Native look-and-feel is a valid complaint. If GTK+ used the native file dialogs in Windows and OSX, that would help a lot. Adding default themes for those platforms that better mimic native controls (and such themes exist) would also help.

Granted, that says nothing about the community, but from a technical perspective, that talk was worthless.

Comment: Re:Secure safe. (Score 1) 381

by dhasenan (#45906837) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Protect Your Passwords From Amnesia?

You give one friend a piece of paper that says "XOR the bitstrings and interpret as UTF-32". You give three friends randomly generated bitstrings of the appropriate length. You give the fourth friend the password XOR'd with each of those random bitstrings.

Or you just write down your master password and put it in your safe and a deposit box at your bank.

Comment: Re:Pay the debt (Score 2) 497



Comment: Re:Unplug. (Score 2) 319






Comment: Neurological circuitry? (Score 1) 251




Comment: 4GB of RAM? (Score 2) 512



