Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA

Unless you mean in the sense of removing passwords and similar, you don't need to clean up code for it to be worth open-sourcing.

I love these questions! Yes, I started on "Pravets" 8 and 16 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers ) with BASIC and Pascal. We also had these robot hands you could maneuver with the Pravets machines. I would travel 250 miles to get the huge sheet-sized disk with a plumber game on it from my cousin in Sofia to show it off to classmates in Tutrakan. Karateka was also huge. For reference, my hometown had no traffic lights or english teachers (I started learning English from Cartoon Network because I could only study German, French or Russian at school until 8th grade.)

I was 8 years old when I started dabbling with Pravetz in the school lab and the 16 year old "Informatics TA" pulled me aside one day to show me a picture of two people kissing to tell me in the most awkward possible way that he wanted to kiss me. Who does that to an 8-year-old? I just ran back into the lab.

I think Reverse Polish Notation is called the same in Bulgaria (CS after the age of the internet is taught mostly in English back there I think).

God forbid that anyone on an internet forum [mostly] about startup businesses might try to draw attention to themselves.

Great list and answer to PG's recent question of how do you get thirteen year old girls interested in programming. Another of my favorite quotes from a high-school girl on this topic [1]:

“Before taking the mandated Intro class last year, when I heard ‘computer science,’ I pictured nerdy boys, who turned into nerdy bearded men, slouched over huge computers and click-clacking out codes that meant nothing to me. There’s nothing wrong with nerdy boys, comp sci just didn’t seem like something I would ever be interested in.

“This image was quickly shattered in that first intro class. Computer science started to resonate with me when I worked on my first project, creating a simple animation of a string quartet using Netlogo. It was while I was working on this that I realized comp sci isn’t about nerdy boys sitting at computers and coding out nonsense that turns into violent video games and complicated math problem solvers. No, comp sci isn’t this at all. Comp sci, as I have found in my classes at Stuy, is a medium for expression, a place for creation and creativity.”

That's equally applicable to both genders.

Also, what do you think of John McCarthy's statement in the article also on the frontpage right now [2]:

" It has been my observation that the dropout from hard science by girls in high school is not primarily the fault of either parents or school. It is much more the fault of the values of present teen-age-girl society. Both boys and girls are affected more by the ideas of their peers than by the official policies of the educational institutions. A disproportionate number of adults with initiative come from separatist social groups where the parents prevent children from taking their values from their peers or from the schools.

Getting more women in higher positions in society depends on breaking this tradition. One possibility is batch processing rather than continuous operation. Normally a school is a continuous institution. Freshmen come in at the bottom and seniors go out at the top. If the tradition is regarded as bad, we could experiment with a system wherein a particular school is filled with freshmen and no new ones are admitted until the first lot graduates. If a new desirable tradition is successfully inculcated, then continuous processing can be resumed. This idea might also work in prisons. Another possibility is to teach initiative directly."

Also, regarding the recommendations to post to reddit, ignore them. HN is a smaller audience, but more specific and relevant to your post, and I'm glad you posted here instead, since I for one don't subscribe to /r/AMA or /r/IAMA (or whatever) and never would have seen it. By all means feel free to cross-post it there, but I suspect it will get a better reception here.

[1]:http://betabeat.com/2012/06/real-tales-of-learning-computer-...

[2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6998299

I think it is more productive to focus on fixing things going forward, than trying to place blame by resurfacing or redefining stereotypes. I'd rather us spread "gateway drugs to hacking" for everyone to use regardless of gender, race, or location. (plus I want us to surface more of the dormant role models we have on HN and elsewhere instead of letting journalists put dramatic spins on a plot that claims female tech founders are on the brink of extinction)

For example, I have a 5 year old niece. Every single gift I have sent her for holidays and birthdays is a way to trigger and express creativity (a drawing board, a guitar, a music box, a basketball hoop, a stomp rocket) and none of them is pink. If her father (who is an SE) doesn't teach her how to play with code in the next 2 years, I will.