I Respect all entrepreneurs, and it seems to me the 'attention' the 'mythical' female hackers gets perpetuates the stereotypes we are trying to break. It is fairly obvious it draws attention on the fact that generally we don't 'expect' this type of person?
Please explain why this fine young person is getting any attention besides her gender?
Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
51–60 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#52Nice. One of my first thoughts was do you have any specific communities that you go to for advice from other women? Some of the ones I know of are Debian Women and Linuxchix. Have you ever tried enterprise selling? I'm curious how you deal with mostly male upper management? What about loans or venture capital? Do banks or VC's treat you differently? Do you have any women in tech you follow? When I was a boy I would devour any book on Microsoft because I idolized Bill Gates for taking on the suits at IBM. What's your experience hiring in the past?
I realize i'm asking about stereotypes that may or may not be in Bulgaria. The whole point of this post is to confront those stereotypes so I just ask what everyone may think at one point or another.
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You don't strictly need to, but most people want to make sure the code the open source is at least commented and free of embarrassing mistakes, shortcuts, antipatterns and whatnot.
That impulse is exactly what I was trying to counter. It's far better to put "bad" code out there (and you may even find someone improves those things for you) than wait to tidy it (which often never actually happens).
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH I find the "rural Bulgaria" bit to be far more interesting :-) Did you have any exposure to Soviet computers? Like their clone of the Sinclair Spectrum say? Did you learn trinary in school? Do you say "reverse Polish notation" or know it by a different name?
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 t…
I remember the local "pioneers home" (what's the translation of "пионерски дом" actaully?) not having floppy disc controllers for their Pravetz 82 machines. So we had to type small BASIC games found in magazines in order to play. Typing to play ratio was usually 1/1.
Good luck with the project!
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#55Nice. One of my first thoughts was do you have any specific communities that you go to for advice from other women? Some of the ones I know of are Debian Women and Linuxchix. Have you ever tried enterprise selling? I'm curious how you deal with mostly male upper management? What about loans or venture capital? Do banks or VC's treat you differently? Do you have any women in tech you follow? When I was a boy I would d…
I look up to Reid Hoffman, Jobs, Drew Houston, Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer - founder/product people who put so much love into their products that you can feel it. In order to build like that you have to be so immersed into the problem and so painfully aware of its every nook and cranny it hurts. Those guys translated real-life human processes into frictionless online experiences so good, they save lifetimes worth of hours for society daily. That is what I want to do when I grow up (but do it for the execution process). The process of taking a pursuit from an idea to a fulfilled or fundable project with the right team, mentors, and exposure anywhere on the planet in the matter of hours or just a few days.
I haven't tried to raise VC money yet. Self-funding for now. I want to build a product so good its numbers cannot be ignored. Currently trying to get access to advisors who have been there before me with similar problems.
And I genuinely hope this doesn't prove true: ( http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/11/02/how-female-en... )
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#56What's the situation like for women in tech in Bulgaria?
There's a lot of girls in the IT over here. When I think about it - most of the QAs that I know are female :-)
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Learning English from Cartoon Network? What sort of vocabulary does that result in?
I knew a lot of people who learned English from watching fan translated anime. They had perfect written English, but I don't know about spoken.
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#58What attracted you to computer science? Put another way, why do you think it is that when your penpal showed you the website she built your reaction was "cool" instead of "lame...." (especially in 98 when the web technologies were much more primitive)?
I liked math and physics because they allowed me to predict or affect future events. I also loved design because it allowed me create things that might have never existed otherwise. CS was the perfect combination of both - you can create things, solve problems, and distribute them to the rest of the world for free (I couldn't afford to buy even books at that time). I started with HTML and flash because the computer m…
Have you read any of the Foundation series by Asimov? The action is driven by a group of scientists who are able to predict the future using mathematical models.
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#59These are the selling points for CS that worked really well in my conversations with 10-18 year-old girls so far (Aggregated so you can use them for your niece if you find the opportunity) : - You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a cringe Justin Bieber /cringe fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how. - This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ…
> - (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.
Amen! Brain power is indeed a beautiful thing.
Re: Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH I find the "rural Bulgaria" bit to be far more interesting :-) Did you have any exposure to Soviet computers? Like their clone of the Sinclair Spectrum say? Did you learn trinary in school? Do you say "reverse Polish notation" or know it by a different name?
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 t…
Can't help recalling this pic http://xkcd.com/645/