Danielle Fong › Comments

"Kudos for bringing this up. Saul Griffith also weighs in quite reasonably on this issue: http://www.boingboing.net/2009......" - Danielle Fong

The single most dangerous bookstore I've ever been to. The average number of books I've bought on my trips to Moe's may well be in double digits. A problem for the plane ride home! - Michael Nielsen

I don't understand how they only have great books?! :-) - Danielle Fong

Please apply at scrane@lightsailenergy.com - Danielle Fong

"Huge numbers of Young Albertan men who would otherwise be applying to college are now going straight to work in the oil sands. It is dangerous, but high paying work. Few women go there at all. Actually it is attracting a huge number of men from all over Canada. I don't know if it's the only factor, or if the experiences of educators in other countries are similar, but it probably should be mentioned..." - Danielle Fong

"Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

mmmmm, sugar - Amit Patel

"Whoa, great idea guys! I've been looking for something like this! :-)" - Danielle Fong

"Btw there are so many cool things one could do if, say, the iPhone could turn off its IR filter as in a shutter :-)" - Danielle Fong

"Consider Cambridge physicist David MacKay's Without Hot Air, especially the section "Every Big Helps." http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/without......" - Danielle Fong

MWA AH AH AH!!! - Josh Haley from iPhone

"...I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” – Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. - Danielle Fong

"On the other hand, while there are fewer WebOS devices out there, there's a massive shortage of Palm apps. You could make an extremely sound business porting successful iPhone apps to the Pre. You'd have huge mindshare if you launched there, first, too. All in all, working on the development environment is a great play by palm." - Danielle Fong

"Consider applying here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...... They'll understand that the market is trouble, and Jeff Hawkens (and presumably many of his employees) have had one foot in both doors for a while." - Danielle Fong

"My vote goes to Mathematica, which is probably both the best and worst technology I've used this year. Oy! A more one-sided review goes to Evernote :-)" - Danielle Fong

any comments? - Paulo Nuin

@Paulo What? You don't eat your lunch at the computer? - Marcos de Carvalho

"It's probably because there weren't any black coworkers around to test on. Otherwise they would have noticed it. See? As if we didn't already have it, here's proof that diversity = better software :-)" - Danielle Fong

"While I think this can be great advice in the internet space, there's a pretty big difference between having a consumer product pre-vc funding which you can bootstrap to a release, and a biotech or cleantech based startup post-funding with roughly a dozen serious potential customers." - Danielle Fong

""Finally I reject the notion that there doesn't seem to be any other way. I have much more faith in human innovation than that. I firmly believe that there is a market for green technologies, that, when fully developed, will create jobs, boost economies, and improve our global environment." This is what I meant when I said "We need to get on a different curve."" - Danielle Fong

"It's a pretty clear link. Take a look at about 8:58 in Hans Rosling's TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks...... Practically every country has gotten out of poverty at the cost of carbon emissions. The link isn't perfect but it is very strong. We need to get on a different curve. There doesn't seem to be any other way." - Danielle Fong

"At present, it depends on the strategy taken, ad of course it will depend on the technologies developed. There are actually many many technologies which, at present, will save you money in the long run (and the run doesn't even need to be that long.) The main barriers to adoption are laziness, cost of capital, consumer behavior (not purchasing LED lights because they 'seem' too expensive), and most importantly, lack of education. Page 4 of this paper has a great graph where they examine costs and cost abatement for a variety of 'green' strategies. Hybrid cars are the most expensive! www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/Hybrids.pdf" - Danielle Fong

"While I'd love to see the working out of a rigorous methodology for studying this, that particular article and study is shot through with politics. I would really like to be able to better answer the question: how much am I contributing? But it seems like too difficult a question to gain much traction on, especially if politics leaves you blind." - Danielle Fong

"I feel like I work fundamentally differently than most hackers I know. I am fundamentally interrupt driven. I think best on my feet. I work best at work when I'm being peppered with a zillion questions. Are there others like me?" - Danielle Fong

This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety. We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have (it is no coincidence that the first question we tend to be asked by new acquaintances is ‘ What do you do?’). With the help of philosophers, artists and writers, the book examines the origins of status anxiety (ranging from the consequences of the French Revolution to our secret dismay at the success of our friends), before revealing ingenious ways in which people have learnt to overcome their worries in their search for happiness. It aims not only to be entertaining, but wise and helpful as well. - Danielle Fong

"As I wrote two years ago, people do not fit Gaussian distributions as neatly as many imagine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item...): "The thing is that intelligence isn't some kind of nice, statistically normed quantity. There's more to most variables than a mean and a standard deviation -- so I don't know why people seem to always think that you can restrict a discussion of intelligence to such concepts. One thing that is actually correct is that there's more variation in gene expression between men and women. On of the reasons for this is because, chromosomally, women have two X chromosomes, which pair up, and then randomly one or another turns off. These means that the gene expression is mixed between both parents. On the other hand, the Y chromosome is largely only effective at turning off gene expression. You can see how there's less redundancy here. But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Dalton, tried to find a simple, biological basis for..." - Danielle Fong

"Disappointing but not terribly surprising. The programming expertise just isn't there for consumer applications, yet, whereas for HPC many problems come close to being embarrassingly parallel. Oh well. Another time, perhaps." - Danielle Fong

"It's perfectly acceptable for me to see fewer women or men or people of a particular socioeconomic or religious background in one field or another. That alone doesn't bother me, except insofar as it can be a signal to another problem. One thing that does concern me greatly is that there are many women who are interested in science and technology, and especially computer science, who are at some point turned off. It appears to really begin around junior high and high school, and it continues through college. My concern is that we're losing a lot of interested and bright minds, who might be excited in the course of actually working in technology, who are being turned away for some reason. I think it's important to try to understand the reasons before we pass judgment upon them. But it might raise some questions and inspire some solutions that generally makes work in technology more enjoyable. Not just for women; for everyone. Consider the reaction to pair programming. Both women and men..." - Danielle Fong

"It's perfectly acceptable for me to see fewer women or men or people of a particular socioeconomic or religious background in one field or another. That alone doesn't bother me, except insofar as it can be a signal to another problem. One thing that does concern me greatly is that there are many women who are interested in science and technology, and especially computer science, who... more... - Danielle Fong

"I am convinced that the climate does warrant it. I just don't think the science is a closed book. There are other reasons to stop the burning of coal, for example: respiratory illness." - Danielle Fong

"Thanks, I appreciate this article, despite my being essentially convinced that it's important to do something significant to reduce carbon emissions. The fact of the matter is that the climate science isn't settled. It's a shame that the nuisances of this have been glossed over for the purpose of the public and policy makers." - Danielle Fong

"Hmm, Try as we might, IQs don't actually follow a bell curve. There are many more on the high and low ends than would be expected by looking at the curvature in the middle. Whether this is a measurement error or something else, we don't know. Also, because of the unique position of the USA in the world (and especially places like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Pasadena, New York) an awful lot of the right hand side of the bell curve for nations like China, India, Russia, etc. are currently living here, and often working for tech companies. Additionally, when you do happen to get extremely brilliant people excited and working on the same thing as you in the same organization, the effects are magical. I've experienced nothing else like it. Finally, when you're in Silicon Valley, you get the sense that there are maybe a couple thousand serious players who, if you look close, are directly involved in or are supporting most of the major efforts. It is a small world -- it seems like it's about..." - Danielle Fong

"Very good points, I suspect that programming and other forms of concentrated work will require a phase shift in order to continue a high level of productivity, and the type of productivity won't be the same. But, as DHH of 37signals points out, people don't typically use their hours well anyway. If raising a child left only two hours a day to work, that's still 10 hours during the week -- as much time as DHH spent coding basecamp and rails his first year. If you add to that time you can spend planning, communicating, and thinking about the problem (to fill the time when you're more likely to be interrupted) you can optimize those few hours even further. So far as I can tell, this is the pattern my mother used while she was caring for me and working her way through journalism school. I had colic. But she'd do her interviews in the intervening time, and she'd collect all the information she needed, and wrote fragments she wanted to include. When she got the chance, she sat down and..." - Danielle Fong

"Even if men are less likely to take time off, the fact that they still can is a significant positive for women." - Danielle Fong

"Do you have proof?" - Danielle Fong