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I recently explained how speakers and microphones work to my wife. We were on a long drive and the topic of bluetooth headsets came up. I have a Plantronics 520 headset and the audio quality is pretty good. I casually mentioned that it's amazing how these tiny devices are able to create sound in such a wide range of frequencies and barely use any power. She asked me what's the big deal. I asked if she knew how speakers and microphones (dynamic) work and she said no.

Aha! For the next twenty minutes, I went over the basics of electromagnetism, diaphragms, and sound waves. I explained how so many different components work together to make sure the sound is captured and recreated exceptionally well. I felt pretty excited explaining something I had known since I was a tinkering kid to someone listening intently. After I was done, I said "Isn't that amazing?" and she said "Not as much as you" and smiled. That made my day.

That's funny, I have the same headset and consider the audio quality just barely usable. In any kind of noisy environment I have to crank the volume all the way up and jam the earpiece in, and even then it's still hard to hear and be understood.
My wife actually likes me explaining technical things. She says it helps her get a good sleep.
I thought that sounds very much like what an Indian would say. Then I looked at your user name :)
Sorry no profiling please :)
Well sometimes my GF discusses her idea of future with me and it's like "we'll have a big bedroom and two parallel 30'' screen and we'll code day and night, we'll hack stuffs, we'll open startup together, our child will be a prodigy..we'll make him learn programming at an early age...blah-blah-blah". And i wonder why she is interested more in geeky stuffs and less in sex :P. Before that I used to think girls as dumb..the opinion have changed now.She codes in linux and is a big time evangelist of FOSS, was selected in google-summer-of-code...blah-blah-blah. It's a pain-in-the-ass when your partner is more technical than yours. I of all people can truly understand his wife's pain ;)
Oh man, a visit to your house is always gonna make me feel jealous... damn geek children too :)
> She codes in linux

really ?

So there's this idea that Asperger's is hereditary...
Something interesting in the comments:

"The screen on my Macbook Pro was trying to auto-adjust its brightness in a semi-dark room. Because as the screen darkened, the light sensors sensed darkness, it increased the screen brightness.. and so forth. So the screen was basically glowing bright and dark on an interval.

She asks, “Why is your computer breathing???”

Which is interesting because Mac laptops are designed to appear is if "breathing" when in sleep mode, and this "breathing" is communicated via a pulsing light. It appears she'd picked up this subtlety better than her husband.

guy (astonished): Wait.. are you serious? In Linux? Really?

What a shame people still react like this. Three of the 5 best programmers I ever met are women. They're out there. Just not here.

My wife codes, and reads HN, and I'm waiting for her reaction to this article.
Makes sense. It's easy for a guy to go in computing even if they don't have a passion for it, however a woman needs to be well more motivated about it before she'll consider programming as a career.
Maybe this woman doesn't feel like a programmer. I find I can sense other developers when I meet them.
"What a shame people still react like this"

What a shame she was lying about it...

Where are they?
I wonder how the author's wife feels about being presented this way? For programmers to judge?
I think she's presented for programmers to drool and think "how cute" and admire her as a great wife rather than judge.
I enjoy explaining technical things to my girlfriend. She has a habit (and poker tell) of furrowing her brow whenever she has trouble grokking something - this serves as a sign to me that I didn't explain a concept clear enough, either through my communication or me just not knowing enough about a subject. That's when I know I've got more learning to do!
What on earth are they doing with windows '95 in 2009 ?
For some reason things with similar names land in the same hash bucket in my memory, and I say one when meaning the other. I usually catch myself about it, but man it's embarassing.
your brain uses soundex instead of strcmp.
Very nice. I think my girlfriend of two years is catching on, although I could easily see her making the KGB/KVM mistake... and it being useful because I'd forgotten about it. :)
[from the comments]

whenever I tried to explain anything technical to her, her eyes would cross and the she’d get impatient, flustered, and frustrated.

I keep hearing this bullshit, both on HN and on other news sites. Do you really choose to spend your time such vacuous people? Or is it just that most explanations given are needlessly complex, so that programming and computers appear magical?

If you can't explain something properly, you probably don't fully understand it yourself.

But anyway, computers are hard. Let's go shopping!

My wife was very patient with technical explanations for about the first year of our marriage. I think she finally realized at that point that I'm ALWAYS explaining technical things and that if she seems interested, I'll keep going. So now she cuts me off.

She couldn't give two hoots about ruby or linux or some whiz-bang piece of hardware I'm all amped about. Sort of like how when she talks about women's life in the Victorian era my eyes glaze over.

Part of marriage is that sometimes you find each other boring.

Some people care about how computers and software work, and some don't. Don't assume that someone is 'vacuous' just because they're not at all interested in the gory details of the classmethod you just refactored.
I don't think it's that at all. She's not vacuous, and the explanations are probably not needlessly complex.

She doesn't care (to the extent that the husband does). She has other interests and areas where she is the expert. I'd experience the same thing with my wife. I would start talking about something I'm working on, and she would follow for a while. But after a certain amount of time or level of technical depth, she would lose interest. Not because she's stupid, but that I had passed the point of her interest.

At some level, our work is just plain boring to other people.

It's very difficult to find a lot of people that aren't 'vacuous.' I mean, I just got out of college, so I have a handful of technical friends, but I'd be willing to say that most people I've known or met are like this.

It's sort of self selecting. Most people aren't hackers; they don't care how things work. They just want to use stuff, and... things. I don't even know. I can't understand that mindset, becuase I'm not one of those people. And neither are you, apparently. So yes, to you and me, it's pretty silly, because these things aren't that complicated, and we need to figure out how they work... but most people don't. Depressing, but true.

Depressing is someone equating 'vacuous' with the lack of technical interest.
Just to clarify; I find it depressing that more people don't want to learn about things and figure out how they work. I don't call them names. ;)
My dad was a largely self-taught mechanical and manufacturing engineer. My mom failed high school algebra and had trouble with Microsoft Word when she first encountered it.

They've been married for forty years now.

My mother isn't vacuous, but she has appreciably little technical understanding. As it turns out there's quite a bit of complex decision making that goes into mate selection, competency in or appreciation of your technical field of choice being one small criterion of a myriad influencing such decision making.

Computers aren't that hard, but fewer women than men will find them interesting for the same reason fewer women do anything involving math, because Math is boring, things are boring, equations are boring. Using language is interesting, people are interesting, jobs that require lots of social interaction are better than jobs that don't.

Most people hate this kind of systematising, abstract, logical thought. Fewer men hate it than women so there are more men in these fields.

Any study of this you could reference?
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118600577/abstrac...

"For example, in the SMPY cohorts, although more mathematically precocious males than females entered math-science careers, this does not necessarily imply a loss of talent because the women secured similar proportions of advanced degrees and high-level careers in areas more correspondent with the multidimensionality of their ability-preference pattern (e.g., administration, law, medicine, and the social sciences). By their mid-30s, the men and women appeared to be happy with their life choices and viewed themselves as equally successful (and objective measures support these subjective impressions). Given the ever-increasing importance of quantitative and scientific reasoning skills in modern cultures, when mathematically gifted individuals choose to pursue careers outside engineering and the physical sciences, it should be seen as a contribution to society, not a loss of talent."

Or just think of the sex distribution of nerdery, which is to Asperger syndrome as AS is to autism, which Simon Baron Cohen has described as an extreme version of the male brain.

To clarify, 'vacuous' was describing the way these people are portrayed, rather than how I think about them.

Additionally, there are so many similar replies, I can't be bothered replying to them all.

This should be titled "The programmer's spouse" instead of the programmer's wife. This makes it seem like being female is the cause of having a non-technical perspective.

He says "She knows about as much as you’d expect an optometrist wife of a programmer to know about computers", but are we supposed to expect something different from an optometrist husband of a programmer?

There should be more links about programming and science at Hacker News, not some heterosexual male programmer's anecdotes about his wife, with a title which suggests that there is a pattern among the behaviour of wives of programmers.

My guess is that it is entitled "The programmer's wife" because the author is male and his spouse is female.
Then shouldn't it be "A programmer's wife"?
"The", as an article, is applied to individuals in all sorts of situations. If, for instance, I say "The apple is red," I'm probably not making an assertion that should be generalized to all apples, but rather speaking about a specific one.
It's probably a play on The Time Traveler's Wife.
"her: Oh, wow, I do all programming in linux"

"His eyes were all lit up. "

So that's how those who can not do FizzBuzz get programming jobs ...

This post is sexist. I wish this constant stereotyping would stop.
Am I the only one a bit unnerved by the easiness with which women bullshit?
s/women/people
s/women/people/g
Men bullshit to aggrandize themselves. Women bullshit to entrap others.
After reading [insert technical field]'s [insert age-appropriate medium], I found that there was a constant among them. You see, the representation of females in [technical field] is limited, and anecdotes related to females in [technical field] are largely the same.

They start with: "My [diminutive significant other] once asked me", "Jane Doe isn't just hot, she's also [common rank in technical field]" or "The best [common rank in technical field] I ever met was Jane Doe."

Replace [technical field] with cars, planes, motorcycles, programming and cinematography. Adventure travel, graphic design, marine biology and non-profit work tended to have more equal representation, and I saw less of this patrician attitude being slung around there.

You've got to be kidding me. 85 points? For worthless "ohh isn't the cute dummy cute!" quotes?

Apparently, Programmer Wives Say The Darnedest Things.

And all you upvoters should feel the sting of embarrassment.