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A comment on Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk. Parent comment

Re:Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk by venantius on Friday December 28, 2012 @08:29PM (#4980576)
She does explicitly acknowledge her own lack of technical knowledge (e.g. where she notes that she was not qualified to evaluate the technical components of the cryptoparty manual). And still, we should hope to be a community that embraces a willingness to learn regardless of current technical knowledge.
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Re:Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk by w1ntermute on Friday December 28, 2012 @08:38PM (#4980613)
And learning is great. But there are cases where I think the author was expecting too much. For example, she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience. She said that her family offered childcare only if she got a speaking spot, but that doesn't mean she should have just applied for it or expected to get a spot when she didn't have the necessary experience, just so she could participate in the conference.

In essence, she should have applied for a speaker spot because she has experience and knowledge she wants to share with other people, not because her family agreed to watch her kid if she got the spot.

Now if her story is true, the "Sydney-based male Cryptoparty organiser" was being douchebaggy by not contributing to the application for the panel. But perhaps he had more experience and felt that it wasn't fair that this newbie (regardless of gender) was turning a speaking spot that he (perhaps rightly) deserved into a panel, just so that she could be on stage as well (since if she believed that she really had the knowledge/experience to get the spot over the other guy, why didn't she just apply for the speaker spot?). I don't really know what happened, but there tends to just be a lot that you miss out on when you only hear a story from the perspective of just one person.

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Re:Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk by mcantelon on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:03PM (#4980714)
>she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience

Non-technical are not unusual at that conference as they know they'll get a wider perspective that way.

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Re:Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk by w1ntermute on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:38PM (#4980833)
Even if that is the case, it doesn't change the fact that she clearly felt the other guy would have a better chance of getting the spot. Otherwise, why didn't she just apply like the other guy had already done, and let the best (by whatever standards they want, whether it be experience or perspective) person be selected by the conference organizers?

Tell me, how would you feel if you had already prepared and turned in an application, and then some random person asks you to instead help with an application for a "panel" to replace the individual speaking spot you had already applied for? That man had absolutely no obligation to indulge the author's desire to have a panel.

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Re:Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk by TheZenPsycho on Saturday December 29, 2012 @03:43AM (#4981537)
She's not a random newb. She invented the thing that he wanted to talk about.
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