Your implicit claim is that a human can't write an algorithm that promotes prejudice. Are you interested in defending that claim? It seems very obviously false.

Either way, it absolutely does not apply here. HN's algorithms sinking sexism-related stories is a side effect. The fact of the matter is it will sink any story that has an imbalance in the upvote-to-comment ratio, whether it's about sexism, Haskell or the Church of the SubGenius.

This is the same logic as saying that encryption is evil because it can be used by terrorists to hide information. Encryption always does the same thing, it's fundamentally neutral, regardless of what's being encrypted. The same way HN's algorithms are fundamentally neutral, regardless of what happens to trigger their procedures.

If you don't want to apply a label to the algorithm, how about "Foo Bar's decision to run Algorithm X against Dataset Y resulted in consequences that predictably increased prejudice, so it would have been better if he hadn't done it"?

If that's okay, note that this is pretty close to what parfe said -- he's clearly upset at the fact that pg chooses to run an algorithm on Hacker News, rather than at the algorithm itself.

Let's assume that it's a bad design decision. Your logic behind it being prejudiced is still faulty, as it ascribes a fallacious cause.

The algorithm merely shuffles page rankings based on two criteria: upvotes and comments, both of which are user-supplied. The algorithm does not support prejudice, it simply behaves in the fashion it is programmed to. You're completely ignoring all of the mundane stories that go down due to the same factors, and cherry picking the ones about sexism.

Time for dinner. heh.

Don't blame the algorithm for the fallacies of the people using it. The only fault in your scenario is the PEBCAK.

All known halting program/input pairs are inherently a little bit prejudiced.

What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly be a better way to rank posts that is able to differentiate between an important discussion that not many people want to have, versus a petty internet argument?

Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation to mean that all porn is exploitative), late night invitations to drink coffee and dongle/forking jokes haven't made me more sympathetic to having a debate about sexism in tech; if anything, they've made me avoid reading or commenting on anything related to sexism. I don't want to keep women who feel wronged by some event from retelling the experience, but most of the stories about sexism in tech I've read have made me form a pattern of avoiding sexism stories altogether.

I fear I might be missing insightful essays from women about their experiences (good, bad, and anything in between) in tech.

Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.

(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)

Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.

I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.

In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.

If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.

Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.

The sexism-related posts have a large number of upvotes, yet they are penalized anyway by the controversial algorithm under discussion.

   * The Tumblr SJW PC brigade flinging poo
   * The people who wish the first group would FOAD, flinging poo
   * The people who have something interesting to say lamenting the existence of
     the first two groups, who wish they'd both FOAD.
   * The people who make meta posts about the whole thing.

I would have flagged it myself, but somehow I don't think flagging a PG article is conducive to my further ability to use the feature...

Its been very clear for a long time that almost all discussion about women in tech is as good as censored on hackers, which is a shame because its giving a lot of well intentions but naive people the impression that there is no problem.