hashbanged

The OP responded. Basically, linux needs feminist spaces because FOSS communities are traditionally sexist spaces where their contributions are not welcome. The point isn't that no one else could have had the idea, that's absurd. The point is that no one had until that point, so it wasn't trivial. It's the banal idea that if we have spaces where marginalized groups are able to contribute without all of the extra baggage associated with being a part of the group. In the FOSS community, you face extra criticism as a woman.

> feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large

Is Python small? I'm sure there were other small linux communities (the term seems almost redundant) who were much less welcoming to women.

I don't know what to say to convince you that open source communities are traditionally hyper male and sexist. It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.

Here's some reading, I encourage you to read it if you think I'm wrong.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...

It's a pretty accepted fact that men interrupt women and women do better when they have women authority managers or teachers. It's why there are women's colleges.

They name names, it becomes a radical feminist attack piece. People would ask, why did she attack so and so? They are so nice and do so many things for the community.

What's with begging the question by saying "it's Valerlie Aurora after all"? It doesn't do anything for someone reading your comment who doesn't know what to think of her.

I recently started on Zoloft, and despite how afraid I was of it and how many bad experiences I read online, it's been fantastic. Could you elaborate more on your experience?

It sounds like being a postdoc stressed him.

I like this article, and I tend to agree with its conclusions about which ones are most common on most platforms, but isn't this at best heuristics and at worst wrong assumptions?

Like, I would use these as my heuristic guidelines if I was on the job and constraints dictate that I can't spend time on researching icons. But I wouldn't write a blog post authoritatively telling people that one icon is more recognized that the other without having some kind of research to back it up.

Then again, the author does say at one point that their research is extremely informal, so maybe I'm just projecting my feelings about the cowboy nature of the UX profession right now. But I still feel like they could do more to qualify that these just appear to be their best guesses about how people interpret the share icon.

The way that people talk about the fruit is the intended effect of their marketing. It's kind of hard to ignore, when they've been so successful at becoming a lifestyle brand. Even if it doesn't end with any concrete suggestion, I enjoyed reading about the author's exhaustion with Apple hype.

It's a business/marketing term, no? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(business)

> "it's unusual for women to be clever enough to program so we're making a song-and-dance about these ones"

The more examples you see of people like you programming, the less of a song-and-dance you think it is. And you might perceive it as putting them up on a pedestal, but others don't.

In an ideal world, we don't have to increase the visibility of other genders in programming.

Did you have role models and examples that you looked up to who also looked like you? I think it's a hard thing to empathize with if you've always had those examples.

> "well unless you can find examples of people of your sex doing that job well then forget it"

Which is a stronger message to a child: other genders or ethnicities being held up as examples or never seeing anyone who looks like you doing what you want to do?

Are you actually suggesting that other minorities might be more successful in America if they were less visible?

Did you just characterize documentation as women's work? Not every woman developer wants to maintain your legacy code while you go off and write features...

What are the restrictions on attachment sizes?

My go to resource for a fast combination of Google Web Fonts is this:

http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

Not a huge resource, but it is sort of what you're asking for.

I have a criticism. I think most people are not fit to criticize the vast majority of the people they interact with. You are not a mindreader and who the hell are you to judge a stranger or acquaintance in some meaningful way?

If you think you're offending 95% of the people you talk to, then maybe that's some feedback you should consider.

Another possibility you should consider is that people don't like to rain on other people's parades. They also saw what happened to Julie and probably would not have been treated very well at work if word got out that they were speaking critically about the company?

> Some people really like attention.

Really? Like what? Can you give an example relevant to this discussion?

> Alternately, she might have not expected the harassment

Lol, I don't think it's possible to be a woman on the internet as much as she is and think something like that. This statement is ignorant of the reality of literally every woman on the internet who criticizes a predominantly male community.

> To be clear: I'm not saying either of these is the case for Horvath. Just that the hypothetical "she was knowingly lying"

Sure, I just think those hypothetical explanations are weak considering the arguments I put forward. I think Julie would have to be really dense not to know that coming forward the way she did would have consequences.

I think it's fair to assume that in most work places people hold back criticism from their employers, no? Why this need to assume anything anyone says is as equally likely to be true as anything anyone else says?

Yeah, that's fair. I'm not sure GitHub's verifiable claims are worth anything though.

I think there are some good reasons to assume Julie's credibility. Like other whistleblowers, the consequences for speaking up are extreme. Not a lot of people I know would open themselves up to the kind of harassment and character assassination that Julie has for no reason.

While it's good that she hasn't turned out to be "unemployable," as many people insisted, the reality is that she has made her life a lot more difficult by speaking out than she would have if she kept quiet. What would she have gained by lying? I'm open to suggestions, but I feel like most of the things people are saying comes down to "disgruntled employee wants revenge" which I find really unconvincing considering the attacks on her character.

If someone doesn't believe that there is pervasive sexism in ANY male dominated industry, I don't know what I can say to convince them. But the truth is that if any HR person (and that's really what this independent investigator is, an HR contractor) asked people if they experienced sexism at work at any of my jobs, people would've been reluctant to be the one to call it out even though it is pervasive.

You're right though, I don't pretend to know objectively what happened. I just think there are a lot of good reasons not to weigh the words of a whistleblower equally with the company trying to protect itself and its investors.

Is that usually how things work? I thought we tend to believe whistleblowers over the institutions with financial interests that they speak out against?

Obviously I'm not saying everything that comes out of a whisteblower's mouth is absolute truth, but if you take GitHub's words at face value without considering their financial interests, etc, you're thinking very uncritically.

We don't know that now. We just know that no one was willing to admit to a company hired investigator (as impartial as defunkt claims they are, would you feel comfortable voicing allegations of sexism about your superiors to someone who you KNEW was going to report to your superior? Now imagine if you were a woman, where talking about sexism is often enough to get you labeled as a troublemaker, or just a nasty word).

I shouldn't expect better from HN, but it's amazing how much stock people put in the words of corporations trying to cover their asses, even if they are start ups. Everyone stops applying critical thinking when you criticize start ups because of the ridiculous start up boosterism mentality we've adopted.

This doesn't contribute anything to the discussion but instead writes off anyone who might be angry about the handling of this and the public reaction as "mob."

Part of having this discussion requires not writing off the entire discussion as impossible to have because of YOUR stereotyped view of the participants.

If you think that blogs like this are a threat to feminism, I don't think we're working with the same definition of feminism. Can you please explain how you are defending feminism right now?

> rational actor

What does economic theory have to do with it? Rational choice theory is about making assumptions about what economic choices people will make when reasoning about people in general. It is a very limited view of human decision making, and have nothing to do with you deciding weather or not someone is rational for getting frustrated over something you don't experience.

But it's nice that you dismissed the author as being irrational. That's another common silencing tactic.

If you think something is trivial, ignore it.

> EDIT 2: This topic has been flagged already, but I'm writing this for future reference. What this seems to imply is that if a new Greenwald or Snowden comes along, they are explicitly not welcome. This is not affirmative action at all, it's just an unreflected usage of it, without understanding the true meaning or function of affirmative action.

Go back and read the question. You're perpetuating a narrative that takes his words out of context. The question was asked if there was anything they were specifically looking for. He said yes, people who are not white males. They are already mostly white males and they want to write something that is less from the perspective of mostly white males.

That is affirmative action. You have the definition correct.

Also, what are you trying to do by name dropping Simone de Beauvoir? It doesn't earn you any credibility. It does sound though like you think of yourself as a feminist or at least a supporter of equality if you won't use that label, since you're also creating strawmen feminists (who the hell says most books are not worth reading because they're written by men? Please tell me about which feminist scholar or author wrote about that). Read things more critically before you promote a narrative established by taking things out of context to pretend that First Look is discriminating against white straight men by being a bunch of white straight men and not trying to become MORE white straight men while not explicitly ruling that out at all.

> Membership in a group doesn't preclude discrimination against that group.

No, but groups generally don't discriminate against themselves when they are the majority and hold the positions of authority?

> If they're trying to promote a broader scope of cultural experience in their writers, then perhaps it's better to discriminate based on experience, not ethnicity.

> broader scope of cultural experience

> not ethnicity

Care to define "cultural experience" and how it differs from ethnicity?

> they have completely excluded an entire segment of candidates

If you're going to carry on with that narrative, would you explain why you don't agree with my above rejection of such narrative? They are not excluding, they are valuing diversity since they have a lack of it.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7594378

Almost instantly.

Or maybe we white males should just rest assured that we aren't being discriminated against, especially not by an organization of mostly white males, and think more carefully before we post things like this to HN. You knew exactly how people would interpret it, but you chose to ignore the context in which the question was asked.

Did you read the question? Because in context, it really DOESN'T look like they're saying that. I can't believe people are accusing an organization that is MOSTLY white males of discriminating against white males!

Q: Are there particulars attributes or beats you’re looking to fill

A: Not white. Not male.

This is what affirmative action is. They are not outright saying NO to white males, they are specifically looking for people who are not white males though, considering they already hired mostly white males. Read the comment he replied to. They did not say that they will not hire white males, because that would be ridiculous, considering that they are already mostly white males.