jgesture

People who tend to be interested in philosophy and are theists probably tend to go into religion rather than philosophy.

It appears that you have committed the fallacy of composition here. The claim that Jobs and Stallaman have some similar characteristics is not the same as saying that they are the same.

For example, you can objectively say that Hitler was an influential head of state (e.g. starting WW II) and FDR was an influential head of state. These are both true statements, while at the same time, these were two very different men.

But, if, for each class of worker, there is income equalization, you will find that large companies tend to have an equalizing affect rather than an unequalizing affect. In this example, it's not interesting that bosses get paid more than workers, it is interesting that all bosses tend to get paid the same amount.

I think the argument is that technology is great for the people who use technology.

If every programmer and engineer got paid $500,000/yr, that would be great...for ever programmer or engineer, it wouldn't matter much for others.

I do tech support for a web hosting company and I've definitely seen people with low incomes who don't and don't want to use technology, they are falling behind.

Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma.

As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.

If the rich didn't actually pay the percentage in taxes as given by their tax bracket, then their tax bracket isn't relevant because it isn't something that was actually followed in practice.

Also, capital gains tax is really. You'd have to make less than $8,500/yr to be in a lower income tax bracket. This hasn't always been the case. So, one easy, legal way to pay less in taxes is to get paid via capital gains.

It is good to take care not to create a false dilemma.

Of course the government is not the only actor that can, or should, address moral problems.

As I understand libertarianism, they are not at all against solving issues of poverty or hunger. But they do believe that the government is not necessarily the best solution to every problem. Of course that statement should be obvious, as government tends to be less efficient and more watered down than other organizations. So the question is in the details.

Indeed. I don't recall the exact numbers, though I've heard both Linux and RoR numbers, I think that Linux has factors more developers committing to it than RoR.

Linux is, perhaps, the most rapidly changing piece of software in existence

It definitely does, Linux is used by far more people than Ruby on Rails is.

Making a general statement about American culture, which I did, doesn't, necessarily, say anything about the details of the culture. As you suggest, and as I've also generally observed, among the Asian Americans that I've met, they tend to retain a culture that's more interested in academics than what is generally found in the American culture.

I think you allude to a good point that I would like to restate.

In this study, and in others like it, the blame seems to be put on the educational institution. But, it's not hard to see places where success is gotten independent of the institution (like, for your example, Asian Americans). So, it seems wrong to put all your faith in and all the blame on the institution.

I've tutored 100s of people and I've done lots of independent learning and, based on my interactions, I think I can say that the schools could be changed however you want and they won't fix the problem in America. See, the students that I've tutored didn't mainly have a problem in understanding the material, as far as I could tell, they had a problem in not wanted to learn. And, if I can teach myself calculus, physics and programming, you don't need schools to learn things.

As far as I can tell, one large problem is that, in America, it's more prestigious to be a manager, lawyer or securities trader than it is to be an engineer or scientist. Engineering and science is associated with curiosity and learning (things good schools should have), the other disciplines are more associated with prestigious and financial comfort and generally are not as socially or economically valuable. There's an interested piece in the New York Times on this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598158).

I have never read, heard or observed that any race is, intrinsically, intellectually superior to another. Give this, your comment isn't interesting.

Now, I have read, heard and observed that Asians tend to have a different cultural emphasis on academics. Given this, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that the problem in the US is that the culture doesn't value learning.

Here's the link to the study mentioned in this article http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-t...

I definitely found reading posts in this thread rather bizarre. This has become more of a spectacle than an event that happened to an actual human being.

Discriminate involves distinction or differentiation. Given this, whenever an uneven distribution exists, some kind of discrimination or bias has occurred. Of course this does not demand that the discrimination was bad, it's just the definition of words. For example, the discrimination done by the semipermeable membrane in your cells is a very good.

So there is not actually a question of whether or not gender discrimination is occurring in technology at a large scale, it certainly is, by about 3 to 1, I think. The question is rather, who is doing the discrimination and why are they doing it. From briefly looking at this thread, I see that at least 3 cases involved sexual objectification by men, and I would venture to guess that this has happen to more than 3 women. I don't think there is enough evidence to suppose that this is the most prevalent form of discrimination, at least I've never heard of it when reading about the gender disparity; though it would certainly be interesting to learn what affect stories like this have on dissuading woman from entering male dominated fields.

I'm not sure how long the study has been out, but I recently became aware of an investigation regarding the disparity of women in professorships. This was actually kind of humorous to me. For some time, it had been assumed that this disparity was related to discriminatory practices by those doing the hiring. But, the investigation didn't find any significant evidence of this, instead, they found that it was the women who were making the distinction; working 70 or 80hrs/week isn't very practical if you want to start a family. Maybe academia is broken, I have no idea, but at least it isn't malicious and yet there is still discrimination.

Regarding technology, or, at least math specifically, there is some evidence that suggests that girls are involved in biasing other girls against it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573548). Also, there's evidence that suggests that the different genders respond better to different language (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571075), so if you have a field mostly dominated by men, it's not unreasonable to see why it would mostly attach men, all else being equal. Again, these aren't malicious and are probably, generally, not well known. But, I think that these sorts of things can be agreed upon by most people as not being good.

Also, regarding some malicious or ignorant discrimination, I think Dave Thomas makes some good points in his keynote during last year's RubyConf about 33mins in to his talk (http://confreaks.net/videos/368-rubyconf2010-keynote).

When the proportion of women in technology is similar to the proportion of women in the work place in general, you can probably say that the problem of discrimination is over blown. Until then, the situation at least looks a bit suspicious.

Mindful that not all discrimination is malicious or even conscious.