hashbanged's comments

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.