xrctl's comments

People who belong in tech don't need to be spoon fed. The barriers to entry are some of the lowest for any professional field in history.

It is quite common for Christians in the United States claim that they are oppressed [1]. Shouldn't we try to fix these problems too?

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/3/christians-pers...

Good, a necessary pruning from the board of people who are more interested in politics than product.

The problem with the founder's wife sounds like a very one sided account of your standard interpersonal conflict. Everyone who has ever been in one of those has at some point claimed themselves to be a saint and their opponent a demon.

The alleged sexism seems to be primarily imaginary.

The anonymous posting that so upset her and precipitated all of this said:

> has a history of RAGINING against any professional criticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she lied about contributions and threw hardworking coworkers under the bus (again and again)[1]

To be honest, it seems to me that such could very well be true.

[1] https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444646082857820160/phot...

You might want to see a counselor about your crippling interpersonal inadequacy. I think after you clear up your mental health issues you might be less insanely fixated on shoehorning meaningless occurrences into the framework of your delusions.

This shows why it is best to ignore women's complaining from the start.

Github has bent over backwards for Horvath, and it only fueled and enabled her delusions.

This "gender based harassment" was most likely someone disagreeing with her that Github did not need to be feminism 24x7.

> I think it is more likely that their outreach programs (through CS AP teacher training etc.) that encouraged the best and brightest women to apply were successful, so that the pool of women were significantly more qualified.

That is entirely implausible. Those straws are miles away, dude.

That could perhaps explain a 20% difference, not a 330% difference.

Um, how CMU:SCS has a gender ratio higher than average is because they accept more women. In 2000 the acceptance rate for women was 39%, for men it was 9% [1].

This is completely boring, MIT could make it so its CS class was 100% women if it wanted to, and because loads of very intelligent people apply to MIT I am sure that class of 100% women would do well. But, this is not a tactic that your average school who struggles to get qualified applicants at all can utilize.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum/PAPERS/women_in_computer_scien...

I think most answers here are over thinking it; I do not think he wants a website that can defeat the NSA, just one where the service provider could get subpoenaed and not lead them to him.

So, just buy webhosting with Bitcoin at somewhere that does not require contact details.

e.g.

http://www.orangewebsite.com/

http://bitcoinwebhosting.net/

Sign up at the local library to cloak that IP then use tor after that if you think you will have a dedicated adversary.

The amount of spoon feeding women in tech require is staggering.

That women of lose more than expected when they play against men of equivalent rating is entirely consistent with regression towards the mean [1].

Because elo ratings contain error and men are on average better at chess [2], the average true value that elo ratings are trying to measure will be lower for women than men at equivalent elo ratings.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

[2] About 1 SD, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1692/2269...

Encouraging women's complaining might be the last thing they actually need. This is kind of like throwing a kegger for alcoholics.

No. No one is threatened by women, just perhaps annoyed by their endless complaining.

> To use an analogy, I can't imagine Olympic athletes being happy for the best competitors from another country being sidelined due to their sexual preference. No, that's not happening. because world class athletes know their victories are hollow unless they're truly competing against the very best in the world.

But you can probably see how male Olympians would be annoyed if they had to put up with 24/7 accusations that their superior performance in comparison to female Olympians was only because how much they hated them.

No. This is wrong.

The correct answer is abstract (modern) algebra.

hahah, you recall that the top science students you knew were women? How convincing!

I have analyzed the records of the World Cubing Association, and there is 1 woman in the top 100 ranked [1].

I have analyzed the ratings of the American Scrabble Association, and there are 6 women in the top 100 ranked [2].

It is well known that there is only 1 woman in the top 100 ranked chess players (FIDE).

I have analyzed the ratings of the European Go Federation, and there are 0 women in the top 100 ranked [3].

But no, I guess I must defer to your remembered impressions.

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

[3] Forthcoming

I would submit that mind sports are the most meritocratic subculture; performance is statistically ranked and sometimes measured directly.

And........ we find that there are no women at the top.

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at speedcubing [1].

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at chess.

There are only a few women in the top 100 at scrabble [2].

There is only one woman in the top 100 at Go (EGF).

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

Well, no system could have a perfectly accurate merit assignment system... but the fact is that tech has much, much lower barriers to entry than other domains.

Interesting to note how similar they are to the real "gender pay gap", most commonly claimed to be 77% [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_St...

The complaining about women's representation at conferences seems to be predicated on the belief that women would be equally represented if merit assessment was unbiased (thus gender imbalance is proof of bias): well, here is a situation where merit assessment is unbiased (performance is measured by a timer). And the gender situation is more or less the same (women's representation is much lower at the top than overall). This leads me to conclude that the women in tech complaining is unfounded.

It is true that no system in the world has or could ever have a perfectly accurate merit assessment system... but has any one noticed that improvements in merit assignment and lower barriers to entry lead to less representation of women at the top, not more? In highly structured environments with statistical ranking systems, the portion of women at the top is miniscule. For example, women make up about about 55% of registered players in the American Scrabble Associations raking system, but on some occasions there are no women in the top 50 ranked (the most there has ever been was just a few) [1]. The only places where women are highly represented at the top are places with strong diversity programs. For example, Rwanda leads the world in terms of women's representation in parliament, but that is because a very large number of seats are reserved exclusive for female candidates, while the rest are open to anyone [2].

1. http://rcm-papers.net/scrabble-ratings-gender.html

2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7620816.stm