Hackathon Be Gone • Hacker News Board

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#141

Post by aedron » Tue, Mar 01, 2016, 11:29 AM UTC

kamens wrote: post #138

aedron wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we shouldn't always be so quick to judge, but my sibling posters have a point. How about the company throws this "hackathon" during company time? That would demonstrate commitment towards whatever the event is supposed to achieve.

That's exactly what we did. We committed an entire week of company time to our hackathon. People can stay late if they so choose. Many did not and made amazing things thanks to the commitment by KA to use company time.

Ah, that is cool, I would love to work at a place like that. And I am 100% sure you unleash a lot of creativity and ideas this way.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#142

Post by pluma » Tue, Mar 01, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #132

pluma wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the American racial categories seem pretty inane to my non-American eyes to begin with. I understand that there is a lot of cultural baggage to the various categories but I can't count how many times I've been genuinely surprised by Americans identifying as black or Latina/o. The most striking ones I think were Halle Berry and Obama -- it took me a while to process that their recognition was genuinely note…

I grew up in Europe and then moved to US. In US, at least in some context (college admissions for example), there is a thing called affirmative action. It seems in order to right a a wrong from the past, or to promote diversity they would sometimes have quotas on how many students from each background to pick. So depending just on race, one could have an easier or much harder way getting accepted. Therefore people wo…

I understand that the legislation/culture around race is in part used to correct historical racism (and the present day consequences of it) but I do wonder whether this obsession with racially categorizing oneself is a necessary evil or just evil.

Re: Hackathon Be Gone

#143

Post by gaius » Tue, Mar 01, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

benten10 wrote: post #114

mdxn wrote: post #53

The hackathon that they mention in the post (Mhacks) put up an application process and enforced a 50/50 gender ratio. In the weeks leading up to the event, I overheard many defeated conversations from fellow CS students over anxiety of getting rejected from this hackathon because they were male. The females didn't share the same anxiety, but it definitely made them feel down that they wouldn't be able to participate…

Pro tip: It is often a good heuristic to identify a sexist by their use of 'male' and 'female' for humans instead of 'men' and 'women', because it sounds dehumanizing. Call them 'women', never females, etc, etc.

Thanks for mansplaining that.