131–140 of 165 posts
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Then why is it strictly forbidden to write an article with a title that caters specifically to young white children?
Young white children can see and relate to a large chunk of tech workers. Black people do not have that privilege. Have you noticed that young people generally achieve more when they can model themselves after those who are like them ?
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I understand if my tone came off as more condescending than necessary - I am a corporate lawyer I am prone to being a bit incisive - so I apologize for that. I do tend to adopt a bit of snark when writing online - it gets those precious, precious upvotes. However, in the end, my point is this: I am of the opinion that collective action is necessary to address this issue and I believe the weight of the evidence is on…
The point that you (appear) to have made, and I am reacting to, is that ignoring the problem is the best way to address it, and I think that is demonstrably ineffective. I think you are misunderstanding the point treehau5 wanted to make. I think he wants to say the same thing as I [1], we should take action to boost disadvantaged groups in order to close existing gaps as quickly as possible but that should be done in…
> I understand the sentiment, but I also understand that if you truly want to get rid of racial bias, gender bias, whatever else bias completely, then not paying it mention in any sphere is how you get there.
I do not see how that is open to interpretation and it appears to run entirely contrary to your point.
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I think it's pretty important if the descendant of someone who was kidnapped and enslaved to provide for a legally enforced illiterate underclass is able to not only read and write but read and write code and make significant contributions to the field of software engineering. Like if someone who lost a foot won the 100 meter in the olympics, not the paralympics . . .
"Alan Emtage was born in Barbados, the son of Sir Stephen and Lady Emtage."
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The point that you (appear) to have made, and I am reacting to, is that ignoring the problem is the best way to address it, and I think that is demonstrably ineffective. I think you are misunderstanding the point treehau5 wanted to make. I think he wants to say the same thing as I [1], we should take action to boost disadvantaged groups in order to close existing gaps as quickly as possible but that should be done in…
The (now deleted) comment said: > I understand the sentiment, but I also understand that if you truly want to get rid of racial bias, gender bias, whatever else bias completely, then not paying it mention in any sphere is how you get there. I do not see how that is open to interpretation and it appears to run entirely contrary to your point.
My interpretation as a non-native English speaker focused on »mention« and so I did not interpret it as excluding any actions. But with you pointing this out and after having a second look I can see how »in any sphere« could make the point stronger than what I thought.
I the end I am neither in the position to judge what the correct interpretation of the phrase is, nor what statement treehau5 actually intended to make. I of course stand by my point, whether it is the same one treehau5 wanted to make or not.
"Alan has a set of shell scripts that automagically calls up some subset of our list of servers each night (to keep load down on any one machine) and do a remote 'ls' on that machine. We cycle through the entire list in about a month, so no entry can be more than that old. For what it's worth, we currently know of about 210 sites."
Archie allows anyone to rlogin into one of our machines and query our archive lists. Another one of my guys, (Bill Heelan, whe...@cs.mcgill.ca) wrote a bare-bones front end, which allows people to login, get a help message, ask for a specific string (using ed-like regular expressions) or get the contents of a specific archive server.
Currently, archie is pretty brain-damaged. The files are stored as flat ASCII files and the "prog" command just launches a "grep" with the appropriate arguments. Future plans (once we get the latest start of semester out of the way) is to add a real database (we've compiled postgres (sp?) and Alan has started to code the program to parse the raw input).
So that was Archie. That's like a library shelf list, or Active Directory, not a search engine.
Long before WWW search engines, there were computerized keyword and catalog databases. The US National Library of Medicine (MEDLARS) and Mead Data Central (later Lexis/Nexis) were early big ones. Big libraries also had online catalogs by 1990.
AltaVista was the first big full-text search engine. AltaVista was in the old telco building behind the Walgreens in Palo Alto. where PAIX is now. AltaVista was built as a demo of DEC Alpha servers. It was the first data center built telco-style, on open racks with the cables overhead. This was because they had the racks in place, but it became a trend.
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/LWVA50W8...
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The (now deleted) comment said: > I understand the sentiment, but I also understand that if you truly want to get rid of racial bias, gender bias, whatever else bias completely, then not paying it mention in any sphere is how you get there. I do not see how that is open to interpretation and it appears to run entirely contrary to your point.
If you interpret »not paying it mention in any sphere« broadly enough as not talking about it and not doing anything against it, then yes, it would mean ignoring the issue. My interpretation as a non-native English speaker focused on »mention« and so I did not interpret it as excluding any actions. But with you pointing this out and after having a second look I can see how »in any sphere« could make the point stronge…
However, here it is pretty clear to me, and likely why he deleted his post, that he meant "we should just ignore it." Which I don't think is a particularly defensible position.
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Do you say this as someone from a member of a minority? Because I am a "minority" and I certainly don't care about going out of my way to find this kind of identification.
As with anything, there are no universals. Happy you don't need affirmation that "someone like you" can succeed, has succeeded, and matters. I don't want to use my own (potential, theoretical) "minority status" to boost my own argument. That's cheap. Sufficed to say, the demand exists as evidenced by the supply: If no one cared, there'd be no clicks, no Black History Month, and no ongoing discussion about the topic :…
HN is sometimes one of the more progressive wings of the geek community. It's disheartening to see the number of replies expressing dismay at race being an interesting and notable part of this story. Representation is a crucial concept in history and media, and a key element in why conversations about privilege are necessary. Rather than stating that you don't know why it would be relevant to mention the man's race,…
Removing my comments because this thread has sparked unnecessary discourse and reactions that this comment is the cause of.
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Then why is it strictly forbidden to write an article with a title that caters specifically to young white children?
I don't think I'll be able to do satisfactorily answer that question in a couple sentences, but I'll try. White people are a majority in technology, so it's assumed to be obvious to white children that they too can be a technologist. There's not a significant gap in perceived identity between themselves and Mark Zuckerberg, for example. So, that begs the question, why focus on encouraging specifically white children?…
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it implies some of the following: - whites are a non-diverse group of people - whites (of all types, as a group) have been as historically unempowered as nonwhites in America - whites think whiteness is underrepresented in America - whites aren't bothered by how nonwhiteness affects outcomes - messages about race are currently at peak broadcast capacity, so talking about race is a zero-sum game where prioritizing one…
>whites are a non-diverse group of people Even if we assume that this is true (despite the fact that it's not) what does it have to do with printing articles with headlines that read "{INSERT NON-WHITE RACE HERE} miraculously succeeds in life!"?
The reason people like headlines like that is that milestone accomplishments by minorities is inspiring.