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ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

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Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#281

Post by smsm42 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81
Baeocystin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once? The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the a…

I second the line of thinking, but please rein in the TSA a bit. That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US. All the other things seem like a purely local phenomena that shouldn't be generalized to the whole 300M country. But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

> That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US

Don't be. TSA is stupid theater, they suck, but probability of anything happening to you is very low. Probability of anything beyond mild irritation happening to you - unless you one of high profile people that Powers That Be have a beef with - is vanishingly low.

Yes, it still happens - millions pass through TSA every day, and you'd have a number of cases where usual silliness rises to the level of dangerous idiocy, and these cases would be widely publicized and criticized, as they should be. But pure numbers game suggests your chances of becoming one of those is very small. If you take some basic precautions - like not standing out too much, being polite and not arguing with them, however stupid the proceedings look, etc. - even smaller.

In fact, on my latest travels, I personally have had much more irritating experience with London security that with TSA. On top of everything TSA does (which they did too), London people were severely understaffed for some reason, but if you think that made them move at anything faster than a glacial pace, you'd be so wrong. They were so Zen I'd be envious if I wasn't so concerned about missing my flight because they need to swab my books and slooowly bring it to some mysterious machine and slooowly come back and so on... But still it wasn't much more than mild annoyance summarily.

> But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

Nobody cares. Really. They don't have resources to read every HN thread.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#282

Post by smsm42 »

throwaway47861 wrote: post #204
Baeocystin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's no way I'm going to defend the TSA's methodologies. They a pain to deal with. The good thing I'll say is that somewhere around 57 million people visited the US last year. 99.9%+ had no trouble other than long lines and the general frustration that comes with long distance travel. So your fears, while completely understandable, are also very, very unlikely to cause any actual trouble.

Those 0.1% mean absolutely nothing. There was a comment months ago right here in HN about a guy who owned a secure email provider who had his throwaway Android device confiscated, and who was interrogated for 8 hours on the topic of "give us access to your private email admin panel". He refused and was smart enough to not bring any way of unlocking his admin access with him (whitelisted IPs and/or physical keys which…

> who owned a secure email provider

So he probably was on some kind of a radar. Are you? Then you concern is completely warranted. Are not? Then it's not.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#283

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

viraptor wrote: post #136
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: Yes, there are better and worse ways to go about it. Realising too late and reverting the original list was not the best. Reaching out to / inviting diverse groups rather than fixing balance later would be better. Hope they learned and will do it better next year. Organisers which care about it from the beginning somehow manage to get a decent m/f split - both in the audience and in the speakers. (see linux.c…

No review process is more fair. But if you end up with all-X selections from a blind-review, you may be advertising to a very homogeneous culture. As a result, you may be limiting your pool of ideas to choose from and reaching only a local maximum. There are usually great non-X engineers, as long as you reach out to them. (they're usually have their own group - guess why?) Mixing multiple varied-X groups usually resu…

In this instance the speakers were all men. Can you show that GitHub specifically advertised to only men?

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#284

Post by smsm42 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
abtinf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All this without ... people that police every word you say. Is that a joke? There are literally laws, with actual prosecutions, in the Netherlands designed to police every word you say.

[citation needed]

Just recently in Zurich somebody was sentenced to a fine for "like" on Facebook:

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-lik...

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#285

Post by rayiner »

leereeves wrote: post #273
rayiner wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a choice, but it's not the same choice. When a woman signs up to be an engineer, she's signing up for long hours debugging segfaults, just like a man. But unlike a man, she's signing up to spend four years in school being one of the handful of women in her class, then entering a workforce with the likes of Uber, etc. There signing up for a life of awkward encounters with coworkers, supervisors who try to date fe…

None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc. Tech isn't new. Why haven't women chosen to enter tech in the same numbers they've chosen other male-dominated fields?

> None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc.

As to law, it didn't happen by magic. After openly excluding women into the 1970s, law schools and law firms made concerted efforts to increase the representation of women. Large law firms not only track demographic information for hiring and promotions, they disclose it to legal publications who report on it. These days much of it has become self reinforcing. Frat culture has a hard time surviving in an environment where a big chunk of the clients are women (a quarter of existing Fortune 500 CLOs and a third of new ones are women).

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#286

Post by throwaway47861 »

smsm42 wrote: post #282
throwaway47861 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 0.1% mean absolutely nothing. There was a comment months ago right here in HN about a guy who owned a secure email provider who had his throwaway Android device confiscated, and who was interrogated for 8 hours on the topic of "give us access to your private email admin panel". He refused and was smart enough to not bring any way of unlocking his admin access with him (whitelisted IPs and/or physical keys which…

> who owned a secure email provider So he probably was on some kind of a radar. Are you? Then you concern is completely warranted. Are not? Then it's not.

It's a slippery slope kind of situation. Once they start doing it and see they can get away with it, then they start widening the circle.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#287

Post by rayiner »

smsm42 wrote: post #279
selllikesybok wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?

Because it reduces people to a set of identity classes that fill respective identity checkboxes. I.e. if it happens that on conference there is 10 good presentation submitted from class X but only 2 from class Y, and the quota is half-half, you would either reject 8 good presentations or add 8 crappy ones, just to fill identity checkboxes and achieve equality of outcome. Or cancel the conference altogether. The true…

If green eyed people had been systematically oppressed until recently and still made a fraction of the money brown eyed people do as a result, you'd see statistics about eye color at conference presentations.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#288

Post by rayiner »

smsm42 wrote: post #280
rayiner wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you should see 70% white players, 15% hispanic players, 12% black players, 5% asian players. Is that the right solution? But is the fact that black Americans dominate the league actually a problem? And what the heck are you supposed to do to fix it? Arguably yes. The NBA itself is an irrelevantly tiny portion of the economy. But it creates a huge pressure on African American kids to focus on being successful thr…

This thinking is exactly the problem. "There are a lot of people with dark skin in basketball, your skin color is looking like theirs, therefore your path to success must be basketball". But the solution you seem to be implying is even worse - "ok, we succeeded in convincing you your skin color determines your path in life. Congrats to us. But now we'll close this path for you because we already have too many people…

Great. Now convince all the black teenagers living in the same segregated neighborhoods black people lived in a century ago (because it was illegal for them to live in the other side of this or that road) that skin color doesn't determine their path in life.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#289

Post by leereeves »

rayiner wrote: post #285
leereeves wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc. Tech isn't new. Why haven't women chosen to enter tech in the same numbers they've chosen other male-dominated fields?

> None of that stopped women from entering law, medicine, business, etc. As to law, it didn't happen by magic. After openly excluding women into the 1970s, law schools and law firms made concerted efforts to increase the representation of women. Large law firms not only track demographic information for hiring and promotions, they disclose it to legal publications who report on it. These days much of it has become se…

That's all true of tech as well. People should seriously ask why women aren't choosing tech careers, because the "old boys club" or "frat culture" explanation isn't at all unique to tech.

Re: ElectronConf postponed until a “more diverse slate of speakers” can be delivered

#290

Post by viraptor »

gens wrote: post #186
viraptor wrote: post #69

I'm disappointed in how many comments here are just kneejerk reactions. Reaching for weird comparisons, getting angry at the idea of diversity and social justice, and many others. This wasn't enforced from outside. It's the organisers who agreed: yup, that's not what we want to do ( https://twitter.com/nmsanchez/status/870811022306574336 ) Stop for a moment, think of how you'd organise a conference. Is it different?…

>( https://twitter.com/nmsanchez/status/870811022306574336 ) I usually hate doing this, but hey. From that twitter: >OG tech diversifier. GitHubber. Lecturer, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. And her github is: https://github.com/nmsanchez?tab=repositories Two repositories have only a README, with, more or less, one line in it. One has a document about, not surprisingly, "diversity in tech" (and a code of conduct…

It looks like you expect a conference organiser to write open source code and put it on GitHub. Why?
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