Women: Learn to Program This Summer

A lot of posturing with no intellectual rigor or honesty.

I left not too long after that.

But here are a few observations about that post:

The HN account in question has under 300 karma. There are three posts, all about the book this person is writing. All comments by the account are in replies to those posts. The account has made zero effort to participate generally in discussion here.

She's not trying to network. She's developing a single project and getting public feedback.

Here are a few other observations for you:

Between my original handle and this one, I have more than 40K karma. My previous handle was briefly on the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard.

I've just looked. I think I can confidently determine the full names of twelve of the top fifteen members of the HN leaderboard quite readily, with minimal effort. Many of them use their name or some portion of it as their handle or some portion of it. (First name, last initial; first initial, last name; etc.)

Yet I am routinely told that I should hide my gender online to avoid problems.

Here is a post I made in January that I wrote and self-posted. It got substantial karma and substantial comments and 60K+ page views total (about 55k the first couple of days):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009

It got one and exactly one private email from someone potentially professionally meaningful to me. I replied to that email. They did not reply to my reply. So I don't know how useful that is for networking purposes.

It made zero money, though it had a Patreon link and a PayPal link at the time. I spent about two weeks developing that piece.

People on HN use adblockers more aggressively than normal and ads generally are doing pretty poorly these days. All of HN expects quality writing on the front page, all day, every day. They decry pay walls and will post workarounds for pay walls.

Regular journalism sites are struggling and dying. They can't figure out how to pay their bills.

HN generally trends towards well-heeled male programmers, lawyers and other respected professionals. Yet they don't want to support writers. I am routinely told "get a real job" by people here.

There is no method by which the HN audience is willing to pay for content. Not by patronage, not by subscriptions, not by tip jars and certainly not by ads. The expectation that people post good content and make it freely available to the general public kind of worked when you could make money via ads. But ad payments have dropped across the board by 75 percent or more online for most sites that I know of.

I mean, I could just go on and on, but it's pointless because you aren't here to understand the problem space. You are here to post a single link as a "gotcha" that proves in your mind that there is no sexism on HN.

If there is no sexism on HN, why do I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of 100 names?

(Please note that a lot more than 100 people have spent time on it. As far as I can tell, that means that not even 1 percent of the members who have spent time there post as openly female. Please note the qualifier there of openly female. I am aware that it is possible that someone has made the leaderboard while hiding the fact that they are female.)

Anyway, this argument is incredibly tiresome and I think I need to try to go do other things. More people piling on to try to somehow dismiss me is not some kind of good faith engagement by any stretch of the imagination.

It is a fact that even at birth, girls are more interested in people where boys are more interested in things. This is even true for newborn chimpanzees. You can’t really blame society for this.

Surely this is a more plausible explanation why there are more women in medicine than in programming?

It's only disingenuous if she's lying about these things and actually not doing this, which seems like an absurd accusation.