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Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

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Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#581

Post by jasonlotito »

thro2 wrote: post #436
raganwald wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the legitimacy of your concerns is based in how women (in this case) feel. If you can't find a person who thinks he/she is being discriminated against here, you're obviously tilting at windmills. Now what you're presenting me with is a proposition that if "X" is false, then I should reconsider my belief that "Y" is true. So before I give this further thought, let me call your bet: Will you in turn agree that if "X" t…

First of all, I think you're confusing me with the people you're arguing against (who explicitly deny that calling some website "bro" is exclusionary). I'm not arguing for that; I'm objecting to your disingenuous claim (as I read it) that you're NOT trying to act as an advocate on behalf of women. We're talking about a social construct here (exclusionarity), so certainly the more women you find, the stronger your cas…

> so certainly the more women you find, the stronger your case is.

It's a problem. Enough women have spoken up about it. They've expressly asked that their friend speak up when they see it happen. They aren't coming to every single stupid thread on every single website just to satisfy your needs.

> But even if you find such people, why don't you let them speak for themselves?

It's a problem. Enough women have spoken up about it. They've expressed they don't feel comfortable, or they don't feel welcome. These are my friends, my colleagues. It makes me feel bad knowing people are doing things that hurt my friends. I speak up, because it makes me feel uncomfortable.

> I'm objecting to your disingenuous claim (as I read it) that you're NOT trying to act as an advocate on behalf of women.

Both men and women have a problem with this mentality. We aren't advocating on behalf of women. We are advocating on behalf of ourselves. It's because that same culture that we are fighting against is the same type of culture that will mock someone for their sexuality, or race, or hell, even if they are wearing glasses. It's a immature culture. It's one that holds us back.

I don't have to be gay to fight for gay marriage. I don't have to be black to fight for equal rights. I don't have to be a woman to fight sexism in the industry.

In the end, I speak up because it affects me. That you think that's not possible is a problem with you, not me.

Indeed, if your point really was: "why don't you let them speak for themselves?", why aren't you asking that same question to everyone supporting the bro name? After all, unless they are the ones who named the software, why don't they let the author speak for himself?

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#582

Post by falcolas »

Steuard wrote: post #324
overgard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, lets throw away our sense of humor and wordplay because there are theoretically people that might be offended (maybe, kindof. You know. In theory.). (N.B. the people that seem to be offended so far are offended on other peoples behalf..) Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

It's not about offending people. It's never about offending people. Plenty of people could have delightfully off-color senses of humor, love playing Cards Against Humanity, and still find this name highly problematic. It's actually about the signals that we send by using language closely associated with groups or attitudes that have long histories of excluding women or others from our culture and community. And just…

A short confession. After participating in this forum for a few years, I never thought this was an actual problem. Watching this whole thread of conversation has been very enlightening, and not in the way I had hoped.

So, on behalf of those of us who had not seen these attitudes before so blatantly on parade, my sincerest apologies.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#583

Post by etjossem »

pessimizer wrote: post #579
etjossem wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is associated with completely ignorant, childish, and lacking in manners. So what? It's the name of a piece of software, and if there's sufficient adoption, it starts to lose its old meaning in a tech context. Which, for "bro", is fine by me.

Git isn't gendered.

Right. I'm just pointing out that it's fine to name software something gendered or something associated with obnoxious, disrespectful people. See Julia and Git, respectively, for examples of the above that seem to be working out just fine.

The real problem is that 'bro' is inherently masculine in a male-dominated industry - which has unfortunate implications if we're trying to be inclusive of women. That's it. If people use it enough as a technical term for a piece of software, maybe 'bro' - like 'man' - will stop feeling weird when you type it into the command line.

Until then, it absolutely is offensive and unwelcoming.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#584

Post by rds2000 »

KuraFire wrote: post #572
rds2000 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to make personal examples, if you compare the look at the replies to @defunkt's twitter post, the females cheering - who even go so far as to overly call themselves feminists - have basically no engineer cred to speak for. Not on github, not on LinkedIn. Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult, I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias. Bias? Feminists on twitte…

Have you ever considered the idea that your apparent dislike towards all things and people described as "feminist" suggests that you have, over the course of your seemingly-angry life, adopted a huge amount of misogynistic perspectives on things? Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that wome…

Please understand,

Sympathy, courtesy, favors and censorship can't substitute the effort to learn programming and build.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#585

Post by blueblob »

vacri wrote: post #414
blueblob wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man pages are nice sometimes but oftentimes they have a lot of options and no examples. For advanced usage of some commonly used commands it's far easier to just look it up online, or perhaps with this tool. Example good man page is ps, and an example difficult to use one is gcc. Even though the gcc man page has all the options, it's very difficult to figure out which ones you need, whereas something like this (or co…

My pet hate is man pages where the tool has a lot of options, and in the manual the options are listed neither alphabetically nor by semantic grouping. "Hrm, what does '-l' do. I guess I'll search for it, and hit every other -l along the way..."

Yeah, pretty annoying, if you use less as a pager for your manpages, you can try:

  /^[[:blank:]]+-l
but it's kind of annoying that you have to use regular expressions to find what you are looking for faster.

EDIT: it may work in more (the default pager) but I haven't tried it.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#586

Post by mkr-hn »

jlees wrote: post #306
mkr-hn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro transcends a single very new and very narrowly-distributed usage.

What are the other usages? I genuinely don't know of any beyond the "bro culture" thing. But then I'm not a bro, so maybe I wouldn't.

It's short for brother. People sometimes refer to their brothers as "bro."

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#587

Post by victorhooi »

Are you kidding me?

Hundreds of idiotic comments on this page from Social Justice Warriors with too much time and nothing better to do.

People, it's the word Bro... get over it. It took me a second to get the joke (it's from man pages), I thought it was semi funny but whatever, it seems useful actually.

Why can't we keep the contents in topic? The authors put in effort to make this - how about we commend them for that, instead of tearing them down, when we've contributed nothing to this project.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#588

Post by mkr-hn »

donotsurveil wrote: post #551
AndyKelley wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with gendered things? The programming language Julia is female, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. What's wrong with a tool that has a male gendered name?

Julia is a first name which is free of negative association. Bro is associated with obnoxious, stupid, despicable, disrespectful.

I never get that impression when my brother calls me "little bro." And all my friends who were/are close enough to treat like brothers. I'd call women who are that close sis if the culture around gender weren't so weird and arbitrary.

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#589

Post by jacalata »

anatoly wrote: post #508
InclinedPlane wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It's just one drop of water out of a clear blue sky. The sort of thing that is easily tolerable, hardly even a nuisance really. Maybe you don't have many female friends, maybe none of your female friends work in tech, and maybe you've never had any female coworkers. The fact is, for women in tech it's been raining, it's been raining every single day for decades. One drop is tolerable, but it's the unrelenting d…

>Make no mistake, these "jokes" have consequences. What's your evidence? Anecdotal evidence cuts both ways: every time this issue is discussed on HN there are real women in comments saying that they personally don't feel discriminated at their tech workplaces and find the claims of GeekFeminism et al about the pervasively misogynistic tech culture laughable. Do you actually know that there's an "unrelenting deluge th…

In the U.S., the percentage of women in tech and CS has been steadily going down since mid-80s, while the society has been getting less sexist since that time by most evidence I can think of: for example, think of the number of women in Congress, representation in the media, jokes that have become too crass, gender pay gap that's been shrinking... If you're right about the reason women don't go into tech, wouldn't you expect the numbers to go up and not down since the 80s?

Maybe tech has not been keeping up with the rest of society?

Re: Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

#590

Post by A_COMPUTER »

KuraFire wrote: post #572
rds2000 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to make personal examples, if you compare the look at the replies to @defunkt's twitter post, the females cheering - who even go so far as to overly call themselves feminists - have basically no engineer cred to speak for. Not on github, not on LinkedIn. Judging by that and the fact you throw out "feminist" like it's an insult, I'm going to say you've got some pretty heavy bias. Bias? Feminists on twitte…

Have you ever considered the idea that your apparent dislike towards all things and people described as "feminist" suggests that you have, over the course of your seemingly-angry life, adopted a huge amount of misogynistic perspectives on things? Because, hate to break it to you, but you were born a feminist. Everyone is. Every person that has ever lived on planet Earth was born a feminist. Because the idea that wome…

Believe in equality? Congratulations, you're a feminist!

Believe in God? Congratulations, you're a Catholic!

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