81–90 of 181 posts
To those saying, "Why is this necessary? This isn't fair!", Well, here's your answer: http://xkcd.com/385/ (XKCD nailed it, as usual.)
We are on the internet, I can't see you, I have no idea who you are.
For those crying sexism, go take a look at the amount of women in the business, now THAT's what sexism looks like.
Go take a look at the amount of men in the business of midwifing, it's even worse. Is there anything that prevent a men to work in this field ? I know a guy who did, so I can tell you: Nothing. If we lack of women in CS it's mostly because women themselves thinks it's not attractive, just like they don't see trucker, or construction worker as attractive jobs. For the same reason teaching, widwifing, etc lack of mens.…
Is it not possible that the cultural imbalance in all of these fields is due to sexism?
You know this makes me sick. Time and time again, articles pop up here on HN talking about some organization trying to promote and encourage women in technology and the comments explode with privileged boys whining about about how "it's not fair" You know what's not fair? A Teacher telling a 12 year old girl that she needs a backup plan because girls getting an engineering degree, well, that's hard. Getting one from…
I don't know if that's the case in the place you are living right now but, if you think that being a boy or a girl its an advantage then you are part of that problem..
Boys will always be boys, ignore them and move on.
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If you'd like to get your local Scouts group to work on code within the safe measures of private repos, I'm sure you'd also find sponsors. It's not a breach of Equality when you aren't stopping other people from doing something. I'm sure Github would love sponsorship from all over the place. A benefit of this is clever on Ada and Github's part: a lot of women don't participate in code sharing because of reasons that…
There is often a disjoint set of expectations between F/LOSS culture and women (besides occasional outright misogyny). Providing a system where women can be eased into the coding experience is, IMO, a very kind thing to do. I visited a church recently and some college students spoke about why they chose that church. Uniformly, the kindness of the church community was a common thread through their comments. It's a hum…
Changing the culture to something "kind", if that is what the community truly wants, will take more than a few donated repos. It will be interesting to see the impact it happens.
[1] One of many examples http://www.muktware.com/3703/linus-torvalds-nvidia-fuck-you
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Here's a good reason: your entire comment is judgmental and assuming. It's not about hearing "hey, good job girl! Have a cookie!" It's about not hearing "your code is badly formatted, didn't you go to CS school?" instead of "that was a good refactor there, but you'll find it easier to read and share if you indent". Women have just grown up in different kind of group dynamics - and while women can be horribly nasty to…
To quote another story on the front page: ... that’s what happens when we hold events for women in IT when there aren’t that many women in this industry – we tend to broaden the definition of women in IT. The software industry exists to write software, and ideally it's good software. We're not here to engender happy feelings about bad code. If you're worried about immature people non-constructively mocking your code,…
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People are also free to criticize Github for any reason they want to. Personally, I think the Ada Initiative is doing far more harm than good. They're pushing a strange brand of coddling and gender privilege.
It's fine you think that. I think that hundreds of girls don't really care about that initial help, will get some seriously good programming done, release some fantastic code and not read your comment at all except with a passing glance at someone who feels slighted for something that doesn't affect him at all.
If the Ada Initiative didn't affect the rest of the industry at all, then they wouldn't be considered effective at their mission.
Whether or not you agree with the way they approach their mission is another question.