14 ms·

Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk

98 points by th0ma5 14y ago

RobertHoudin 14y ago
Dear Blogger - We Need to Talk About Brevity.
TallboyOne 14y ago
I feel like I'm missing something. Edit: I thought this said "Dear Hacker [News] Community"
- timmm 14y ago
  Yeah I'm pretty sure the original title was "Dear HN..." I could be wrong though.
46Bit 14y ago
That's quite the rant. It's a shame that someone's been put off like this, but it doesn't seem like there's enough in this article to really work out what's gone on. Regret that I'm only learning of Cryptoparties now - I quite like the concept.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  I agree; I find the message clear but the story itself very hard to follow.
w1ntermute 14y ago
The problem with this woman's story is that she takes a few cases of explicit sexism and extrapolates them as the reason why everyone is saying rude things to her. Or at least that's how I see it. Perhaps she is just commenting on the general douchebaggery of the community, but even then much of the criticism she received could be seen as fair if she was actually in the wrong. Although sexism is clearly an issue in the hacker community that needs to be tackled, the story makes me wonder if the author's behavior didn't initiate some of the vitriol directed at her. There was certainly plenty of it without any sexist connotations. She says "I’ve gone from being a Facebook user to running OTR, PGP and Tor all in under a month." Perhaps she is not as knowledgeable or as experienced as she thinks she is, and so she is receiving criticism from those who know what they're saying/doing.
- venantius 14y ago
  She does explicitly acknowledge her own lack of technical knowledge (e.g. where she notes that she was not qualified to evaluate the technical components of the cryptoparty manual). And still, we should hope to be a community that embraces a willingness to learn regardless of current technical knowledge.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    And learning is great. But there are cases where I think the author was expecting too much. For example, she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience. She said that her family offered childcare only if she got a speaking spot, but that doesn't mean she should have just applied for it or expected to get a spot when she didn't have the necessary experience, just so she could participate in the conference. In essence, she should have applied for a speaker spot because she has experience and knowledge she wants to share with other people, not because her family agreed to watch her kid if she got the spot. Now if her story is true, the "Sydney-based male Cryptoparty organiser" was being douchebaggy by not contributing to the application for the panel. But perhaps he had more experience and felt that it wasn't fair that this newbie (regardless of gender) was turning a speaking spot that he (perhaps rightly) deserved into a panel, just so that she could be on stage as well (since if she believed that she really had the knowledge/experience to get the spot over the other guy, why didn't she just apply for the speaker spot?). I don't really know what happened, but there tends to just be a lot that you miss out on when you only hear a story from the perspective of just one person.
    - mcantelon 14y ago
      >she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience Non-technical are not unusual at that conference as they know they'll get a wider perspective that way.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        Even if that is the case, it doesn't change the fact that she clearly felt the other guy would have a better chance of getting the spot. Otherwise, why didn't she just apply like the other guy had already done, and let the best (by whatever standards they want, whether it be experience or perspective) person be selected by the conference organizers? Tell me, how would you feel if you had already prepared and turned in an application, and then some random person asks you to instead help with an application for a "panel" to replace the individual speaking spot you had already applied for? That man had absolutely no obligation to indulge the author's desire to have a panel.
RobertHoudin 14y ago
I feel like I'm missing the part where this blogger was discriminated against. Disagreement or conflict =/= discrimination. I'd say it's pretty sexist to assume that people who disagree with you are doing so because of their gender, and not because they have, you know, an actual and possibly valid point of view. This just seems like a fairly childish dummy-spit, IMO.
davewicket 14y ago
Tiny gray text on a gray background. Ick.
timmm 14y ago
They (big bad men) gave you trouble for seemingly valid difference in opinions, deal with it. And please don't imply that the HN has any hand in fostering misogyny or sexism because it's a completely false characterization of the community at large. In fact if you haven't picked up on it yet we're actually one of the more "progressive" and or liberal industries. But that doesn't mean we're going to hold you to any lesser standard or treat you better because your a girl either. By the way quitting and blaming others in a rant was probably the wrong decision on your part.
- venantius 14y ago
  At no point does she explicitly cite HN. The post is directed to all "hackers."
  - timmm 14y ago
    Hence my use of the word imply. As in 'implicit' ... you know - the opposite of 'explicit'. I also believe she changed the title.
    - venantius 14y ago
      I don't think there's anything implicitly linking the people in her article to HN, either. We don't have a monopoly on the word "hacker," after all.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        In fact, quite the opposite. HN's use of the word is the tag-along.
- 67726e 14y ago
  Admittedly, the post is very ranty, but that doesn't take away from the the issue itself. Picking apart the person behind the argument does not lessen the issue either. By doing so, you are only trying to detract from the seriousness of the issue via a borderline ad hominem response. Finally, at no point in the post did Asher Wolf mention Hacker News, it was directed at the greater hacker community.
venantius 14y ago
It's so hard to know what to say in response to stuff like this. I want to believe that there's a consensus amongst the enlightened hacker community that the type of sexist behavior described is Not Acceptable, but it seems hardly a week goes by without another major incident in which a long-standing female contributor is finally pushed out of a project by stuff like this. I agree with Ms. Wolf that community and convention anti-harassment rules, policies, and introductions are a good place to start, but I can't help but wonder what the real answer is. My introduction to this entire world came through a female hacker, one that I still hold in highest esteem, and I can't help but feel a sense of immense confusion and sadness that she and all those beyond the straight/white/male class are still made to feel like outsiders.
- krakensden 14y ago
  Prominent male members of the community burn out all the time (_why, Mark Pilgrim) too. I think sexism isn't really the culprit, so much as being exposed to the howling nether of the internet. There are a billion people online, and some percentage of them are in a shit mood, and the more prominent you are the more likely it is that someone will try to shit all over you for no visible reason. If you get famous enough, you'll get it every day. A lot of the other stuff sounds like the mundane bullshit that happens to every open project- people promising to build stuff that then don't, bikeshedding, flakiness, poor communication and clashing goals. The eternal heartbreak of people preferring talk to action. This sounds like her first rodeo. It sounds like that made everything worse. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the gender stuff is basically incidental to the people making her life miserable, even if it feels central to her. Being internet famous and trying to organize internet volunteers is a recipe for awfulness.
fsiaf 14y ago
This article is so big and confusing that I do not understand a thing... Besides the fact that someone is pissed because of the way they treat her in the tech community?
- batgaijin 14y ago
  The real problem is that she thought she was an exclusion to RTFM and trusting some random person to make a website for her. That really stands out to me... she seems to make such an effort to learn crypto but just writes off reading a wiki tutorial? I don't buy it.
tomwalker 14y ago
" I didn’t create Cryptoparty just so a bunch of privileged white boys could.." Why did she drag race into it? Completely unnecessary. She has valid points without this.
- sedev 14y ago
  Her agenda is about making crypto accessible to lots of people that it's not currently available to. To those people, hackerdom often looks like an undifferentiated mass of white dudes. Leaving race out of a discussion like that is not a neutral thing: omitting race is a statement of its own.
  - robryan 14y ago
    This isn't the white males fault though, I am sure all of them would be happy to see more diversity. The event is open invite though and this is the crowd that it attracts right now.
  - boboblong 14y ago
    Are you saying that crpyto is not available to people who aren't white guys?
- thejsjunky 14y ago
  It's inherent to the concept of "privilege"; the understanding is that the people with the most "privilege" in the western world are men who are white. If you are making a point that a group has "privilege", it makes sense to point out they are mostly white since it affects the amount of "privilege" they have. That said, that particular remark seems to be imbued with some bitterness and desire to wound; which may be understandable coming from someone frustrated, but prevents me from endorsing it myself. edit: quotes are not for sarcasm, but to denote less common usage/meaning
  - anewguy99 14y ago
    I've always found concepts of privilege to be lacking explanatory power. A European-derived culture is dominant in America, but east-Asian Americans still manage to do better than whites in education and in earnings. If racial privilege is powerful, it is not all-powerful. At the same time, I find the focus on race and class privilege to be incomplete. A poor white boy growing up in Appalachia has less privilege than a member of any race or gender growing up in a California suburb. But if he manages to get to college (statistically unlikely), he will learn from his professors how his success is all because of his skin and his genitals.
JacobJans 14y ago
I think there will be a lot to learn by how people respond to this. (There's already been quite a few revealing comments.)
jamestc 14y ago
I submit that like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion will win no converts and will probably receive the praise of people who agreed with her before she made the post. I sympathize with her in regards to harassment, but I don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper cards" (a poorly thought out endeavor since, after all, not one of us is righteous enough to hand out the cards in the first place). My advice: nobody likes "we need to talk" conversation. Or, at least nobody on the opposition does. The art of persuasion is still an art, no matter how obviously correct you think your side of the argument is. Collect more facts, provide more details that relate to harassment, edit better, don't preach. The data and the details will be enough.
- antihero 14y ago
  > like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion I'm not sure of the validity of this statement - history has been all about appeals to emotion being more powerful than appeals to reason. > don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper cards" It's the sentiment - creeper cards are there because of the oppression of females by lecherous males at these types of events. The fact that someone is making fun of that it by being mildly perverse is terrible because it's literally anti-anti-oppression - it's oppressive.
kabuks 14y ago
If you are a man reading this, I invite you to: a. Resist the urge to pick apart the OP's life and criticize how/what she said. b. Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of this community? I invite you to do this, because it's a charged topic, but an important one. See if you can look past the hurt feelings and accusations, and sincerely reflect on what you can do to understand how sexism works a little better, and address it. EDIT: I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I've spent the past few years earnestly looking at how oppression works and keeping an open mind. I was truly astounded by the magnitude and difficulty of the problem.
- learn 14y ago
  This was horrible to read.
  - kabuks 14y ago
    What do you mean? Writing style? It's my run on sentences isn't it.
    - Alex3917 14y ago
      I think this piece would have been stronger if it were just 3 - 5 examples and then discussion. If the piece is going to be billed as a call for discussion about sexism, then the piece should be mostly about sexism rather than about things not related to sexism that went wrong with the project. Also, for what it's worth most of the questionable behavior I see comes from the developers who are part of open source culture rather than from the ones who are part of startup culture. Not sure if others agree or disagree.
      - thejsjunky 14y ago
        > billed as a call for discussion about sexism I'm curious why some people seem to think that she is exclusively talking about or attributing her problems to sexism. The very first sentence: > Some parts of this article deal with misogyny, sexism, and harassment, while other aspects of it respond to experiences of down-right douche-baggery. ...explicitly states that sexism is only part of the discussion. Was this edited at some point after publishing? Perhaps some readers not carefully perusing, or some combination thereof.
sublimit 14y ago
Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer, at least until you've achieved something worth having a conference speech or "Cryptoparty" about. The thing about the hacker community is that people won't like you if you draw unwarranted attention to yourself. Hoping that people would accept her, the author just keeps on hitting herself with "creeper cards" and social media outbursts that draw more unwarranted attention, feeding the feedback loop. Your life will be easier once you realize emotions and human relations only get in the way, at least when it comes to hacking. If you want acceptance, invent something good.
- Maxious 14y ago
  > Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer Focus on the damn cooking and stay in the kitchen?
  - boboblong 14y ago
    Uh...no?
ams6110 14y ago
I recommend counseling. ASAP.
cooldeal 14y ago
What I learned from the post is the absolute lack of organizational structure or delegation for "Cryptoparty" with everyone going off to do their own thing. This is why structure is super important to organizing events. Coming to sexism, there are a great many sexist events here as well as the regular "you noob!" moments which seem to have been mistaken as sexist. There is an extreme amount of manipulation, general douchebaggery, credit stealing, blame shifting etc. in office politics and not just in IT and all of it happens to guys too. Hearing only one side of the story from an an obviously anguished individual also does not help. Alcohol, a thousand guys and six women don't mix well and alcohol should have been taken off the table. Having lost my father recently and realizing some truths about life, my sincere advice for her is to take a step back, turn off Twitter, turn off comments on her blog, take a deep breath and spend more time with her baby for a week before coming online again. Wasting sleepless nights on things so trivial in the long run is not even close to being worth it.
verroq 14y ago
Is there actually a point in all these because I've read about half way down and I'm not seeing any substance, and I'm not convinced that there is one. If anything, her approach to organisation (do whatever you want) is a big red flag to me that this wasn't going to work well for her/or anyone in fact.
learn 14y ago
Do something.
michaelkscott 14y ago
http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
krakensden 14y ago
> Would 10 minutes at the start of a conference explaining anti-discrimination policy and acceptable conduct really infringe on anyone’s “fun”? > It won’t change the culture of asshattery over-night, but it will begin a conversation that’s needed – far more necessary than another article or blog post like this, or more red-card waving in the wind. It's an interesting strategy, but I don't have much hope for it. The thing that makes HR rules effective is that they can forcibly eject people from the workplace. They also work in a framework of a fairly static population and an understood hierarchy. A conference is a bunch of strangers together for a quick day or two. It's hard to police, and hard to trust complaints from people you don't know about things with no evidence.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rachelbythebay 14y ago
>> He sat in on the crowd-sourced process of writing of the application, contributing nothing except criticism to anything I wrote for hours. That's the part of this post which really grabbed me. I went through the same sort of thing in a corporate environment not too long ago. I had suffered through discovering a massive security hole on an internal system, managing disclosure to just the right groups, writing the fix myself, and making sure it was 100% patched in production before talking about it. This went on for over a month. When I did finally talk about it on an internal system, someone on the internal security team spotted it and said I should expand it a bit to add some recommendations about how others might avoid creating the same sort of hole in the future. I asked if they had any restrictions on content, length, or whatever, and they said that I could just keep doing what I had been doing. I took that as a thumbs-up and started working on my new and improved writeup. This "version 2" had code snippets showing the actual problem, a walkthrough of how it happened in the first place, and details about how I managed reporting and containing it (including escalation to appropriate corporate security folks). I fired it off and waited. Instead of a "thanks!" and an appearance in their next issue, someone else from the security team jumped on it and started raising issues with my prose. I was either "too chatty" or "too wordy" or similar, and basically, he had his own ideas for what a post should look like, and I didn't write like him, so he didn't like it. I told them they could "take it or leave it" as-is, and they wound up rejecting it. I turned around and self-published it internally, using the same sort of chat-type channels my original writeup had used. A bunch of people spotted it and shared it around, and I got a bunch of comments. These were just ordinary engineers, not the special "security" ones who had turned me down. Yet, they managed to focus on the security and technical content of the piece, and actually found a bug in what I had written! I got some logic inverted somewhere, and they caught it, so I fixed it. The document improved as a direct result of sharing it with them. Meanwhile, the so-called security guy was so fixated on my writing style that he had apparently failed to look at the actual technical content within. It's that last point I want to emphasize here: some people get so fixated on the container that they completely miss the technical content (or ability) inside. That's just one way sexism rears its ugly head at times in my experience. Original post: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/
- 14y ago
8ig8 14y ago
This 'letter' is addressed to the hacker community, but I've seen similar behaviour at other male-dominated conferences, specifically commercial construction conferences/seminars. I'm not trying to get the hacker community off the hook for their behaviour, I just wonder if the discussion needs to be broadened?
kybernetyk 14y ago
So she is getting mad because people did things $differently at their own crypto parties and didn't obey when she told them to do otherwise? And then all those people who created unofficial IRC channels and didn't add those to the wiki? This whole article sounds like an ego-thing rather than gender based discrimination.
tomc1985 14y ago
There is a general thread of sexism that permeates much of western life. It's endemic to all levels of American society. Addressing sexism in the hacker community seems fruitless to me when there is a much larger fountain of hate spewing forth over the general public. New souls will come into the hacker community and old souls will leave, and some of the new souls are going to be incorrigible sexists. Sexism must be fought at the society-level, where it originates, not in subcultures. That, and more boys need to grow up with sisters. If you want to kill sexism, make sure boys and girls respect each other at an early age...
jjjeffrey 14y ago
This article is exceptionally difficult to read because of the low contrast between text and background color and because Firefox won't allow me to highlight the text for some reason.
- kybernetyk 14y ago
  The highlight color is just a nuance darker than the background - almost not noticeable.
jiggy2011 14y ago
"on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement, harassment, rape." This seems a little strong, is there any evidence to suggest that women in a technical field have a heightened risk of rape vs any other field? Especially something like lapdancing which seems to have no lack of female participants.
burntsushi 14y ago
> Inequality doesn’t just spring up without a context. There's the problem. People aren't equal, and they never will be. So yes, inequality is fundamental. The sooner you accept that, the better.
- jamesmiller5 14y ago
  It exists therefore it should accepted? The hacker culture has always been about being a better version of itself than it currently is and inequality in the community is just another hurdle to overcome.
  - burntsushi 14y ago
    You misunderstand. I said inequality was fundamental. It cannot be "overcome". You cannot make people equal. I != You. We have different skill sets, experiences, relationships, ideas and other thoughts that make us all fundamentally different. As a result, we are each treated differently.
- charleshaanel 14y ago
  It's not about "people being equal". It's about equality of opportunity. Curious that you don't see things this way...
  - burntsushi 14y ago
    What is equality of opportunity? It's understandable that you'd like people to be equal with respect to the law, but "opportunity" is a word so vague and general that it's borderline meaningless. Do you mean to say that we should all be trying to make sure everyone around us has equal opportunity to resources that we control? Or that we should treat everyone the same way?
- rjknight 14y ago
  This is correct. Everyone is an individual and no two people are, strictly speaking, equal. But that doesn't justify all instances of treating people differently. If I steal from you, you would expect me to receive the same punishment as if you had stolen from me. We are therefore "equal before the law". In the case of the law, we ask our legal system to suspend judgment of certain inequalities and to focus only on the facts of the case. There's no reason why we should not do this in other matters - if we're judging someone on their merits as a software developer, we can legitimately consider their unequal experience, intelligence, skills and abilities, but we should not consider their age, gender or ethnicity. Now, you might argue at this point that we wouldn't consider age/gender/ethnicity anyway, because these have no bearing on software development. And you would be mostly right to do so - these factors are genuinely unimportant. But most people are imperfect judges; they use heuristics and intuition in ways which can sometimes go awry. We might apply stereotypes, we might allow our judgment of other similar individuals we have met in the past to cloud our judgment of the person before us now, and so on. When people talk about equality, they're really asking that we find an effective way to ensure that we're making our judgments using only the truly relevant criteria. Past experience suggests that this takes effort and requires some cultural reinforcement. It's emphatically not about denying that people are different, but about ensuring that only the most contextually important differences are considered.
apeace 14y ago
In one paragraph, the OP implies that some in the hacker community have "no will to fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery" In the next, she describes "a bunch of privileged white boys" who seem to anger her. Why, then, is she surprised to be called a "mommy-type" when others are angry at her? My point being, people sometimes use mean words when they are angry. The best way to "fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery" is not to use that type of language when angry, or at all. The OP should consider her own message.
zeidrich 14y ago
To be fair to the author, she doesn't claim that everything is a result of sexism. The down-right douchebaggery is more apt a description for the majority of it, but there's no question that sex factors into big parts of it. There's a lot of egos in these communities, there are a lot of young people with adolescent hormones and something to prove. The communities themselves are pretty insular, and distinguish themselves by being exclusive. Girls are outsiders, for whatever reason. I wont speculate as to how this started, but it can perpetuate by staying hostile to girls. These communities strive to maintain some exclusivity; you're something special, better than others, smarter than others. You can't just let anyone new in, then you won't be so special. So in this article, you have a girl (outsider) who is non-technical (going to get ridiculed whether you're a boy or a girl) trying to exert her will (which is going to get you into fights regardless). Sexism is a thing. It's not a good thing. However, I don't think that removing sexism from this kind of community is a possibility, because sexism isn't the basic issue here. I think that the basic issue is the general exclusivity of the community. It's not a group to educate new people. In fact it's a group that is hostile towards "noobs". It's a group that is trying to restrict membership to those who are similar, who think similarly, or who can bully their way to the top. I think that the better situation is to recognize that this crowd of douchebaggery does exist. The way you fight it isn't to try and get into it and start shouting at people to change it. That's at best going to make you hoarse, and at worst going to make you one of them. I think that to deal with this is to do the kind of things that the author did. The wiki creation, the creation of the cryptoparty. These are the things that should be focused on. This is actually some cool stuff, and the author, a woman, was instrumental. Now the thing about the idea is it's not something that is owned by the author, it's just a good idea, and douchebags can make use of good ideas. I think the problem was that the author gets herself wrapped up in trying to control and maintain the purity of her idea and in the end gets drawn into pissing contests with other people trying to prove something. This is going to happen whether you're a girl or a guy, however when you're a girl, the guys have that knife in the wound already and they just need to twist it. Naw, I think instead the way to do it best is to endeavor to make this knowledge available to more people. Make it harder to be exclusive. Make it something that anyone can learn. People can be douchebags when it's them vs. the world. They can't be when it's just knowledge. So I guess the question is, are you trying to educate, or are you hoping to get people to accept you into their exclusive club? If you're trying to do the former, then I wish you all the luck and support in the world. If it's the latter, then even if you get your wish, you'll end up treating others how you hate being treated, whether by race, age, prior knowledge, whatever or else it will stop being an exclusive club. I agree that sexism is a problem. But it's a big problem. It's a problem that demands a lot of attention. You set up, or helped set up, a framework, and then put yourself under pressure to control how that framework is being used and abused all over the place; all the while still feeling responsible for fighting sexism within this framework. I think that's far too much for one person to handle, and I can promise that if a guy were to try it he wouldn't have any better success just because the other guys respected his testicles. Anyways, I commend the author's efforts, and I think the best way to combat that form of general douchebaggery is to make the thing that they hold above everyone else available to the mainstream. You don't stop sexism by going to the men's club and ranting at them to treat women nicely. You stop sexism by letting women vote, by training them to be doctors and engineers, and otherwise giving them, (and further, any other excluded parties) access to those things that were held over their heads before. And it's not a fast process, it's a very slow and hard one. But don't be discouraged, I think she did something good. Small, but good.
mburshteyn 14y ago
Applies to many of the comments on this thread, so just posting it separately. TL;DR the language we use to discuss and analyze these kinds of issues is not neutral. http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Instead of spamming that link, why don't you try leading by example? (Now tell me, which derailment tactic did I just employ? I can't be bothered to read them all to find out.)
yareally 14y ago
I've been around the Android modding/hacking community for a couple of years (I'm an admin at one of the larger ones) and it's quite a bit different than this to give a different outlook. If you happen to make it known you're female (through name/avatar/comments/etc), you'll most likely never suffer an ill comment, no matter how "noobish" you are. However, if you're a guy and asks something obvious like how to root your device (because it's a pinned topic in a sub-forum), be prepared to be flamed by a dozen or so users. One can draw conclusions from all that, but I don't think it's really important as the Android community I help to admin does not factor gender when moderating discussions (though some of the general users might). I'll help a user regardless of who they are, not because of their chromosomes. I may not reply to a question or post for help because the information was discussed many times over and can easily be searched, but I won't flame a user for asking anyways. However, I will moderate those that do flame them because they should either ignore them or give a helpful response. I'm a huge believer in trying to seek out your answers first (if they're easy to find) and sometimes a user will never do that if you don't let them try on their own before providing assistance. Android is kind of different though than many modding/hacking/tinkering communities. It's far less exclusive and developers inter-mingle with average users. Many times, it ends with the developer becoming introverted or ignoring users after a while because of general douchebaggery of the community or users (the community as a whole, not just the site I admin). Much of that though is from the developers just being too accommodating (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041) and letting the users walk all over them for their generosity. The community I admin generally tries to prevent user flaming (regardless of gender) and douchebaggery by users towards developers, but there's always some that happens anyways and users have to be put back in check. I get annoyed at some of these users and want to go off on them, but I just ignore them for the good of the community and be polite or ignore them when possible. A community is only as good as those that cultivate it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
domrdy 14y ago
I fail to see the connection between her personal incidents (website/29c3/crypto) and the hacker community as a whole. Title is very misleading in my opinion.
c141charlie 14y ago
>> Women stay the hell away from hacker-spaces, conferences and tech initiatives because of on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement, harassment, rape. To be clear, anyone who has abused, threatened, or raped someone should be criminally prosecuted. And if you act unprofessionally, you should be disciplined, fired, removed, etc. It doesn't matter what your race, sex, age, sexual orientation, or educational background is, there is no excuse for mistreating or restricting the liberty other another human being. That said some of this post doesn't fit with what I see historically, globally, or in my day to day activities. For example, Ada Lovelace is widely recognized for envisioning the first computer program. Marisa Mayer is the CEO of Yahoo. Meg Whitman runs HP. I work on a team of ridiculously talented software engineers, many of whom are women. Several books I've read to learn how to program were written by women. There are many women who have been tremendously successful and influential in tech. With regard to women's rights and attitudes towards women, we've come a long way, and undoubtedly have further to go. But I'm optimistic that tremendous opportunities await women. I'm hopeful that ultimately intelligence, ingenuity, drive, knowledge, and experience will lift women above the experiences described in this article.
kcarruthers 14y ago
Let the mansplaining commence...
- Chris2048 14y ago
  HN comprises mainly of men doesn't it? 'mansplaining' seems to mean a man explaining something to a woman in a patronising way. A man posting on HN will be seen mostly by other men. I can't see how there will be mansplaining.
aj700 14y ago
The causes of the problem as I see it. 1. A female who is a geek doubles her hotness to other geeks. 2. The guys in question are in the US, which has a shortage of hot women (which is hotly debated) and an even bigger shortage of geeks in general, and therefore of women who are also geeks.
rdl 14y ago
I wonder if people "in security" are just particularly abrasive assholes, or if there is just observer bias on my part. In ~20 years of following this stuff, I've never seen a professional discipline as petty and mean as security. On the other hand, I've never gotten as deep into other fields like politics, finance, other parts of computers, etc. From what I have seen, security is an outlier. Network operators are slightly abrasive but nothing approaching security. Firearms and tactical stuff absolutely has the "for guys" thing, but there are women in the industry, and they tend to be treated fairly well. SANs and storage are positively polite by comparison to security. etc.
antihero 14y ago
It might be nice to sit around on the throne of privilege and gaze over the people with their problems, seeing simple solutions to all their petty seeming squabbles, but until you feel the anger, dismay, and emotion that comes of being on the ground, in the thick of discrimination and oppression, of not only seeing those problems but having them affect you and those that you love, you cannot "rationally judge" or "objectively assess" such events, because true understanding requires not only reason but experience, and emotional experience is one of those things.
- Chris2048 14y ago
  Surely the term 'objectively' is at odds with requiring 'experience' (which would be 'subjective')?
mr_eel 14y ago
First male that says something like 'I've never seen any sexism in the field' has to leave Earth _forever_. Of course you haven't my dears, because you don't suffer it, you're blind to it.
samthetechie 14y ago
@samthetechie Response to @Asher_Wolf "Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk." Posted on pastebin and blogger: http://pastebin.com/KbyFsbKq http://pastebin.com/KbyFsbKq http://samthetechie.blogspot.com/2013/01/response-to-dear-hacker-community-we.html http://samthetechie.blogspot.com/2013/01/response-to-dear-ha...

98 points by th0ma5 14y ago

RobertHoudin 14y ago

Dear Blogger - We Need to Talk About Brevity.

TallboyOne 14y ago

I feel like I'm missing something. Edit: I thought this said "Dear Hacker [News] Community"

timmm 14y ago
Yeah I'm pretty sure the original title was "Dear HN..." I could be wrong though.

46Bit 14y ago

That's quite the rant. It's a shame that someone's been put off like this, but it doesn't seem like there's enough in this article to really work out what's gone on. Regret that I'm only learning of Cryptoparties now - I quite like the concept.

Locke1689 14y ago
I agree; I find the message clear but the story itself very hard to follow.

w1ntermute 14y ago

The problem with this woman's story is that she takes a few cases of explicit sexism and extrapolates them as the reason why everyone is saying rude things to her. Or at least that's how I see it. Perhaps she is just commenting on the general douchebaggery of the community, but even then much of the criticism she received could be seen as fair if she was actually in the wrong. Although sexism is clearly an issue in the hacker community that needs to be tackled, the story makes me wonder if the author's behavior didn't initiate some of the vitriol directed at her. There was certainly plenty of it without any sexist connotations. She says "I’ve gone from being a Facebook user to running OTR, PGP and Tor all in under a month." Perhaps she is not as knowledgeable or as experienced as she thinks she is, and so she is receiving criticism from those who know what they're saying/doing.

venantius 14y ago
She does explicitly acknowledge her own lack of technical knowledge (e.g. where she notes that she was not qualified to evaluate the technical components of the cryptoparty manual). And still, we should hope to be a community that embraces a willingness to learn regardless of current technical knowledge.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  And learning is great. But there are cases where I think the author was expecting too much. For example, she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience. She said that her family offered childcare only if she got a speaking spot, but that doesn't mean she should have just applied for it or expected to get a spot when she didn't have the necessary experience, just so she could participate in the conference. In essence, she should have applied for a speaker spot because she has experience and knowledge she wants to share with other people, not because her family agreed to watch her kid if she got the spot. Now if her story is true, the "Sydney-based male Cryptoparty organiser" was being douchebaggy by not contributing to the application for the panel. But perhaps he had more experience and felt that it wasn't fair that this newbie (regardless of gender) was turning a speaking spot that he (perhaps rightly) deserved into a panel, just so that she could be on stage as well (since if she believed that she really had the knowledge/experience to get the spot over the other guy, why didn't she just apply for the speaker spot?). I don't really know what happened, but there tends to just be a lot that you miss out on when you only hear a story from the perspective of just one person.
  - mcantelon 14y ago
    >she applied for a speaking spot at a conference despite her lack of experience Non-technical are not unusual at that conference as they know they'll get a wider perspective that way.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      Even if that is the case, it doesn't change the fact that she clearly felt the other guy would have a better chance of getting the spot. Otherwise, why didn't she just apply like the other guy had already done, and let the best (by whatever standards they want, whether it be experience or perspective) person be selected by the conference organizers? Tell me, how would you feel if you had already prepared and turned in an application, and then some random person asks you to instead help with an application for a "panel" to replace the individual speaking spot you had already applied for? That man had absolutely no obligation to indulge the author's desire to have a panel.

RobertHoudin 14y ago

I feel like I'm missing the part where this blogger was discriminated against. Disagreement or conflict =/= discrimination. I'd say it's pretty sexist to assume that people who disagree with you are doing so because of their gender, and not because they have, you know, an actual and possibly valid point of view. This just seems like a fairly childish dummy-spit, IMO.

davewicket 14y ago

Tiny gray text on a gray background. Ick.

timmm 14y ago

They (big bad men) gave you trouble for seemingly valid difference in opinions, deal with it. And please don't imply that the HN has any hand in fostering misogyny or sexism because it's a completely false characterization of the community at large. In fact if you haven't picked up on it yet we're actually one of the more "progressive" and or liberal industries. But that doesn't mean we're going to hold you to any lesser standard or treat you better because your a girl either. By the way quitting and blaming others in a rant was probably the wrong decision on your part.

venantius 14y ago
At no point does she explicitly cite HN. The post is directed to all "hackers."
- timmm 14y ago
  Hence my use of the word imply. As in 'implicit' ... you know - the opposite of 'explicit'. I also believe she changed the title.
  - venantius 14y ago
    I don't think there's anything implicitly linking the people in her article to HN, either. We don't have a monopoly on the word "hacker," after all.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      In fact, quite the opposite. HN's use of the word is the tag-along.
67726e 14y ago
Admittedly, the post is very ranty, but that doesn't take away from the the issue itself. Picking apart the person behind the argument does not lessen the issue either. By doing so, you are only trying to detract from the seriousness of the issue via a borderline ad hominem response. Finally, at no point in the post did Asher Wolf mention Hacker News, it was directed at the greater hacker community.

venantius 14y ago

It's so hard to know what to say in response to stuff like this. I want to believe that there's a consensus amongst the enlightened hacker community that the type of sexist behavior described is Not Acceptable, but it seems hardly a week goes by without another major incident in which a long-standing female contributor is finally pushed out of a project by stuff like this. I agree with Ms. Wolf that community and convention anti-harassment rules, policies, and introductions are a good place to start, but I can't help but wonder what the real answer is. My introduction to this entire world came through a female hacker, one that I still hold in highest esteem, and I can't help but feel a sense of immense confusion and sadness that she and all those beyond the straight/white/male class are still made to feel like outsiders.

krakensden 14y ago
Prominent male members of the community burn out all the time (_why, Mark Pilgrim) too. I think sexism isn't really the culprit, so much as being exposed to the howling nether of the internet. There are a billion people online, and some percentage of them are in a shit mood, and the more prominent you are the more likely it is that someone will try to shit all over you for no visible reason. If you get famous enough, you'll get it every day. A lot of the other stuff sounds like the mundane bullshit that happens to every open project- people promising to build stuff that then don't, bikeshedding, flakiness, poor communication and clashing goals. The eternal heartbreak of people preferring talk to action. This sounds like her first rodeo. It sounds like that made everything worse. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the gender stuff is basically incidental to the people making her life miserable, even if it feels central to her. Being internet famous and trying to organize internet volunteers is a recipe for awfulness.

fsiaf 14y ago

This article is so big and confusing that I do not understand a thing... Besides the fact that someone is pissed because of the way they treat her in the tech community?

batgaijin 14y ago
The real problem is that she thought she was an exclusion to RTFM and trusting some random person to make a website for her. That really stands out to me... she seems to make such an effort to learn crypto but just writes off reading a wiki tutorial? I don't buy it.

tomwalker 14y ago

" I didn’t create Cryptoparty just so a bunch of privileged white boys could.." Why did she drag race into it? Completely unnecessary. She has valid points without this.

sedev 14y ago
Her agenda is about making crypto accessible to lots of people that it's not currently available to. To those people, hackerdom often looks like an undifferentiated mass of white dudes. Leaving race out of a discussion like that is not a neutral thing: omitting race is a statement of its own.
- robryan 14y ago
  This isn't the white males fault though, I am sure all of them would be happy to see more diversity. The event is open invite though and this is the crowd that it attracts right now.
- boboblong 14y ago
  Are you saying that crpyto is not available to people who aren't white guys?
thejsjunky 14y ago
It's inherent to the concept of "privilege"; the understanding is that the people with the most "privilege" in the western world are men who are white. If you are making a point that a group has "privilege", it makes sense to point out they are mostly white since it affects the amount of "privilege" they have. That said, that particular remark seems to be imbued with some bitterness and desire to wound; which may be understandable coming from someone frustrated, but prevents me from endorsing it myself. edit: quotes are not for sarcasm, but to denote less common usage/meaning
- anewguy99 14y ago
  I've always found concepts of privilege to be lacking explanatory power. A European-derived culture is dominant in America, but east-Asian Americans still manage to do better than whites in education and in earnings. If racial privilege is powerful, it is not all-powerful. At the same time, I find the focus on race and class privilege to be incomplete. A poor white boy growing up in Appalachia has less privilege than a member of any race or gender growing up in a California suburb. But if he manages to get to college (statistically unlikely), he will learn from his professors how his success is all because of his skin and his genitals.

JacobJans 14y ago

I think there will be a lot to learn by how people respond to this. (There's already been quite a few revealing comments.)

jamestc 14y ago

I submit that like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion will win no converts and will probably receive the praise of people who agreed with her before she made the post. I sympathize with her in regards to harassment, but I don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper cards" (a poorly thought out endeavor since, after all, not one of us is righteous enough to hand out the cards in the first place). My advice: nobody likes "we need to talk" conversation. Or, at least nobody on the opposition does. The art of persuasion is still an art, no matter how obviously correct you think your side of the argument is. Collect more facts, provide more details that relate to harassment, edit better, don't preach. The data and the details will be enough.

antihero 14y ago
> like most socially active voices, her method of appealing to emotion I'm not sure of the validity of this statement - history has been all about appeals to emotion being more powerful than appeals to reason. > don't think there's anything wrong with a headless female (or male) body made out of "creeper cards" It's the sentiment - creeper cards are there because of the oppression of females by lecherous males at these types of events. The fact that someone is making fun of that it by being mildly perverse is terrible because it's literally anti-anti-oppression - it's oppressive.

kabuks 14y ago

If you are a man reading this, I invite you to: a. Resist the urge to pick apart the OP's life and criticize how/what she said. b. Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of this community? I invite you to do this, because it's a charged topic, but an important one. See if you can look past the hurt feelings and accusations, and sincerely reflect on what you can do to understand how sexism works a little better, and address it. EDIT: I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I've spent the past few years earnestly looking at how oppression works and keeping an open mind. I was truly astounded by the magnitude and difficulty of the problem.

learn 14y ago
This was horrible to read.
- kabuks 14y ago
  What do you mean? Writing style? It's my run on sentences isn't it.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    I think this piece would have been stronger if it were just 3 - 5 examples and then discussion. If the piece is going to be billed as a call for discussion about sexism, then the piece should be mostly about sexism rather than about things not related to sexism that went wrong with the project. Also, for what it's worth most of the questionable behavior I see comes from the developers who are part of open source culture rather than from the ones who are part of startup culture. Not sure if others agree or disagree.
    - thejsjunky 14y ago
      > billed as a call for discussion about sexism I'm curious why some people seem to think that she is exclusively talking about or attributing her problems to sexism. The very first sentence: > Some parts of this article deal with misogyny, sexism, and harassment, while other aspects of it respond to experiences of down-right douche-baggery. ...explicitly states that sexism is only part of the discussion. Was this edited at some point after publishing? Perhaps some readers not carefully perusing, or some combination thereof.

sublimit 14y ago

Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer, at least until you've achieved something worth having a conference speech or "Cryptoparty" about. The thing about the hacker community is that people won't like you if you draw unwarranted attention to yourself. Hoping that people would accept her, the author just keeps on hitting herself with "creeper cards" and social media outbursts that draw more unwarranted attention, feeding the feedback loop. Your life will be easier once you realize emotions and human relations only get in the way, at least when it comes to hacking. If you want acceptance, invent something good.

Maxious 14y ago
> Moral of the story: focus on the damn hacking and stay on your computer Focus on the damn cooking and stay in the kitchen?
- boboblong 14y ago
  Uh...no?

ams6110 14y ago

I recommend counseling. ASAP.

cooldeal 14y ago

What I learned from the post is the absolute lack of organizational structure or delegation for "Cryptoparty" with everyone going off to do their own thing. This is why structure is super important to organizing events. Coming to sexism, there are a great many sexist events here as well as the regular "you noob!" moments which seem to have been mistaken as sexist. There is an extreme amount of manipulation, general douchebaggery, credit stealing, blame shifting etc. in office politics and not just in IT and all of it happens to guys too. Hearing only one side of the story from an an obviously anguished individual also does not help. Alcohol, a thousand guys and six women don't mix well and alcohol should have been taken off the table. Having lost my father recently and realizing some truths about life, my sincere advice for her is to take a step back, turn off Twitter, turn off comments on her blog, take a deep breath and spend more time with her baby for a week before coming online again. Wasting sleepless nights on things so trivial in the long run is not even close to being worth it.

verroq 14y ago

Is there actually a point in all these because I've read about half way down and I'm not seeing any substance, and I'm not convinced that there is one. If anything, her approach to organisation (do whatever you want) is a big red flag to me that this wasn't going to work well for her/or anyone in fact.

learn 14y ago

Do something.

michaelkscott 14y ago

http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/

krakensden 14y ago

> Would 10 minutes at the start of a conference explaining anti-discrimination policy and acceptable conduct really infringe on anyone’s “fun”? > It won’t change the culture of asshattery over-night, but it will begin a conversation that’s needed – far more necessary than another article or blog post like this, or more red-card waving in the wind. It's an interesting strategy, but I don't have much hope for it. The thing that makes HR rules effective is that they can forcibly eject people from the workplace. They also work in a framework of a fairly static population and an understood hierarchy. A conference is a bunch of strangers together for a quick day or two. It's hard to police, and hard to trust complaints from people you don't know about things with no evidence.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rachelbythebay 14y ago

>> He sat in on the crowd-sourced process of writing of the application, contributing nothing except criticism to anything I wrote for hours. That's the part of this post which really grabbed me. I went through the same sort of thing in a corporate environment not too long ago. I had suffered through discovering a massive security hole on an internal system, managing disclosure to just the right groups, writing the fix myself, and making sure it was 100% patched in production before talking about it. This went on for over a month. When I did finally talk about it on an internal system, someone on the internal security team spotted it and said I should expand it a bit to add some recommendations about how others might avoid creating the same sort of hole in the future. I asked if they had any restrictions on content, length, or whatever, and they said that I could just keep doing what I had been doing. I took that as a thumbs-up and started working on my new and improved writeup. This "version 2" had code snippets showing the actual problem, a walkthrough of how it happened in the first place, and details about how I managed reporting and containing it (including escalation to appropriate corporate security folks). I fired it off and waited. Instead of a "thanks!" and an appearance in their next issue, someone else from the security team jumped on it and started raising issues with my prose. I was either "too chatty" or "too wordy" or similar, and basically, he had his own ideas for what a post should look like, and I didn't write like him, so he didn't like it. I told them they could "take it or leave it" as-is, and they wound up rejecting it. I turned around and self-published it internally, using the same sort of chat-type channels my original writeup had used. A bunch of people spotted it and shared it around, and I got a bunch of comments. These were just ordinary engineers, not the special "security" ones who had turned me down. Yet, they managed to focus on the security and technical content of the piece, and actually found a bug in what I had written! I got some logic inverted somewhere, and they caught it, so I fixed it. The document improved as a direct result of sharing it with them. Meanwhile, the so-called security guy was so fixated on my writing style that he had apparently failed to look at the actual technical content within. It's that last point I want to emphasize here: some people get so fixated on the container that they completely miss the technical content (or ability) inside. That's just one way sexism rears its ugly head at times in my experience. Original post: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/

14y ago

8ig8 14y ago

This 'letter' is addressed to the hacker community, but I've seen similar behaviour at other male-dominated conferences, specifically commercial construction conferences/seminars. I'm not trying to get the hacker community off the hook for their behaviour, I just wonder if the discussion needs to be broadened?

kybernetyk 14y ago

So she is getting mad because people did things $differently at their own crypto parties and didn't obey when she told them to do otherwise? And then all those people who created unofficial IRC channels and didn't add those to the wiki? This whole article sounds like an ego-thing rather than gender based discrimination.

tomc1985 14y ago

There is a general thread of sexism that permeates much of western life. It's endemic to all levels of American society. Addressing sexism in the hacker community seems fruitless to me when there is a much larger fountain of hate spewing forth over the general public. New souls will come into the hacker community and old souls will leave, and some of the new souls are going to be incorrigible sexists. Sexism must be fought at the society-level, where it originates, not in subcultures. That, and more boys need to grow up with sisters. If you want to kill sexism, make sure boys and girls respect each other at an early age...

jjjeffrey 14y ago

This article is exceptionally difficult to read because of the low contrast between text and background color and because Firefox won't allow me to highlight the text for some reason.

kybernetyk 14y ago
The highlight color is just a nuance darker than the background - almost not noticeable.

jiggy2011 14y ago

"on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement, harassment, rape." This seems a little strong, is there any evidence to suggest that women in a technical field have a heightened risk of rape vs any other field? Especially something like lapdancing which seems to have no lack of female participants.

burntsushi 14y ago

> Inequality doesn’t just spring up without a context. There's the problem. People aren't equal, and they never will be. So yes, inequality is fundamental. The sooner you accept that, the better.

jamesmiller5 14y ago
It exists therefore it should accepted? The hacker culture has always been about being a better version of itself than it currently is and inequality in the community is just another hurdle to overcome.
- burntsushi 14y ago
  You misunderstand. I said inequality was fundamental. It cannot be "overcome". You cannot make people equal. I != You. We have different skill sets, experiences, relationships, ideas and other thoughts that make us all fundamentally different. As a result, we are each treated differently.
charleshaanel 14y ago
It's not about "people being equal". It's about equality of opportunity. Curious that you don't see things this way...
- burntsushi 14y ago
  What is equality of opportunity? It's understandable that you'd like people to be equal with respect to the law, but "opportunity" is a word so vague and general that it's borderline meaningless. Do you mean to say that we should all be trying to make sure everyone around us has equal opportunity to resources that we control? Or that we should treat everyone the same way?
rjknight 14y ago
This is correct. Everyone is an individual and no two people are, strictly speaking, equal. But that doesn't justify all instances of treating people differently. If I steal from you, you would expect me to receive the same punishment as if you had stolen from me. We are therefore "equal before the law". In the case of the law, we ask our legal system to suspend judgment of certain inequalities and to focus only on the facts of the case. There's no reason why we should not do this in other matters - if we're judging someone on their merits as a software developer, we can legitimately consider their unequal experience, intelligence, skills and abilities, but we should not consider their age, gender or ethnicity. Now, you might argue at this point that we wouldn't consider age/gender/ethnicity anyway, because these have no bearing on software development. And you would be mostly right to do so - these factors are genuinely unimportant. But most people are imperfect judges; they use heuristics and intuition in ways which can sometimes go awry. We might apply stereotypes, we might allow our judgment of other similar individuals we have met in the past to cloud our judgment of the person before us now, and so on. When people talk about equality, they're really asking that we find an effective way to ensure that we're making our judgments using only the truly relevant criteria. Past experience suggests that this takes effort and requires some cultural reinforcement. It's emphatically not about denying that people are different, but about ensuring that only the most contextually important differences are considered.

apeace 14y ago

In one paragraph, the OP implies that some in the hacker community have "no will to fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery" In the next, she describes "a bunch of privileged white boys" who seem to anger her. Why, then, is she surprised to be called a "mommy-type" when others are angry at her? My point being, people sometimes use mean words when they are angry. The best way to "fight harassment, discrimination and douchebaggery" is not to use that type of language when angry, or at all. The OP should consider her own message.

zeidrich 14y ago

To be fair to the author, she doesn't claim that everything is a result of sexism. The down-right douchebaggery is more apt a description for the majority of it, but there's no question that sex factors into big parts of it. There's a lot of egos in these communities, there are a lot of young people with adolescent hormones and something to prove. The communities themselves are pretty insular, and distinguish themselves by being exclusive. Girls are outsiders, for whatever reason. I wont speculate as to how this started, but it can perpetuate by staying hostile to girls. These communities strive to maintain some exclusivity; you're something special, better than others, smarter than others. You can't just let anyone new in, then you won't be so special. So in this article, you have a girl (outsider) who is non-technical (going to get ridiculed whether you're a boy or a girl) trying to exert her will (which is going to get you into fights regardless). Sexism is a thing. It's not a good thing. However, I don't think that removing sexism from this kind of community is a possibility, because sexism isn't the basic issue here. I think that the basic issue is the general exclusivity of the community. It's not a group to educate new people. In fact it's a group that is hostile towards "noobs". It's a group that is trying to restrict membership to those who are similar, who think similarly, or who can bully their way to the top. I think that the better situation is to recognize that this crowd of douchebaggery does exist. The way you fight it isn't to try and get into it and start shouting at people to change it. That's at best going to make you hoarse, and at worst going to make you one of them. I think that to deal with this is to do the kind of things that the author did. The wiki creation, the creation of the cryptoparty. These are the things that should be focused on. This is actually some cool stuff, and the author, a woman, was instrumental. Now the thing about the idea is it's not something that is owned by the author, it's just a good idea, and douchebags can make use of good ideas. I think the problem was that the author gets herself wrapped up in trying to control and maintain the purity of her idea and in the end gets drawn into pissing contests with other people trying to prove something. This is going to happen whether you're a girl or a guy, however when you're a girl, the guys have that knife in the wound already and they just need to twist it. Naw, I think instead the way to do it best is to endeavor to make this knowledge available to more people. Make it harder to be exclusive. Make it something that anyone can learn. People can be douchebags when it's them vs. the world. They can't be when it's just knowledge. So I guess the question is, are you trying to educate, or are you hoping to get people to accept you into their exclusive club? If you're trying to do the former, then I wish you all the luck and support in the world. If it's the latter, then even if you get your wish, you'll end up treating others how you hate being treated, whether by race, age, prior knowledge, whatever or else it will stop being an exclusive club. I agree that sexism is a problem. But it's a big problem. It's a problem that demands a lot of attention. You set up, or helped set up, a framework, and then put yourself under pressure to control how that framework is being used and abused all over the place; all the while still feeling responsible for fighting sexism within this framework. I think that's far too much for one person to handle, and I can promise that if a guy were to try it he wouldn't have any better success just because the other guys respected his testicles. Anyways, I commend the author's efforts, and I think the best way to combat that form of general douchebaggery is to make the thing that they hold above everyone else available to the mainstream. You don't stop sexism by going to the men's club and ranting at them to treat women nicely. You stop sexism by letting women vote, by training them to be doctors and engineers, and otherwise giving them, (and further, any other excluded parties) access to those things that were held over their heads before. And it's not a fast process, it's a very slow and hard one. But don't be discouraged, I think she did something good. Small, but good.

mburshteyn 14y ago

Applies to many of the comments on this thread, so just posting it separately. TL;DR the language we use to discuss and analyze these kinds of issues is not neutral. http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html

jlgreco 14y ago
Instead of spamming that link, why don't you try leading by example? (Now tell me, which derailment tactic did I just employ? I can't be bothered to read them all to find out.)

yareally 14y ago

I've been around the Android modding/hacking community for a couple of years (I'm an admin at one of the larger ones) and it's quite a bit different than this to give a different outlook. If you happen to make it known you're female (through name/avatar/comments/etc), you'll most likely never suffer an ill comment, no matter how "noobish" you are. However, if you're a guy and asks something obvious like how to root your device (because it's a pinned topic in a sub-forum), be prepared to be flamed by a dozen or so users. One can draw conclusions from all that, but I don't think it's really important as the Android community I help to admin does not factor gender when moderating discussions (though some of the general users might). I'll help a user regardless of who they are, not because of their chromosomes. I may not reply to a question or post for help because the information was discussed many times over and can easily be searched, but I won't flame a user for asking anyways. However, I will moderate those that do flame them because they should either ignore them or give a helpful response. I'm a huge believer in trying to seek out your answers first (if they're easy to find) and sometimes a user will never do that if you don't let them try on their own before providing assistance. Android is kind of different though than many modding/hacking/tinkering communities. It's far less exclusive and developers inter-mingle with average users. Many times, it ends with the developer becoming introverted or ignoring users after a while because of general douchebaggery of the community or users (the community as a whole, not just the site I admin). Much of that though is from the developers just being too accommodating (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041) and letting the users walk all over them for their generosity. The community I admin generally tries to prevent user flaming (regardless of gender) and douchebaggery by users towards developers, but there's always some that happens anyways and users have to be put back in check. I get annoyed at some of these users and want to go off on them, but I just ignore them for the good of the community and be polite or ignore them when possible. A community is only as good as those that cultivate it.

deleted 14y ago

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domrdy 14y ago

I fail to see the connection between her personal incidents (website/29c3/crypto) and the hacker community as a whole. Title is very misleading in my opinion.

c141charlie 14y ago

>> Women stay the hell away from hacker-spaces, conferences and tech initiatives because of on-going experiences of misogyny, abuse, threats, put downs, belittlement, harassment, rape. To be clear, anyone who has abused, threatened, or raped someone should be criminally prosecuted. And if you act unprofessionally, you should be disciplined, fired, removed, etc. It doesn't matter what your race, sex, age, sexual orientation, or educational background is, there is no excuse for mistreating or restricting the liberty other another human being. That said some of this post doesn't fit with what I see historically, globally, or in my day to day activities. For example, Ada Lovelace is widely recognized for envisioning the first computer program. Marisa Mayer is the CEO of Yahoo. Meg Whitman runs HP. I work on a team of ridiculously talented software engineers, many of whom are women. Several books I've read to learn how to program were written by women. There are many women who have been tremendously successful and influential in tech. With regard to women's rights and attitudes towards women, we've come a long way, and undoubtedly have further to go. But I'm optimistic that tremendous opportunities await women. I'm hopeful that ultimately intelligence, ingenuity, drive, knowledge, and experience will lift women above the experiences described in this article.

kcarruthers 14y ago

Let the mansplaining commence...

Chris2048 14y ago
HN comprises mainly of men doesn't it? 'mansplaining' seems to mean a man explaining something to a woman in a patronising way. A man posting on HN will be seen mostly by other men. I can't see how there will be mansplaining.

aj700 14y ago

The causes of the problem as I see it. 1. A female who is a geek doubles her hotness to other geeks. 2. The guys in question are in the US, which has a shortage of hot women (which is hotly debated) and an even bigger shortage of geeks in general, and therefore of women who are also geeks.

rdl 14y ago

I wonder if people "in security" are just particularly abrasive assholes, or if there is just observer bias on my part. In ~20 years of following this stuff, I've never seen a professional discipline as petty and mean as security. On the other hand, I've never gotten as deep into other fields like politics, finance, other parts of computers, etc. From what I have seen, security is an outlier. Network operators are slightly abrasive but nothing approaching security. Firearms and tactical stuff absolutely has the "for guys" thing, but there are women in the industry, and they tend to be treated fairly well. SANs and storage are positively polite by comparison to security. etc.

antihero 14y ago

It might be nice to sit around on the throne of privilege and gaze over the people with their problems, seeing simple solutions to all their petty seeming squabbles, but until you feel the anger, dismay, and emotion that comes of being on the ground, in the thick of discrimination and oppression, of not only seeing those problems but having them affect you and those that you love, you cannot "rationally judge" or "objectively assess" such events, because true understanding requires not only reason but experience, and emotional experience is one of those things.

Chris2048 14y ago
Surely the term 'objectively' is at odds with requiring 'experience' (which would be 'subjective')?

mr_eel 14y ago

First male that says something like 'I've never seen any sexism in the field' has to leave Earth _forever_. Of course you haven't my dears, because you don't suffer it, you're blind to it.

samthetechie 14y ago

@samthetechie Response to @Asher_Wolf "Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk." Posted on pastebin and blogger: http://pastebin.com/KbyFsbKq http://pastebin.com/KbyFsbKq http://samthetechie.blogspot.com/2013/01/response-to-dear-hacker-community-we.html http://samthetechie.blogspot.com/2013/01/response-to-dear-ha...