No. Let's keep words meaning what they mean.

But we can say this guy violated her space and insulted her dignity and acted in a way that would make most people cringe if not shun the guy.

I wouldn't trust him after seeing him display that behavior. Would you?

"I wouldn't trust him after seeing him display that behavior. Would you?"

Of course I wouldn't. Neither would most people in the Bitcoin community. Nevertheless, now we have "this is how women are being treated at Bitcoin meetups".

Btw not only would I not trust him, I also wouldn't like him.

In that case, your comment is misplaced.

I don't think this guy represents any group of people either.

I was commenting on why the woman might be justified in worrying about a physical attack if she embarrassed the creep because he obviously doesn't have much in the way of boundaries.

Ok. I am a big, intimidating looking guy (or so I've been told). Next time I see you, how about I just go ahead and put my hand on your waist, lead you to a chair, sit you down next to me than put my hand on your leg while saying shitty things about whatever group you might identify.

Then we'll see how you feel about the situation.

Could you even imagine such a thing?

This story made me realize that eventually we will get some sort of "FemCoin", though. Anybody who continues to use Bitcoin will be labeled a sexist and be made a social pariah.

The reason is that women didn't have a fair chance to get into Bitcoin in time because the community was so hostile. Therefore all the Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men.

Edit: turns out Femcoin already exists https://bitbucket.org/valerieaurora/femcoin

That's interesting. What you are suggesting is that, with lower barriers of entry to create new currencies, we will see a rise in forking economies just as open source and distributed source control allowed open source communities to maintain forks.

Leaving aside that, however, notions of "fairness" is flawed. Fairness for me means that a hostile community self-destructs under its own weight of hostility, not that "Bitcoin wealth is unfairly shifted to white men."

An unfair economy that discriminates against a class of people will see people leaving. I am not sure if it will happen like that, but that's an interesting thought.

There are already a lot of forks of Bitcoin, some even moderately successful.

Actually independent of feminism I have long wondered if other cryptocoins might supersede Bitcoin exactly for the reason of fairness. Assume the world wakes up to Bitcoin in a couple of years. Then the BTC wealth will be very unequally distributed. Why should people start using BTC if they are poor in it? They could as well say "hey, cryptocurrencies are swell, but let's use another one were nobody had a headstart".

I guess part of dogecoins success story is that everybody got rich in dogecoin quickly (1 Million doges per minute). A lot of people who didn't like Bitcoin like dogecoin.

Sure, I know there are lots of forks of Bitcoin. I'm talking about forking the whole economy though, which requires being able to at least trade for basic survival needs.

From an existential point of view, there is no such thing as fairness and yet, people still create whatever notions of fairness. Fairness tends to be deeply rooted into emotional makeup of a person. Many conflicts come about because the parties involved have different, deeply rooted sense of fairness.

Forking in open-source software allowed it to more or less outcompete commercial software in many (though not all) areas, and what finally made it work was a relatively cheap way for forked projects to be merged back together again. In other words, if we are forking along the lines of fairness (and come to think of it, notions of fairness are the psychological factor from which economies arise from), then eventually, for things to work out means being able to merge economies back together again.

@throwawaycoder I see. You're underlying assumption is that there will ever be only one single "economy" of which there are multiple markets. I'm not sure that is wrong either (though I am not sure that is right). Thanks for bringing that up.

@throwawaycoder huh, not sure why your comments get downvoted.

The forking I mean is not necessarily the technical part of it, but rather the interactions of people. On the other hand, I also just talked with someone I know who has been in the payment space for a long time -- he says he prefers to keep things simple, so not necessarily a "forking" that happens.

Eh well, something to think about for me. I think the "forking" concept is useful for me when we start talking about markets for which there is oppression. I'm not particularly interested in things like drug or gun trade. I'm much more interested in things like, being able to 3D print a tractor so people can farm land and grow food even if vested interests try to suppress that tractor.

It's not always easy to know what kind of relationship people are in. That's probably a reason why people tend to wait until it escalates beyond a certain point.

If people would interfere too soon, feminists wouldn't be happy either. Because that kind of behavior would imply that women are weak and unable to take care of themselves.

The average man is five to six inches taller and forty or more pounds heavier than the average woman. Men are also physically stronger pound for pound.

I'd rather take a tongue lashing for being an interfering white knight wannabe than not say something and find out that the woman was too uncomfortable, for all the reasons being discussed in this thread, to extricate herself from the person bothering her.

That's just blindness, though. They only see the rising rents, not that they can't afford the rents anymore because they don't have tech jobs. It's just different sides of the same coin.

Even if they saw that, that'd be little comfort, wouldn't it?

I have nothing against it, although it wasn't my personal taste. I just want to point out that being exaggerated and semi-crazy is not the only way to get kids excited. It is maybe the "TV show for kids" way. I often cringe inside when I witness that way of dealing with kids, because to me it seems not very genuine.

Again, if people like it, and kids like it, fine. I just wanted to comment because I think it would be sad if everything for kids would be converted into that kind of format.

Actually the whole premise of "getting kids interested" already points to a problem. Kids are naturally interested. You don't have to go into manic mode to get them interested.

Less punishment for controversial comments in controversial topics.

Difficult to explain. In short, I actually have a six years old account with karma in the top 100, but today I wouldn't be allowed into HN anymore. I temporarily disabled my main account for productivity reasons a couple of months ago, and since then I created 3 new accounts when I was drawn into controversial discussions. After a good start, two of them were hellbanned, both times rather to my surprise (that's why I am on the 3rd now). I don't expect this one to last very long either.

I felt a bit guilty for taking part in controversial topics, but at least I figured the controversy stayed in those threads. I am not a troll, merely somebody who wants to understand things as objectively as possible and therefore is not always aligned with the mainstream opinion.

I was going to suggest to ban controversial topics rather than controversial users, but since that would sadly involve all topics involving female coders that is probably not workable. So perhaps an idea would be to punish controversial comments less if they appear within controversial topics? I assume I was hellbanned because I received too many downvotes, or maybe the majority of mods just don't like me.

I'm sure I won't be missed, and perhaps all is working as you want it to be. I don't think we really can escape our own filter bubble. But HN is pretty much my only news source, so naturally it saddens me that today I apparently am not welcome anymore - and probably lots of other people feel the same.

Except that most kindergarden nurses and primary school teachers are women, so they already normalize learning from women all the time. Oh, and of course mothers are women, too, and most kids spend more time with their mothers than with their fathers.

(I have nothing against a programming book written by woman - I learned Java from the Java Tutorial and earned lots of money with it - but I ask people to challenge their prejudices).

I even sent the author of the Java Tutorial a fan email once (the original author was a woman, don't know what it's current state is).

Because men would never have thought of creating a programming book for kids?

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aprog...

Or maybe because men can't draw as well as women?

Edit: probably I'll get downvoted for this so I'll just add that I think it's good this book is being made. Can't hurt to try different things to get kids interested. Just not sure why the gender comment was necessary.

No, because the audience is clearly unsatisfied with only having those options.

What a bigoted comment. OP is praising diversity, and you are suggesting what, exactly? That there isn't an issue if everyone in a field approaches a problem in the exact same way? Are you really that small minded?

I did not reply to the "diversity is good" comment, but to the "this is a good example why diversity is good" comment. This seems to imply to me that such a book wouldn't be made by men, which seems rather prejudiced to me. I only object to the implied prejudice.

Your comment also sounds as if you think women would approach the issue in a completely different way than men, so please explain in which way?

"Just not sure why the gender comment was necessary."

I said nothing about gender nor did I intend to, that was your assumption.

Don't dodge criticism by retroactively changing the meaning of what you said. We all know damned well the major lack of diversity in programming is the lack of women.

Rather affirm that this is exactly part of what you were saying [1]. I'll one-up you: indeed, the chance of a male writing such a book is much smaller than the chance of a female writing such a book. Acting as if gender wouldn't influence choice of content and style is ridiculous.

And before anyone jumps on my back: I'm telling it like it is, which implies nothing about how I think that it should be.

[1] Why would 'diversity' be a good thing, if not for the fact that it results in, you know, more diversity? Differences in the input result in differences in the output.

"I'll one-up you: indeed, the chance of a male writing such a book is much smaller than the chance of a female writing such a book. Acting as if gender wouldn't influence choice of content and style is ridiculous."

So what aspects of it are female specific? Because women would be more likely to worry about educating children?

Seriously, answer the question instead of relying on prejudice, please.

I'd consent that female heroines might be more likely for female authors (didn't check, though), although in this case I suspect gender of author's children might be more important.

Edit: I have to go further - sorry, but you made me think about it. Of course the odds of a woman writing such a book are significantly smaller, simply because there are much fewer female programmers than male programmers.

  Of course the odds of a woman writing such a book are 
  significantly smaller, simply because there are much fewer 
  female programmers than male programmers.

If you are talking about P(book written by female|book written by programmer). I was talking about P(such a book written by female|such a book written by programmer).

Which implies I assume P(female programmer writing such a book) / P(male programmer writing such a book) > P(male programmer writing book) / P(female programmer writing book). Also P(female programmer writing such a book|female programmer writing book) > P(male programmer writing such a book|male programmer writing book)

  So what aspects of it are female specific?

None. There are aspects more likely to originate from a female. As you say: female heroine. As you say: caring about education of children. You only need to look at the gender ratio in primary school teachers to affirm the latter.

Please do tell what you intended to mean by diversity in this context.

You implied it though

No, I think you inferred it.

So how do you interpret "diversity" then? That we need more kids in industry?

Diversity could be: Income, Country of Origin, Sex, Sexual preference, Ethnicity... much more. It's a broad term.

Of course. However in IT discussions, especially on HN, what do you think it gets interpreted as?

What did you mean then, by "this is a good example why" - in what way is it a good example, what does it show about diversity?

I want to address one of the books in the Amazon link. 3D game programming FOR KIDS looks overwhelming even to me. The kid me would have looked a few pages and fell right asleep. I understand it isn't for the same age range as Linda's book but wow. This is the problem getting kids to stick with it. My manager talks about his kids just not sticking with programming. They go to classes and want to build things, but it is easier to play games than actually build them. Which is more valuable skill? Looking at the mockup images of Linda's book, it seems to bring kids real life scenarios with a programming ideology which is fantastic.

I only did a search for "programming book for kids" on Amazon. Maybe they all suck, maybe not. Maybe Linda's book will suck, too. I just want to know why a programming book written by a woman is presumed to be superior to programming books written by men. And I have nothing against programming books written by women - my question is why enter the gender angle.

Maybe men would be less likely to use a female protagonist, I haven't sampled the books content. Maybe not. So it's maybe nice to have a programming book with a female protagonist, but I doubt it is something only women would think of.

In fact I suppose if a man who has a daughter were to write such a book, he would be quite likely to make the protagonist female, too.

Btw. the Python books for kids looks as if there are also stories in it, and I saw at least one rave review from an 8 year old: http://www.amazon.com/Python-Kids-Playful-Introduction-Progr...

Maybe Alice in Wonderland would work, too?

I think there's something to be said for having a female author to look up to, for young girls (and boys) in terms of dispelling programming stereotypes at a young age. And no, I don't think a man could accomplish the same thing. As far as the actual content though, no argument.