skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm replying to my own comment to attach an opinion to it (I want the original comment to remain neutral). But, maybe we can't have women in IT because people like Bryan Cantrill can't avoid attaching themselves and company to even the most trivial gender issues and posting inflammatory blog posts about it?

I'd wager that there are less women in IT because of behaviour like Bryan's and a company like Joyent that will host his views than there are because of declined pull requests.
> "it doesn’t matter if you think my fees are reasonable, because you don’t get to negotiate them: You just pay them"

Nice. Spoken like a true lawyer.

How did legal fees get so high anyway? Do lawyers perform a task more skillfull than (say) software engineers? It seems under $350/h a lawyer won't move a finger. Software engineers do not (typically) make $350/h.

Also it looks like high lawyer fees are at least partially a US phenomenon.
This article misses the point. Before it goes on to speculate about hypothetical situations, it says:

> The reality is that probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” is not the Ben fight

And that's okay. It doesn't have to be Ben's fight. The problem is that Ben denies this fight to others. The problem is not that Ben doesn't work to improve gender equality, the problem is that he rejects and reverts other people's work to improve gender equality.

And I can fully understand that this would be a firing offense in some companies. Rejecting and undoing other people's good work is seriously not cool.
touche

...

Although it's hard to read the following as not calling a figurative-me hostile, for my choice of pronoun.

Q: They said I was being hostile!
A: I'm sorry, but you were.
Unfortunately only 2 guys actually signed up so far. So I am pretty sure now PGP is not as popular as it seems in terms of verification purpose. :/
They want to determine who I hire, or who I am attracted to (the subgroup of feminists who campaign against certain beauty ideals).

As for "the feminists", it's true that some people who haven't really given it much thought call themselves feminists (they think they fight for equality). I don't really blame them.

But I have followed feminism for a while now and I think there is a group you can call "the feminists". For starters, even the people you mention ("women deserve the same respect") tend work on the basic assumption that women get less respect and generally receive the shorter end of the stick in society (or in other, more common words, women are victims).

Never mind that "they" tend to generalize about men and "masculinity" in much the same way as you claim nobody should about feminists.

And why would anybody have to call themselves a feminist if they were merely for equality? It seems fair that if you call yourself a feminist, certain prejudice is applied to you.
I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments.

Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And since there are more and more single fathers we should be allowed to call a nation "he" instead of "she".

I often write in HN with the phrase "but your average uncle joe..." and this is sexist. So one day I will be asked to write "your average auntie Mary" or better yet "your average consumer."

Freedom of press should be honored. If I were an author and I like to write with "he" instead of "they" I should have that freedom. Yes, the project is owned by contributors. So like I said, let other contributors rule him out.

And why do we have sexism in the first place? Because we all assume to have some roles in this society. Today women want the same rights that men do, but there are also rights that men don't get easily (or assume to have less). For example, raping a woman is a big crime but raping a man, have you ever heard of that? Sure. But to some people that's less severe than raping a woman. I am just stating the obvious. In some countries, raping a man is a less severe crime. And law is making a sexist decision.

I believe in people's performance over gender.

All points from either side will draw to the same root cause: we want to be superior. We want to demonstrate that we are superior. We don't really want to be equal, we just want to be superior. If you think about it a moment - that's really where sexism lies. Because there are fewer woman in engineering, we ought to demonstrate our success and ability too.

I have bias, yes, because I am a man. Who doesn't? But I see performance. My sister is very capable and more capable than I am. I always look up to her.

And yes, the solution is to make gender neutral but we are looping between anti-sexist and feminism. There is often a confusion between what a feminist, a sexist or an anti-sexist person would do... We need Yi-Yang logo here.

-- EDIT --

I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?
He probably just confused it with Poe's Law.

There should be a law that concerns the confusion of the two.
If we gave up phones in public, we could be as extroverted and public as two generations before us:

https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/1453418_673...
Very cool. I take your experience shared here to stand corrected!
Deanonymization that works well relies on:

(i) correlating social graphs
(ii) correlating likes/dislikes/reviews etc. across different networks.
(iii) Lots of data to do (i) and (ii)

And it's still difficult to do for random people on the internet (as opposed to the NSA or serious attackers such as those willing to put in the effort to crawl and analyze the entire linkedin graph.) I believe deanonymization based on just textual analysis is still a little bit of an academic effort.

Anonymity does buy quite a bit - especially on a forum like HN - where there isn't a social graph and the like/dislike information is private.
Javascript is one of my favorite languages, Coffeescript makes a great language impossible to debug.
Why not assume the best of your fellow developers, instead of assuming the worst? Here is an interpretation that has nothing to do with "sticking it in women's eyes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193

And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.
If you actually look at the joyent blog post and the github commits its pretty obvious Ben was a dismissive prick with a bit of an agenda since this goes beyond just not accepting a pull request. I think firing someone over this would probably be a bit much but he definitely deserves to be called out for being a jackass.
If he's overwhelmed, why would he go to the extra effort of reverting the commit? He didn't just not pull, he reverted it when someone else pulled it.

That means he does care. He cares enough to enforce gendered pronouns in the face of others who prefer neutral pronouns.
Overgeneralize much?
That's true, but there are outright trivial things a lot of sites just don't do to limit the impact of compromise. I just sold some Bitcoin for example (I know right...) and the exchange doesn't require any special credentials for initiating trades or withdrawals: just the same password and 2FA code I use to login to my account.

All the good stock trading sites I've used in the past have had separate trading passwords, it just makes sense.
No he didn't. He reversed a commit that didn't follow standard procedures.
You should probably go back and read his commit message before making assumptions.
Lol. Joyent, the people who tried to optimize their whole product around nodejs because it was hip is now creating excessive coverage with pretty extreme language to paint themselves as the "White knight" of the tech world.

Lame company is lame.
I like using it when I'm filling an array with an indeterminate number of elements. I've used this pattern a few times:

foo foos[255];
int ct = 0;

if (<condition for adding first element>)
foos[ct++] = foo1;

if (<condition for adding second element>)
foos[ct++] = foo2;

...

for (int i = 0; i < ct; i++) {
/* do something with foos[i] */
}

IMHO, this is more concise and readable than separating the increment and assignment into two lines.
This is from a commit he did over a year ago:

https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50...

Had nothing to do with using a masculine pronoun, it was to document how the code works.

Hes not a native english speaker either, so you should be glad that he wrote the comment in english for us that don't speak dutch :)
Here's a similar exploit for Gold/Silver: http://forums.glitchcity.info/index.php/topic,6716.0.html

edit; If you are interested in finding other glitches, there's commented source code over here:

Red/Blue: https://github.com/iimarckus/pokered

Crystal: https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal (Gold/Silver doesn't compile yet)
I think you're experiencing some culture shock. Even if you can trust people to be decent, you still have to share norms as to what the other guy considers "decent". Americans tend to have a fairly individualist/independent view of ethical behavior that can be jarring to someone not used to it but it doesn't prevent social cohesion or a trusting society.
I didn't expect to find humor in this thread, but here I am, laughing. So that's nice.
Ben is not a Joyent employee, but a Strongloop employee/cofounder. I Cannot say I am terribly surprised. Strongloop has rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. Since they have launched, they have displayed all the integrity of a used car salesman. I know they have some very strong core devs, and I know they are not all like this, but their public image has been max-sleaze ever since they started marketing in shady ways suggesting that they were the creators of node.js.
The shrill objections that people raise when people draw parallels between things in history that are not strictly equal in all respects ("Do you really think this is equivalent to torturing people for being jewish?!?") are the same.

It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
<sarcasm>"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense" - nice place to work, congrats Joyent employees.</sarcasm>

There's one practical problem with this approach though. If you start aligning everyone against a single doctrine and prosecute deviations, you'll quickly lose the ability to innovate.
Start sending people to jail for having an opinion different from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and you'll end up not only with engineers in jail but with an industry 100% copied from someone else. Ask me how I know.
Probably not, which is why it is vitally important to choose battles well. This situation seems to be being sorted reasonably well without the incursion of a baying horde looking for the guys head, or Joyent's head for that matter.
What does this whole thing have to do with radical feminism?
I read a study once that said people who think they have no bias are the most behaviorally biased people of all.
Any reaction should be towards Joyent - not Ben.

What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit.

If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the Affordable Care Act, would you dare voice your opinion?

To Bryan Cantrill, just because you're the boss doesn't mean you can fire at will, without cause, and ruin a programmer's life, unless that is you like the idea of a lawsuit and getting into the press since literally nobody is talking about Joyent and SmartOS anymore.
GTFO of my menu bar
This is one of those things I've had in my head for years, and as a result of this I habitually use pre-increment in code, even in other languages. I think I haven't actually believed the "myth" myself, though, for quite a while.
The 2006 monograph by the british artist David Hockney (for anyone interested).

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters[1]

[1] ISBN-10: 0142005126> http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Knowledge-Expanded-Edition-Redi...
Richard Stallman just had a heart attack.
Love it! The complaints here are usually from people who assume this is good for all situations. If you have a fixed amount of static forms, this wouldn't make sense. BUT, if you had to do dynamic forms that can change drastically with user input, this is wonderful.
It is so incredibly, profoundly frustrating to watch (mostly) male nerds grapple with sexism. Guys (and I mean that specifically and gendered-ly), you don't get it. You kinda can't, and I say that as a cis male person. I don't get it, either, except maybe intellectually, and even then only occasionally.

To get a little meta for a moment, I think a lot of the disconnect that happens in these discussions (to, admittedly, stretch the term a bit) comes from the fact that nerds are already deeply familiar with Othering. We know what that shit feels like, man; we've been Othered all our lives.

Consequently, when we see an instance of gender-based Othering that seems trivial to us (witness all this foofaraw over the gender of a pronoun — it's different by three whole letters!), we tend to rank our perception of that triviality over the Othered party's experience. After all, we know what Othering feels like, and saying "him" instead of "them" sure as hell doesn't feel like that. Ipso facto, it can't be Othering, and is therefore just those damned misandrists trying to make trouble again.

But that's exactly the thing you need to understand if you want to approach and engage meaningfully with feminism (in the "women are people, too" sense, which is how it's used by most people): your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.

Just like an unpopular, male nerd might, in some ways rightly, object to a popular, pretty, smart girl bemoaning being treated differently for being "nerdy", because she's never had the experience of being Othered for her unpopular, male nerdiness, a male nerd can't legitimately claim, "That's nothing!" when presented with a case of gendered, grammatical Othering. He's not the Other there.

So, no, it's not reasonable for a male person to reject a gender-neutralizing pull request on the basis that the gender-based Othering that it's correcting is "trivial". It may seem trivial to him, but he isn't in a position to legitimately judge its triviality. That's not to say it's necessarily a firing offense, but I know I'd, personally, be uncomfortable working with someone who consistently manifests Ben's attitude towards women and gender issues.
Kindle Fire HD 7", Dolby Audio, Dual-Band Wi-Fi, 16 GB, Black | eBay
Not really. So far as I can tell, anyone who disagrees with these tactics is publicly shamed as a misogynist by influential feminists and isn't welcome, even if they're a woman and even if they agree with the end goal. It's pretty easy to make generalizations about a political movement when anyone who those generalizations wouldn't apply to is effectively driven out of the movement.
No, not everybody has to fight sexism, just don't defend sexism when others fight it.

Really, what makes sexism so vital that it needs to be defended?
>If he's overwhelmed, why would he go to the extra effort of reverting the commit?

For a possible answer to this (admittedly rhetorical) question, please re-read my comment, particularly the lines "...doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project."

Some developers cleverly attach their name to famous project "Contributors" lists by making small grammar changes to the documentation, and then put it on their CV. In my mind, that's actually not a bad thing, since documentation is improved and everyone benefits. But I can understand that some developers may not think that such recognition is deserved.

He may have reverted because it might have appeared that Isaac was trying to bullishly overrule him in violation of project guidelines (I'm not sure whether that's actually true, but it may have appeared as such).
Yup, exactly. That's how computer software industry transforms into civil rights movement. I guess we developed all possible softwares on earth and need no industry anymore.
Is there a scientific basis for wanting to remove gendered pronouns?
for the benefit of others could you outline what "set of assumptions" might get people fired? your post is incredibly vague...
You're right again. If you are the same guy who has the "Learn code the hard way", I honestly think you should
run for political office. Get your name out there. You
say, and think the way a lot of us feel, but are afraid
to speak up.
Not anymore, you can't: https://github.com/wilg/headlines/commit/efdf7eaa33303918cdb...
Badly. I've always envied english for its almost complete lack of grammatical gender.
I'm not sure what you mean by "livable working conditions"

If you are referring to total compensation and hours, this comes under what I referred to as "oligopoly". That is, labor unions can create market power on the side of labor, in order to raise pay.

However, this doesn't benefit society as a whole, and so it is only reasonable when there is market power on the other side. In my industry, there did seem to be an attempt to form a cartel of employer, but Mark Zuckerberg seems to have broken that cartel.

If you are referring to actual working conditions, like workplace safety, I already mentioned that when I talked about special unions that are involved with management. E.g. in very dangerous professions, unions might be part of the "deal" where management and workers agree on how to, as you say, organize labor and capital.

In general, however, and especially in IT, there is no need for unions because the market for labor is competitive, and working conditions can be negotiated between the worker and the corporation.
Because no-one's posted it yet, Tom Scott has a great video on grammatical gender that is worth a watch: http://youtu.be/46ehrFk-gLk
I don't agree with you at all.

Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with.

+1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post.

EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
From what I've seen, this is the result of polarised thinking. There are lots of issues upon which campaigners are unwilling to accept any compromise on any level.

Case in point feminism. Women have put up with a lot over the years and I can understand someone being angry and having the courage of their convictions as a result.

In a way, I respect that. It's their prerogative to try and bring about change. Refusing to enter into dialogue over certain issues will certainly not win anyone over who isn't already on their side, but admitting that things aren't black and white is admitting that they could be wrong.

But mixing take-no-prisoners thinking with the workplace and you can end up with a very poisonous atmosphere. You always need some flexibility of thought, however strong your views, because sooner or later a situation will come up which requires clarification and discussion. Not everything is black and white, and sometimes there are mistakes and misunderstandings. I think the error bars on that github activity are wide enough that we can't be certain.

This blog rant reflects very badly on Joyent. I think it shows that Bryan Cantrill has exceptionally poor judgment. Bryan says "we believe that empathy is a core engineering value". That seems a bit hypocritical given his behaviour.
They or their as singular has been part of recognised English for a very long time.

"God send every one their heart's desire!" - Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4

"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend." - Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3
> people are generally amiable and friendly but will take advantage of you for a mile if you give an inch.

How does that not describe...say Italy?

> Rabid consumerism, shows of status, workaholism and an overwhelming feeling of fuck you got mine

I've never lived in a country where I felt like this wasn't true, even Switzerland.
Out of sheer curiosity, since the Joyent's blog post had such a big emphasis on "empathy", but wouldn't sociopaths/ psychopaths be even more likely to be not sexists? Because they would be an assholes to everyone anyway, regardless of gender :-). (I'm sorry, this is probably really wrong to be joking with, it's just that the whole situation is completely bizarre and incomprehensible to me, so weird questions just pop up).
It's 2013. Some people in the open source community seem to still live mentally in the 1950s.
It's not criminalizing anything. It's pointing out that it goes against that company's policy. Is it really so bad for a company to have a policy to prefer gender equality?

I'm rather amazed to see people rushing to defend sexism. Please tell me: what's so great about sexism? Why is it so wrong to fight it? Because I really don't get it.
The nicest place on the internet
Isabella Karle's Curious Scientific Method
but apparently ben didn't revert the commit on the basis of its content, he reverted it on the basis of a bad process (lack of review).

So we should criticize "people who don't accept these commits", or "people who revert commits because of bad process", but the case "people who revert these kind of commits" is not valid.
He explicitly stated the reason for that in his revert: either he or another leader (that wasn't the one who did the merge) has to sign off before changes can be merged. He does care, not about the gendered pronouns but rather the principle of commits/ merges in a big project.