from Hacker News

On Github and Speaking Out

by jejune06 on 3/18/14, 12:40 AM with 41 comments

• by akerl_ on 3/18/14, 2:25 AM

  The initial premise of the article appears flawed. Based on my reading of the community response to Horvath's post and Github's response, most people were in the camp that the founder's wife's actions were outright ridiculous, the coworker's actions (reverting her commits) were asinine, but that the article did not appear to portray sexism, because her only provided example of sexism was ~"some women were hulahooping, I saw some guys gawking at them, the guys thought it was ok". If she had a case for more pervasive sexism at GitHub, I'd like her to lay it out in the open so we can address it.

  There's a minority of the community who are assholes and will always be assholes. Without becoming a censorship society we can't outright extinguish their ability to make noise. But the vast majority of responses I saw were sympathetic to Horvath's position, if not her sexism angle.

• by vezzy-fnord on 3/18/14, 2:06 AM

  Interesting. I didn't see that much negative attitudes after the story was cleared out, actually most were sympathetic. The main disagreements were how the story was massively pinned everywhere as one of sexism, when the main conflict involved another woman, and then the man who reversed Horvath's commits appeared to hold a grudge, not necessarily sexist attitudes.

  Sorry about the incident you describe, but I'm having a hard time extrapolating it to systemic racism. It appeared that it was an uneducated punk trying to impress a love interest through the only brutish way he knows: violence. He also needs to intimidate you somehow, and your race stands out. So what do you think he's going to do, in that case? Comment on your race, of course. People of lower caliber tend to focus on these superficialities.

  Oh, and they also tend to be highly effective insults. There's that, too. If your goal is to offend, racial slurs are an invaluable tool.

  But even if we were to assume that this arbitrary incident from over 25 years ago is evidence of current events, I still cannot take your claim that the tech industry is "as welcoming to women as medicine and law were a century ago" at face value.

  Secret WASP classes, indeed. Most higher education today is the polar opposite of that ideologically, but there you go.

• by programminggeek on 3/18/14, 4:42 AM

  It seems like whenever something like this happens publicly in our industry, a lot of people get all up in arms for a few days on blogs and twitter and then people forget until the next one happens. I suppose that is the way of the world, but it seems like people are more invested in being upset by things like sexism, racism, spying, or whoever sold for a billion dollars than they are in doing anything about it. I think a lot of people like complaining and being unhappy, even if the problems of the day have nothing to do with them directly.

• by Bahamut on 3/18/14, 3:12 AM

  I have experienced similar sorts of crap behavior in the past (racial, violent, etc.) - my only recourse in some cases were to respond to violence with violence unfortunately, although it did have a net positive effect that I somehow gained respect & the reputation that I would fight back, so that no one would mess with me. The downside is that sometimes you end up having to continually prove yourself at various points in your life.

  Violence is not my preferred method of retaliation though - violence in itself does not prove a point, except that I am not willing to be trampled on. It has also backfired on me in the past at times (ex. fracturing my hand while in boot camp from retaliating over getting punched in a stressful moment - the initial punch I took was due to some mythical blame that I was at fault for the platoon getting jacked up). Sometimes you cannot do anything else when a bully attacks you directly - the only thing such people understand is meeting power with power, that is the state of their brutish mind. They don't ascribe to the fundamental premise of mutual respect, even when you have not done anything that should have provoked it. You're just used as an excuse to vent out frustrations over self-deficiencies or failures.

  This is why we, the new privileged class of tech, should be doing everything to abet this behavior, and show that we should be welcoming - we should be showing that there is a better way than repeating the same old animalistic behavior in a new form. Behavior like this or what Julie experienced is abhorrent, and commentary should take into account that we are talking about people who have experienced what no one should experience ever.

• by hueving on 3/18/14, 4:19 AM

  The second paragraph is a complete strawman of the discourse that occurred here. It's so unrepresentative of what I witnessed that I thought it was a joke. How can you post something like that and expect any of your post to be taken credibly after that?