Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct

http://wildchocolate.tumblr.com/post/12555879965/a-letter-to-the-developer-community

by phwd • 15 years ago

95 116 15 years ago

wildchocolate.tumblr.com

hackermom• 15 years ago

No need to freak out. Let people be people, and learn to just shrug your shoulders once in a while.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

Actually, that's just plain unprofessional behavior, and reflects poorly not only on the speakers, but on the organizers as well. Though I hear the organizers were equally concerned over what transpired, so I expect it was naivety on the part of the organizers in their lack of firm communication that professional conduct was a requirement in order to be a speaker at the event.

rimantas• 15 years ago

Why should anything professional be sterile, humourless, polit-correct to the point of being lifeless? Why is any mention of sexuality "inappropriate"? It is so sad that we degnerate to primitive knee-jerk reaction—spekear mentions anything sexuality related—I must by offended. WHY? We are _wired_ to pay attention to this stuff, this is a reason why we are there and I really don't get this trend to pretend we are all cold, sexless robots.

sp3328• 15 years ago

If it's just some guy making jokes with his friends, no big deal. But at a conference, that's not cool.

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

One speaker at a developer conference does not represent the community. If anything it reflects the organizer's choice of speakers.

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

This trend needs to stop now. I guess this does not happen much in company-based events where such behavior would be grounds for firing or a warning from HR(or a ban from other company events for outsiders.) The open hacker community needs to step up a little and not let things be too casual to a fault. Diversity is very beneficial to the industry and if a speaker has to resort to crass humor to attract or entertain attendees, that doesn't reflect too well on their skills.

drcube• 15 years ago

I supposed "diversity" doesn't include diverse standards of humor? "Let's not offend anybody" is a losing game. Somebody WILL be offended, so my advice is to ignore the offenderati and communicate your own way. People will listen or not, but that's on them.

jarrett• 15 years ago

The OP isn't saying "let's not offend anybody." She's asking conference speakers and organizers to maintain a minimal level of professionalism and respect as is standard in pretty much any other industry.

Dirty/sexist jokes in professional conferences do not count as "diverse standards of humor." They just make our industry look immature and unwelcoming.

msbarnett• 15 years ago

False dichotomy. There's a broad middle ground between the positions "Don't do anything that may ever offend anyone. Humor of any sorts is completely unacceptable" and "Dick jokes totally belong in official presentations at industry tech conferences".

pyre5• 15 years ago

Counter-point:

  I communicate best by using live nude people up on
  stage in an interpretive dance. The human body is
  beautiful. If you are offended by it you should just
  leave. If you decide to ban me from your conference
  you are just trying to censor my free speech.

paxswill• 15 years ago

This isn't just a Mac/iOS community problem, as evidenced by a post like this popping up every week or two. It's a programming/hacker community problem.

rb2k_• 15 years ago

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this kind of stuff also happens in most other communities? At least I've met a few people in the banking community that had their fair amount of crude jokes.

cooldeal• 15 years ago

> At least I've met a few people in the banking community that had their fair amount of crude jokes.

Sure, but how many banking conferences do you see jokes as crass as the ones that were mentioned here? No one is getting hot and bothered here how people talk privately or to their buddies.

ender7• 15 years ago

No offense to the banking...actually, you know what, fuck those guys. I'm sure there are a lot of nice people working there (I have two friends who do so), but the average level of juvenile bro-tude and that passes for normal behavior among young ibankers is embarrassing. We are better than that.

JonnieCache5• 15 years ago

If we're holding investment bankers up as our moral benchmark, then we're screwed.

Not that ibankers are necessarily the worst of the worst, they obviously aren't, but c'mon people, aim high?

jonhendry10• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure banking, as a whole (not just hot-shot traders), has a higher proportion of women than programming does. When I was at First Chicago working on a fed funds trading system, there were plenty of women around, in tech-related positions, including my boss. The proportion of women is even higher in retail consumer-facing banking.

Some traders are certainly gross, especially on Wall St, but that isn't true across the industry.

michaelchisari• 15 years ago

I have a good friend who is a medical anthropologist. She attends both medical conferences, and anthropology conferences. And no, this stuff doesn't not happen there.

The only places I can see this as being acceptable is in places which were a) male dominated/homogenous, and/or b) lacking in professionalism.

So I can understand this happening at banking conferences because of (a), and unfortunately, hacker scenes have a problem with both (a) and (b), but I would strongly disagree that this happens in most other communities.

halfsoldier• 15 years ago

"I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this kind of stuff also happens in most other communities?"

Pretty much. I've seen the same debate in other circles I'm involved in- anime/manga nerds, film geeks, atheists, sports etc etc. There's nothing special here but nonetheless we should act if there is a problem regardless of the community.

ryandvm• 15 years ago

The world would be a better place if people spent less time figuring out ways to be offended.

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

Maybe, but it would be an even better place if developer conferences are kept free of dorm-room-level jokes.

weeksie• 15 years ago

Let me guess, you're white and male? Me too, and for a long time I thought to myself "Gee, I can't believe people get offended at stuff like that." Then after a bit, I really put myself into other people's shoes. How would you feel if your credentials were constantly being second-guessed just because of how you looked, talked, or your gender?

The thing is, as white (or white-looking arab or jewish) dudes, we _never_ have to run into that. The closest I ever came was immigrating to a different country and constantly getting singled out over my accent — so much so that I changed it.

sneak4• 15 years ago

I'm white and male and live somewhere I can't speak the native language very well. I'm singled out all the time.

I agree with the parent post - people should stop trying so hard to be offended about stuff. Being singled out or second-guessed doesn't harm one.

ceol4• 15 years ago

This is exactly why these types of posts are so common and actually proves her point. A developer expresses her disappointment that a prominent Mac/iOS conference includes a surprising amount of crude and sexual humor? Most of the responses consist of "quit being offended", dismissals, and flat-out ignoring it ("this doesn't represent the community even though it's at a popular convention!"). There's even a guy in these comments suggesting being singled out "doesn't harm [anyone]".[0]

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217486

fbuilesv• 15 years ago

Am I experiencing some bug here or is the author of this really expecting us to read something like this: http://cl.ly/0Q1b0i2t191F0R2L0B0t ?

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

The contrast looks a bit better on my browser(Opera). Maybe the blog software wants to deemphasize comments(like HN does for selfpost text and downmodded comments)?

wizzard• 15 years ago

Yes, this font is a terrible choice for white-on-black. And as for the dark-dark-dark-suede-on-black portions, forget about it.

Aramgutang• 15 years ago

This is what I see (Firefox on left, Chrome on right): http://i.imgur.com/RBs0E.png

Not sure if she's changed the style since you visited, but it's quite readable. I was tempted to put it down to me using a dark theme in KDE, but Chrome, unlike Firefox, doesn't inherit the OS default colours for web pages.

tux19682• 15 years ago

Open letter to open-letter writers. If you're not the kind of person who has empathy for people with different tastes in humour, there's no need to write anything further.

phillmv• 15 years ago

Open letter to dipshits:

Stop being a dipshit, you dipshit.

Love,

recoiledsnake4• 15 years ago

This was a Mac/iOS developer conference, not a adult standup comedy show in Vegas.It's a conference meant to showcase different development methodologies and paradigms, not awkward base humor.

tux19682• 15 years ago

Indeed, but there is a place for fun even at serious conferences. Some of my favourite talks at conferences have been filled with humour. Usually they're informative at the same time, which the talk in question apparently lacked, but such is life.

The actual point I was making was slightly different, but i'll leave it to the reader to figure out what it was.

alex_c2• 15 years ago

>maybe the Mac community doesn’t want people like me to be comfortable? Perhaps they would rather keep this a boy’s club forever, and it’s simply irritating when people like me disrupt that.

I find this kind of generalization or assumption pretty much as distasteful as the author found the presentation.

nupark2• 15 years ago

I've been in the Mac (and now iOS) and UNIX development communities for decades, and I've never come across this sort of "rockstar" immaturity.

I have, however, come across this in other fields. I assume this is likely due to how small the Mac community has been, as well as -- and this may be a stretch -- the kind of professionalism that Apple has themselves demonstrated.

The fact that this sort of conduct may be becoming more prevalent in the iOS/Mac space is disappointing, but not entirely surprising.

king_jester• 15 years ago

The full line from that quote you pulled is:

> However, what this experience and other similar encounters I have had in the last three years as a Mac developer have started to suggest is, maybe the Mac community doesn’t want people like me to be comfortable.

The author of the post isn't implying that this singular incident leads to the conclusion that the Mac community is a boy's club. Rather, a series of experiences had while working in the Mac community leads the author to that feeling.

It's been my experience working in computer and programming communities in general that there is a huge blind spot for privilege among members of those communities, esp. given how many professional programmers are white, cisgendered men. The author is stating that her experience has show there to be a problem in the way professionalism and gender is approached by the Mac community, and its up to those of us that do have a lot of privilege to listen, take a step back, and think about that person's experience and examine our role in that community.

scott_s5• 15 years ago

I had to look this up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender

alex_c2• 15 years ago

> its up to those of us that do have a lot of privilege to listen, take a step back, and think about that person's experience and examine our role in that community.

After stepping back and thinking about it, the author's stance about the iOS community seems to allow me, as an iPhone developer, only two options:

1) I am, explicitly or implicitly, guilty of some form of discrimination or inappropriate behaviour, or

2) I am not actually part of the iOS community.

protomyth• 15 years ago

Is there any specific information on what conference this was and who were the speakers mentioned? I find it hard to gauge what I should think based on no information.

jarjoura• 15 years ago

I am curious what conference and also what session this was?! Word of advice to anyone reading these comments, when presenting, ALWAYS take the moral high ground. People are easily offended period, and for all sorts of reasons you may not care about. The last thing the developer community needs is to offend people. We're all here to make the future a better place to live in, so lets act like we care too.

enra• 15 years ago

I'm not supporting this kind of behavior, but I think least think any community needs is to be too scared about offending people.

Like others have commented, author makes pretty _offensive_ generalizations of the whole community and people in it, which I think is even worse and untrue, than some guy having an offending talk.

snorkel• 15 years ago

I'm surprised the leading providers of mobile fart noise applications would be so immature.

zyb09• 15 years ago

Well some people say if you are getting offended by "inappropriate" jokes that's basically your problem, not the problem of the majority of people there having fun. After all its just jokes, as in having humour. At a developer conference you shouldn't be so critical about it.

georgieporgie5• 15 years ago

Well some people say if you are getting offended by "inappropriate" jokes that's basically your problem, not the problem of the majority of people there having fun.

Do you honestly not see any problem with that line of thought? I'm curious, how old are you?

dextorious5• 15 years ago

I'm 35 and I honestly don't see any problem with that line of thought. But then again, I'm not a WASP, and I'm not into political correctness either.

funkah• 15 years ago

Daniel Jalkut has posted his own take on the situation [1].

I appreciate it, because whenever these situations pop up, they quickly devolve into "tech is full of unprofessional assholes" versus "stop being such a baby". He also provides some background for why the session was done that way in the first place.

[1] http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/2266/how-to-talk-dirty

JonnieCache5• 15 years ago

Here are the slides from the talk: http://www.mactech.com/sites/default/files/Lee-Ten_Dirty_Wor...

Based on this more specific info, I don't actually think this is offensive at all, and it's actually rather funny.

However, as with all jokes, it's how you tell 'em. I can imagine this all being done in a family friendly way. I can also imagine it being delivered in a wholly inappropriate drooling-pervert manner. We can't know unless we see a video.

As jalkut says in the blogpost, the jokes write themselves. You could deliver this entire talk in a deadpan manner, reading out all the "dirty words" as if they're perfectly normal, and all the dirtyness is in the minds of the audience. This is the beauty of innuendo and double entendre, it allows you to be dirty without actually being dirty.

There is a long tradition of this on BBC radio going back to the 60s, where unbelievably, unutterably filthy things have been talked about at 6:30pm, when children are having their dinner, via the potent medium of deadpan innuendo. The key is that everything should have be able to be parsed perfectly innocently, so if your children ask what it means you can tell them with no embarrassment. There have been things said at dinner time in this manner that would likely otherwise never have been allowed to be broadcast, at any time of day or night.

In this case however, based on the OP reaction, I think it's more likely that the presenter was gurning his way through the talk, giving suggestive "LOL DICKS!" messages through his speech mannerisms and body language. These were likely the root cause of the uncomfortableness.

But as I say, all this is speculation without video of the session.

ceol4• 15 years ago

>Based on this more specific info, I don't actually think this is offensive at all, and it's actually rather funny.

Really? It's just a collection of crude jokes. I can't imagine how you could present those slides in anything other than a perverted manner.

jonhendry10• 15 years ago

"There is a long tradition of this on BBC radio going back to the 60s, where unbelievably, unutterably filthy things have been talked about at 6:30pm, when children are having their dinner, via the potent medium of deadpan innuendo."

Precisely. The humor involved sounds like the kind of thing you hear on Radio 4's News Quiz. Some of which is simply a BBC newsreader reading clippings from the media that have double meanings. (a non-sexual example: "The Bristol RSPCA is giving discounts on pet chipping. 15 pounds for cats and dogs, 10 pounds for old-age pensioners")

Needless to say, the News Quiz loves to talk about UK shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

It's possible, of course, that the speaker's presentation was rather less deadpan. But still, the woman who posted the complaint did have some warning of the content and tone.

scott_s5• 15 years ago

I actually don't think they're funny. That's not code for "I think they are inappropriate" (which at a developer's conference, I think they are inappropriate), but rather I don't find them humorous. It's the kind of easy humor people try for when they're not actually funny. I find listening to this sort of thing painful because I feel sorry for the speaker - trying to be funny, failing, and having to deal with it.

With that said, even if the speaker did as you said and was completely deadpan, I would still think it's inappropriate. It's just not the appropriate place to even attempt to make those references, no matter how you do it. Among friends, I make and laugh at raunchy jokes. But professional environments should be more inclusive than that.

This is what topical, appropriate and actually funny humor in a professional setting looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4

droithomme• 15 years ago

Thanks for posting the slides.

I don't find them funny, I find them interesting and useful. It's a discussion on interesting aspects of the Cocoa libraries. The common theme is that dirty minds could find the names of certain calls naughty. But it's not discussed or the point of the slides at least.

Seems like a reasonable talk. I was actually all set to defend the point of the author of the article, having read the article, but now seeing the slides I don't really see anything at all troublesome here. It's a valid tech talk.

But as you say, perhaps the video of the session would indicate the slides were ignored and it was a wild free for all of obscenities and bigotry.

FuzzyDunlop2• 15 years ago

While the description of the conference from the author's perspective certainly shows a stark lack of professionalism, it seems to be quite a jump to then attribute it to a lack of diversity in the field.

That lack of professionalism can't or shouldn't be defended, but neither can the hypocrisy in the post about it. For a thinly veiled post about sexism and male dominance in an industry, the author makes no effort to avoid making some sexist remarks of her own (as highlighted by alex_c[0]).

At risk of going off on a tangent, diversity is a good thing. Discrimination isn't. By extension, positive discrimination isn't a good thing. And the sooner everyone realises that the solution to the issue of poor diversity isn't even more discrimination, the better.

This in its simplest form means not using your own race, gender, religion, age etc. to make a point in favour of your own demographic, and also not allowing other people to do the same against you. Because real diversity is when none of that actually matters.

I have a slight feeling this may not be a popular point of view, but I find some of the popular thinking to be rather illogical. But the author makes a good point when taken solely on the merits of professionalism.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217306

jonhendry10• 15 years ago

"it seems to be quite a jump to then attribute it to a lack of diversity in the field."

Oh? What would you attribute it to?

It's quite likely that it is because of a lack of women. Some immature people get accustomed to working in a boy's club environment, and don't grow up, don't know how to act professionally.

Note that you're making the error of assuming that attributing the cause to lack of diversity implies some kind of quota system to remedy the lack of diversity.

More women would be great. Better would be for immature developers to grow up.

FuzzyDunlop2• 15 years ago

Is it not a quota system that's typically used to remedy the lack of diversity? In the UK it hasn't been uncommon to do this quite openly as if it's a good thing. Territorial Army posters used to say they would only consider women and minorities for application.

At best attributing it to diversity and playing the sex card oversimplifies things such as the individual's upbringing and his personality. People are all different, so I find it unfair to say that this is not the product of a person being a person, but a person who works in a male dominated environment.

Is the implication thus that an industry needs more women for it to be more mature? That without diversity men (note how the article emphasises this is a male problem) will resort to making dick jokes and chatting about celebrities they'd bang all the time? And how is that implication any less offensive than the lack of professionalism the speaker exhibited?

So to answer the question, I attribute this not to diversity or anything such, but to an individual who was, as you've said, immature. He alone does not make the entire development community immature, nor is he exemplary of a male dominated profession.

jonhendry10• 15 years ago

I wish posts like that would just name names. It would have made it easier to figure out what, exactly transpired. Having looked at the slides, and Daniel Jalkut's post linked elsewhere, it appears to be tame double-entendre humor that wouldn't be out of place on NPR.

I'm inclined to be on the complainant's side, but the complaint makes it seem much worse than it appears to have actually been.

I'm left thinking the woman involved went to a session that gave every indication of being very slightly off-color, and was shocked and offended that it was.

JulianMiller520• 15 years ago

I agree with you entirely but found your use of the terms "tits and ass" a bit jarring given your topic. I’m assuming it’s an attribution but was unable to glean that directly from the text. You may want to include quotation marks so we know who’s speaking, lest we find your post as offensive as the conference you are mentioning. "Auto-releasing" is offensive when double entendre is applied, "tits and ass" need no further implications.

sp3328• 15 years ago

Not defending the inappropriate nature of the talk, but these doesn't look like "boy's club" kind of jokes. I mean "autorelease" and "NSInsertionPosition" don't seem like they're demeaning to women somehow. I think men and women are equally likely to be offended by this?

bdonlan• 15 years ago

Indeed. While one can make an argument that the tone of the talk is inappropriate for a professional conference, arguing that these particular examples in some way single out women for denigration is absurd. Do men not engage in sexual acts as well as women? Why should a sexual joke - one which, apparently, implies an act that could involve both genders - be automatically assumed to be harmful to women more than it is for men?

Naturally, I have not heard the entire talk, so it's possible there were segments which would indeed be considered demeaning for women specifically - and if so, then indeed that is another problem. But as a society, is it really healthy to keep around this attitude that women are delicate creatures who would be forever harmed by hearing anything with the slightest hint of sexual connotations? Is it really the case that only men can laugh at and enjoy the occasional sex joke?

scott_s5• 15 years ago

Sexual jokes are naturally divisive if the crowd is gender imbalanced.

It's not an issue of being demeaning. It's an issue of people from a minority group being very uncomfortable when the majority is talking as if they're not there.

sp3328• 15 years ago

You mean that guys don't usually tell these jokes when women are around, and therefore just the fact that a guy told this joke was dismissive of the women in attendance?

If so, would the exact same jokes be dismissive of men, if the gender of the speaker and audience were reversed? Or is there something about the jokes which have an anti-women bias?

sneak4• 15 years ago

A conference I can't hear dick jokes at is a conference I don't want to attend.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc

georgieporgie5• 15 years ago

That's a great video (Frank Zappa on Crossfire, 1986), but first amendment issues have absolutely nothing to do with standards of professional conduct at a conference.

sneak4• 15 years ago

It's not the first amendment thing I posted it for - but for the part where he points out that... "THEY'RE JUST WORDS."

Yes, words have meaning, and that meaning can change the world, but if someone making dick jokes causes you to get hyper-uncomfortable, maybe you have some personal sensitivity issues to work through before you start worrying about the level of professionalism at a conference that you obviously don't want to be at.

In short: "Yes Virginia, the world has dick jokes in it."

luigi• 15 years ago

As the number of developer conferences increases for a given technology, the probability of a sexually inappropriate talk approaches 1.

thoradam• 15 years ago

I'd understand this post if it were just a cry for more professionalism, which is welcomed, but how can sexual innuendo be construed to slight women in particular? Because the speaker mentioned breasts? Is this the '50s?

maw• 15 years ago

Some empathy for those of us who don't like reading grey text over a black background wouldn't go astray.

bgramer• 15 years ago

I had to copy/paste because it was too hard to read in dark reversed style of the blog's design. Here it is so you can read.

"A Letter to the Developer Community

Dear Mac/iOS Developer Community,

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes who may be different from yourself and attempt to understand/have compassion towards that person’s feelings, especially if their feelings are different from your own. If you do not consider yourself to be a particularly empathetic person, there’s no need to read any further.

I attended a Mac developer conference recently and overall had a great experience. I had the opportunity to meet and get to know many great developers while learning a few things too. Unfortunately, I left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. This feeling I attribute to a lack of conduct standards, and a failure by many of us to understand the changes in the industry that have been occurring, like it or not, over the years.

Here is what happened. I sat down to listen to a talk that I could tell by the title of the talk, was going to be inappropriate. I thought to myself, I’m at a respectful Mac conference, the organizer is walking around in a suit and conducting himself very professionally, I’m sure it will be ok. This was, in fact, a poor assumption. The speaker prefaced his talk by basically stating there was a little substance, but that most of the topics were being presented simply because of the sexual or otherwise inappropriate jokes that could be formed from the topics. For instance, jokes that can be made about “autoreleasing”. I’ll let you think about that for a second and you basically understand how this went. About ten minutes in, I was thoroughly disappointed in the immaturity and inappropriateness and walked out of the room. As others informed me later, it did not get any better. There were tidbits of information weaved in, but the overarching theme remained the same.

Sadly, this was not the only offensive point in the week. The highly respected keynote speaker managed to weave in a reference to a female celebrity’s tits and ass in his discussion, which I found awfully distasteful.

Now, I know that being one of the handful of women in attendance at the conference, I am in a serious minority in terms of the way I experience and react to things such as this. I also know that it’s quite possible that others would not be offended as they may have the same, in my opinion immature, sense of humor. Yet, in discussing with others, including members of my team, I found that I was not alone in finding these references uncomfortable.

Why is it that an inappropriate talk would even be permitted on a stage at any respectable conference? How does this in any way further the advancement of the software industry at large, and the Mac community especially? In my opinion, it sets us back quite a bit. During one of the much more informative and respectable talks of the week, the topic of diversity was brought up. The speaker pointed out the fact that the Mac community is full of mostly men from an educated and higher income background. The context was in discussion of how we tend to gravitate towards like minded people. And in fact, it’s impossible to argue that this is a truly diverse field by any means because women and minorities are grossly underrepresented as I’m sure you know.

However, what this experience and other similar encounters I have had in the last three years as a Mac developer have started to suggest is, maybe the Mac community doesn’t want people like me to be comfortable? Perhaps they would rather keep this a boy’s club forever, and it’s simply irritating when people like me disrupt that.

Wow, does that thought scare me. Coming from a different industry where diversity is praised and encouraged, could it be that software developers want the exact opposite? Clearly not all of us. But, perhaps some of the organizers of this particular conference gravitate toward that mindset.

The Mac development community has changed a lot over the years. There are new iOS consulting companies popping up all the time. Macs are in more homes than ever before in history. Mac developers are hiring business partners, even donning suits sometimes, and prancing into major corporations to work on exciting applications. It’s a new world, folks. And as a result, there will likely be growing pains.

All I ask is this…

First, if you are in a position where you can control the conduct and standards at a software event that is intended to be in any way professional, you are therefore obligated to do so. Or at least warn people who may be attending otherwise, so we may steer clear.

Second, before you start to defend this kind of inappropriate behavior in a professional setting, think about how you would feel if I were your daughter or your sister. I’m not against inappropriate humor by any means, I just think there’s a time and a place. This was not it.

Do we want the Mac community to be a place where anyone, regardless of gender, race, religion, etc. feels uncomfortable?

Diversity is great. It shows that our field is growing up. But diversity can only happen with acceptance, tolerance, and the ability to empathize with those who may feel uncomfortable, even if you yourself do not. I sincerely hope that at future Mac community events, I will not be similarly offended.

Thank you to the wonderful guys who provided support and feedback in preparation for this article. It’s nice to know we have some gentlemen out there in the Mac community!

Sincerely,

Brit

Update: After getting in touch with the conference organizers, I have a lot of hope regarding this issue. They were very concerned, apologetic, and acknowledged that this should not happen at a professional event. Thank you!

parfe• 15 years ago

In Firefox you can go to View -> Page Style -> No Style.

siavosh• 15 years ago

I had the same experience when watching the Startup School video on the office hours when there was an innocent comment by PG regarding the mic and the female founders, and the whole audience laughed. I felt embarrassed at the immaturity of the audience and how much this was normal behavior for engineers. I think the whole cs/hacker field needs to reach for higher standards of professionalism.

geuis• 15 years ago

Agreed. I was in the audience and took notice of this. Made me groan internally a bit.

getsat• 15 years ago

What was the actual comment/context?

spaznode2• 15 years ago

We wouldn't be having this discussion on the Internet if it weren't for our love of "tits and ass".

Why are we acting so prudish about sexuality? I know my wife wouldn't care about a reference to celebrity t&a. What kind of girls do take offense? I'll tell you what kind, ugly girls. Had to be said.

fleitz• 15 years ago

Who the fuck goes to a talk titled: "The Ten Dirty Words and How To Use Them." and is surprised that there are jokes of an offensive nature? It basically screams this talk is going to be unprofessional.

Exactly what could the presenter have done to more fully communicate the nature of the talk? Put up a green first slide that says "This talk is rated "O" for offensive by the Tech Conference Association of America."?

spaznode2• 15 years ago

Fuckin god damn right. Use some common sense m-fers. ;)

Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct

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