throwawaycoder

Sorry, I probably really misread you. I also read the article again and personally I don't think the situation sounds that threatening - there were a whole bunch of people there, including a good male friend.

Nevertheless, "she could have said something" is of course not an excuse for rude behavior. I wouldn't want to excuse his behavior. As I said, if I knew him, I probably wouldn't like him much and certainly wouldn't encourage him to attend further meetups.

"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.

Yeah, let's just get it over with and say he basically raped her. Let's increase the counter for "women get raped in public all the time" up by one. After all, even if he didn't rape her, the psychological damage was the same, so it counts. Also, let's put that guy in jail for rape.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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).

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 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 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?

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.