A female computer science major at Stanford: "Floored" by the sexism - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/02/17/a-female-computer-science-major-at-stanford-floored-by-the-sexism/ <comment><USER3> I am a female developer about 6 years older than the author. I absolutely love the end of this article:

> Slowly but steadily, I am learning to see my dresses and high-pitched voice > not as hurdles to my success, but as symbols of the perspective I bring to > the table.

This conclusion is fantastic and shows a sense of confidence and maturity that I think all professionals of all genders need to project.

<comment><USER4> It was difficult to have any clue what she was going on about, except that she expects other people to solve her problems for her and do things for her. I wonder what gave her that idea.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps the difficulty is in you and you should reflect on that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well she writes like a junior because she is. But the main points she makes - subtle sexism regarding capability in the face of equivalent effort - <USER2> certainly observable and do ring true.

When I see articles like this (and the issue of sexism in computing does pop up quite often) I usually agree. It is there. But what can be done? I myself have been a disgusting example of a male engineer at times. And as much as I would love to permanently erase any male/female alteration of my behavior in a professional context, the reality is I do not become asexual when I go to work. I'm still a man. What to do?

<comment><USER7> You've successfully completed steps 1 and 2:

1\. Acknowledge there is a real problem.

2\. Acknowledge you are part of the problem.

Now, on to steps 3-n!

3\. Don't be discouraged, accept that there are things you can do to help! This is _good_ , you're about to become a more valuable member of society.

4\. Accept that you need to put in some effort. Not much, don't worry. Most of it is shutting up.

5\. Read what women write about this problem. They're all experts because they've been studying it literally their _entire lives_.

6\. Learn (from step 5 and some self-reflection) how to recognize _in real time_ when you're being a jerk. Then stop.

Now it gets a little harder. But remember, not nearly as hard as _being_ a woman in tech, so buck up, kid!

7\. Learn (from step 5) how to recognize in real time when _other people_ are being jerks, and good techniques for how to advocate on behalf of women. This takes practice and courage, keep at it.

8\. You'll be tempted to brag about how helpful you are to women (hi @wadhwa). Resist this temptation. Whenever you feel yourself about to tell someone how great and helpful you are, instead, show them something an actual woman has said about their problems, and try to point them in the right direction.

Note that you can replace "woman/women" in the above with any minority/disenfranchised/disadvantaged group you want to help, and the same formula pretty much works verbatim.

<comment><USER8> You seem certain that that you know exactly what the problem is, and exactly how to solve it, down to a list of steps. You even seem certain that a stranger on the Internet is part of the problem. Well, give me a break -- that's really presumptuous and condescending. Listening to the aggrieved seems like a good idea, but there's no guarantee that they have the answers.

<comment><USER7> >You even seem certain that a stranger on the Internet is part of the problem

The stranger on the internet said they felt like part of the problem, so I don't really know what to tell you.

If you read between the lines a bit, I never said I had any of the answers. All I said was listen to the people that are affected, try to learn about their problems, and be empathetic, and maybe you'll find the answers.

I'm not trying to be revolutionary here, I just think one of the nice features of these types of issues is that the people being affected are actual people that you can listen to and have conversations with, and I think that's a good place to start.

<comment><USER9> > All I said was listen to the people that are affected, try to learn about > their problems, and be empathetic, and maybe you'll find the answers.

Are you aware that one female will have entirely different experiences and suggestions on how to solve tech's sexism problem than the next? E.g., you implicate Vivek Wadwa as being a problem (probably due to Amelia Greenhall's accusations), and yet there are an overwhelming amount of women who take Vivek's side, not Amelia's. Amelia Greenhall herself, for example, is highly critical of Sheryl Sandberg. But is highly supportive of females whose blogs are banned by hacker news (Nitasha Tiku, for example). So, with all due respect, your suggestions are pretty impractical and will result in a lot of confusion for the person following the advice, not much good results.

<comment><USER5> More people accepting the problem, reading up on the experiences of those facing discrimination, and thinking about what they can do to change themselves and those around them.

That seems like a pretty good starting point, no?

Whatever you read about, you're going to come up with conflicting opinions and suggestions, so that is hardly new, and is certainly not an excuse for doing nothing.

<comment><USER9> > That seems like a pretty good starting point, no?

Honestly, not at all. I really think the exact opposite is true. The debate in this arena is hellishly toxic. You read into it a little and you quickly find out how disturbing ideas flying around really are -- especially from the prominent voices. Staying away from these debates is probably the best option for now. I really hope in time something happens and the toxicity goes away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do sympathize because people shouldn't have to put up with discrimination for any reason, especially at work, but her message gets eroded through poorly chosen arguments.

There's a difference between discrimination and assumption. If I wear scrubs while visiting a friend at a hospital because I like walking around in scrubs, people will assume that I'm medical personnel working there. If you're a woman in a dress at a company where all other women in dresses are recruiters, people will assume you're probably a recruiter, until they find out otherwise. They are not discriminating against you, it's just the prior probability. It's not okay to take this personally and lash out and call them a sausagefest.

An extroverted man wearing more fashion-conscious clothing in an introverted company-shirt crowd will stand out, and might face less sympathetic reviews in interview situations. That's discrimination, and it's not okay, but it happens. Having to look the part or not when it matters is a compromise we all face. This is not a good argument for her case.

And look here: > And if that wasn't enough, my achievement was questioned by male colleagues. I'd occasionally hear, "Oh you're a woman, you'll get a job at Google or Facebook just fine!" Which was the most discouraging encouragement. If I did get the internship, it was because I was a woman and if I didn't, I'd just failed to leverage my upper edge.

They said it because there is truth to it -- she won't get the job _because_ she's a woman, but she _will_ have higher chances _because_ she's a woman. In the very least, it will muddle the reasons behind the decision. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're in support of gender diversity awareness in hiring, you've given up the license to complain about it. Saying "Let's hire more women!" when selecting from a decidedly male-dominated pool fully implies that women at large are given higher chances solely for being women. Sad, but true.

At that point I'm starting to doubt the interpretation of other examples like the older guy who called her dresses "fun." Was it a creepy guy making underhanded passes, or mere a fatherly figure lending his support for her unique choices? I personally don't doubt her judgment that it was the former, but it's hard to be convinced given the way the rest of the article reads.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have heard most of these things, and it sucks. This is hella real.

<comment><USER12> Yup, it makes me a teeny bit more angry every time I read an article like this. Angry and disappointed.

<comment><USER13> I'm happy that she decided to share. It's easy to forget how real this issue can be. The shit show in the comments here when an article like this is new further demonstrates the fact that there's still more work to be done. I will say though I do like HN because it seems to pretty quickly approach reasonableness with the voting system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do sometimes wonder what's added by focusing on sexism in tech, in particular, and suggesting it's uniquely a problem with tech. I can believe it's worse here on average than some other comfortable professional jobs, but seriously, sexism is _everywhere_ and if we want to reduce it, it makes more sense to me to focus on the problem itself _in full generality_ rather than an environment it's found in.

Unless you want to invoke an explanation that involves some combination of classism and good old-fashioned picking on (relatively) low-status nerds because it's easier and feels more natural. Then there wouldn't be much left to wonder.

(Edit: NOT saying we shouldn't point out sexism in tech, but expressing skepticism at the broader cultural narrative around how software people are uniquely ignorant and sexist relative to other professions. Ask ten women who've worked somewhere besides tech for a few years for some stories of sexism, you'll hear plenty.)

<comment><USER15> You said yourself that you can believe that sexism is worse in tech than in other professions. That is already a problem worth discussing. Why is it worse? What can we do to correct that discrepancy?

I will go so far as to say your suggestion to "focus on the problem _in full generality_ " \-- which is to say, to completely encompass an impossibly complicated issue -- is just a way of trying to pass responsibility and to avoid admitting that there is a problem. Of course, trying to resolve sexism everywhere is admirable. But to use the existence of sexism in other fields as a reason to avoid addressing it in our own is little better than rejecting its existence altogether.

edit for your edit: I think there are specific reasons that sexism is more prevalent in tech, which are not necessarily related to "software people are ignorant". In our culture there appears to be a general bias against women in pretty much all STEM fields, perhaps for historical reasons. I suspect (although this is just my opinion) that this is largely responsible for any greater bias that exists in tech as well. There is a mistaken perception that women are less capable in highly rational pursuits, which affects how women in tech are viewed by their colleagues. I think this is a big reason that women have a hard time in tech.

<comment><USER14> I'd expect it's worse in tech than _some_ other professions _on average_ because tech is mostly male, which I think is mostly due to gendered expectations originating from parenting and early education.

I think "just don't be sexist please" makes more sense than "don't be sexist at work if you belong to this profession". Like I desperately clarified in my edit which you may not have seen, I'm not saying it shouldn't be pointed out in tech, I'm saying it's suspicious that the cultural narrative focuses so much on tech in particular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> First of all, calling a group of guys a sausage fest is reverse sexism. If I called a classroom full of girls a barbie play-date, or a tea party, or a "fashion" class - regardless of the real reason for their gathering, people would be outraged - and rightfully so. None of those things are true and it's disrespectful to say something like that.

Second, the guy who said "well I should have applied for that" might have said it because two people in a row standing right in front of him just said they had awesome internships at Facebook. Sure, he could have been a total prick and said it because she was a girl, but the fact that the 2 people he asked both said they interned at Facebook completely changes the context of the conversation. If he only asked the girl and responded that way, then that would be different - and that seems to be how she's thinking about it. She's not taking into account the actual context of the conversation.

Wearing colorful, comfortable dresses sounds awesome. Yeah, I like tech T-shirts, and the latter was definitely the more common form of attire at the startup I interned at this past summer, but if someone wore a dress one day, I don't think it would be unusual for that person's manager to say "you look nice today" or "your outfit looks fun."

And regarding the interview, it makes sense that you'll get "better results" by dressing like a techie. There are _tons_ of girls who dress like techies. Wearing a T-shirt with a tech logo on it just sends the message that you love technology. It shouldn't be an important factor in an interview, but of course the way you dress sends a particular message. Wearing a dress doesn't send a negative message in any way, but a girl wearing a tech T-shirt comes across as someone who is super into tech - for the same reason a guy wearing a tech T-shirt looks more into tech than someone who wears a business suit to an interview. The T-shirt could be completely misrepresenting that person's interest in tech, but the point is it sends a particular message during an interview.

I hate to conclude on such a sour note, but the girl the article is speaking about seems to think everyone is against her. It is absolutely possible that this girl experiences discrimination in the tech industry due to her gender, but the examples she talked about simply don't demonstrate that in a definitive way.

<comment><USER17> Side note: My relative who works in HR has told me time and again, the appropriate way to say "you look nice" to a co-worker in a professional setting is to _not say it_. In that setting, beyond grossly inappropriate work attire (at which point all comments should go directly to HR and not the employee), there is no need to make a subjective-comment on someone's appearance, you're there to work.

(edit) grammar

<comment><USER16> I agree with this. Nobody should be judged based on how they look. If you compliment someone and don't compliment others, it could be interpreted the wrong way. If you compliment someone and it's misinterpreted, then it could also cause issues. Just don't judge people based on superficial things.

<comment><USER18> Knowing this I am going to start wearing sweatpants and slip-ons to work. Perhaps I'll stop bathing too. I would certainly hate to have to call my company out on tumblr for judging me on superficial things.

<comment><USER16> I do see the issue with it. Perhaps nobody complimenting anyone is the lesser of 2 evils? Or maybe the trick is to keep comments about attire left up to HR. Managers and coworkers should not comment on an outfit, but HR can if a manager or coworker complains to them. Surely not bathing would get you a talking to from HR =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a CS grad at CSUEB in the Bay Area (I was also an undergrad there previously), and this "women are absent" nonsense is very much the opposite of what I see in my classes.

Most of my classes are comprised of roughly 25-30 students. Of those, roughly 20+ students are Indian, and of those 20+, 15+ are females, and I assure you they're really good!

Now, it may not be Stanford or Berkeley or whichever high-horse university some of you would like to use to dismiss this information, but in my experience there are women in CS, lots of them. It seems folks are just looking at the "bigger buzzfeed" schools or where they want for these "ohh.. I'm a girl in CS and I'm not recognized". Take a look outside these prestigious schools and the gender demographics will change. I'm not saying these don't exist, I'm just saying look around a little more.

Now, I can't speak for female presence in IT in the professional world, but with regard to those feeling belittled or taken advantage of, women are unfortunately targeted by unsolicited/creepy advances all the time, everywhere. It's not a tech industry thing, it an unfortunate all-over-the- world problem.

If when asked where one person did an internship the answer is "facebook", then yeah maybe some surprise, I guess it would be nice to intern at facebook. If the following 1,2,3 people also answer "facebook", then I too would probably think to myself "oh, I should have probably applied then". At this point, I'll just have to take Lea's word that the reaction was truly because she was a girl?!

</comment><comment><USER20> A male developer is going to be flagged as an "imposter" if he shows up to cut code in a suit. That sucks. Unfortunately, it probably also applies to dresses.

</comment><comment><USER21> > I've had middle-aged coworkers (not at Facebook, another internship) > literally GChat me pickup lines (that aren't even clever) to the point I'd > avoid certain portions of the office altogether;

Not to be trite, but the only thing worse than being a girl who gets Gchated pick up lines, is one who doesn't.

OK, now. What am I driving at? My view on a primary reason why there doesn't seem to be more progress is because the Liz Lemon and Jenna Maroney archetypes have yet to come up with a common strategy.

This bit of dialogue basically sums up their differences:

Jenna: Oh, I'm not worried because I have something the other actors don't. A secret weapon.

Liz: Don't say your sexuality.

Jenna: My sexuality!

<comment><USER22> If she feels incomfortable about it, she shouldn't avoid them. Did she tell them it makes her unconfortable? Nerds aren't all good with asserting if someone is confortable with something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the best TA's that I ever had, in any discipline, was a female CS instructor at Cal who was also likely a PhD candidate. My operating theory was that she not only had to be smart enough to be admitted into that program, but that she additionally had to overcome some degree of adversity stemming from gender-based perceptions (which I definitely observed in our department). The entire class was disappointed when our regular professor returned from a conference after she had been instructing for a week because she was so much better at teaching than he was.

</comment><comment><USER24> Rush's brain: "Wow, one of my classmates made it to Facebook? Cool." Rush's brain a moment later, "Wait, TWO of my classmates made it to Facebook?!? Oh... well then I should have applied for that internship." I'm sympathetic to the view that Rush was being sexist. But could it possibly be that Rush was just adding up the numbers and realizing that his odds weren't as bad as he realized?

"and I've been cornered by a stranger at night outside Stanford's Gates Building when leaving office hours." This doesn't strike me as an indictment against Stanford or against Computer Science - just against men in general.

"Worst of all, a 50-year-old married, male coworker at one internship would regularly make it a point in passing to comment on how "fun" my dresses looked." I wasn't there, and again, I'm sympathetic to the idea that this could have been sexism - but I again wonder if this wasn't just a compliment. As a 40-year-old married male, I wonder if I can compliment my female co- workers on how they look. And at what frequency would it become the "worst of all" sexism that female had ever encountered?

"I noticed that management listened more to what my male counterparts had to say even though I was offering insightful feedback." I've seen this first- hand, and it's disgusting. I saw blatant sexism and racism in my college, as well.

I am sympathetic, but some of the examples cited seem questionable to me.

</comment><comment><USER25> One of my female friends has been through broadly similar experiences, and so sadly I'm not particularly surprised by this article. I'm glad that it's been posted, and am somewhat saddened by the defensive nature of a lot of the replies here.

Yes, a few of her examples are a little weak, but I think it paints an overall picture that isn't hugely encouraging for the state of SV, and one that I have no trouble believing.

</comment><comment><USER26> For a typical high-achieving man (in other words, a narcissist) to make it through a program where he's even slightly outside the social mode _without_ a persecution complex, he'd have to possess extraordinary emotional poise. And we've seen that fine analytical minds are at least as prone to biases (system 2 reasoning is the rationalizing one, not the automatic system 1).

So, this woman's reaction is not to her discredit. Almost any person would have it. What's maybe a little sad is how much play such "dear diary" reactions get. I guess people really love a good shouting match (see the many flagkilled comments).

Those capable folks who enter a field out of genuine desire and with no obstacle other than a (real) feeling of social friction will stick with it and prevail. Good luck, outsiders. Anyway, ridiculous feelings of persecution (e.g., they think they're better than me with their college degrees - I'll show them all!) can be harnessed for productivity, so if you can't zen away your angst, use it.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a PhD student here at Stanford, I find this really distressing.

For what little it may be worth to anyone reading this who is(/was) thinking about coming to Stanford, I _have_ heard professors and grad students talk about ways to be more inclusive in their actions and language. I've heard my advisor stumble over "you guys" only to stop and correct himself with "you all". I can't speak for every lab (there are numerous, each with different cultures and norms), but hopefully I speak for everyone when I say that we grad students and the professors are at least open to learning about how we can make the CS program (and the field as a whole) a safer space for everyone, if not _actively_ working toward that goal. If nothing else, we can promote an inclusive culture in how we speak, behave, and in what behavior we (don't) tolerate.

For Lea (and for countless others), I worry her perception of CS has been irreparably damaged. Hopefully that won't be the case going forward.

</comment><comment><USER28> are sexism and sexual harassment the same things? To me it sounded like she listed examples of both. I mean like the stranger in the night isn't exactly "sexism in tech", it is more like industry unrelated harassment bordering on assault. I'd venture to guess that such harassment/assault is even less probable from a college educated tech workers than from other demographic groups.

<comment><USER29> Sexism is pervasive. Sexual Harassment is generally goaded on by permissive environments, especially those that are largely male.

The "Stranger in the Night" comment is definitely harassment, but it is not hard to see how its occurrence is relevant to the larger issue.

<comment><USER28> >it is not hard to see how its occurrence is relevant to the larger issue.

my point is that it is really hard to see. How thinking that somebody is less capable as a programmer (or auto mechanic, TV announcer, whatever...) relevant to actual stalking/harassment/assault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> These are getting funnier. Now back to actually trying to better myself instead of blaming "unconscious" biases for all of my problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've worked many jobs in my life, many . . . people will ask you out everywhere you work. Go be a waitress and see how many co-workers, bosses, and customers try and pick you up.

> I've had middle-aged coworkers (not at Facebook, another internship) > literally GChat me pickup lines (that aren't even clever) to the point I'd > avoid certain portions of the office altogether

</comment><comment><USER32> Having read a lot of the "are you sure she didn't misinterpret that" or "it's not like women can't apply to these jobs" comments, I'd like to help people overcome their knee-jerk reflex and really think about this instead of throwing their hands up.

For those who are questioning her experience, let's consider a piece of satire about bias at Hogwarts (and mentally substituting gender or other demographic of choice for religion here):

"These facts will likely surprise Hogwarts students today, especially those acquainted with the broader history of Judaism at their school... and though Spinoza's invitation to deliver a series of lectures, in 1652, was met with protests, organizers were careful to note that it was the philosopher's virulent anti-wizarding stance that they objected to, not his Jewish extraction.

A turning point in the story of anti-Semitism at Hogwarts came in 1920, when Jewish enrollment, buoyed by excellent Wizarding Admissions Test scores, peaked at thirty per cent. Complaints began to circulate that the "character of the place" was changing. These were vague comments, but no one mistook their meaning. The conservative Board of Governors (which, for the record, did not admit a Jew until Robert Rubin joined, in 1995) exerted enormous pressure on Headmaster Phineas Nigellus Black to "do something about it," and the Class of 1926 was the first to be subject to the notorious Jewish quotas that would stand for almost fifty years. There were no hard numbers, of course—only a directive to the admissions committee to begin placing less weight on test scores and more on certain vaguely defined categories such as "character," "fitness," and "spell diction." But it was enough.

Of course, the situation at Hogwarts had never been anywhere near as bad as at the universities in Eastern and Central Europe, where Jewish wizards as eminent as Freud and Einstein, unable to secure teaching appointments, were forced to use their magic in the service of formulating bizarre Muggle theories. Nor was Hogwarts ever the site of anti-Semitic violence, seen at too many of the Hungarian and Austrian wizarding schools during the tumultuous years after the First World War. There, student "demonstrations" often included the use of the so-called Jewish spells, cruel incantations that caused the peyes (side curls) to become scalding hot, the phylacteries to tighten around the wearer's head—and, of course, the notorious "kipa spinner."

No, Hogwarts was never the setting for any bigotry as brutal as that, and if I persist in recalling the minor injustices it is for the sake of guarding against future anti-Semitism in its most subtle forms." [1]

1\. [http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/true-history- jew...](http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/true-history-jewish- wizards-hogwarts-harry-potter)

</comment><comment><USER33> I know guys make all kinds of jokes during work, some of them are not PC. If they do / do not make those jokes with a female coworker, which one is considered as sexism?

</comment><comment><USER12> Yup, sounds like standard fare. I would have been impressed if she'd documented and reported this shitty behaviour. Then again Confrontation is difficult, no matter the context.

<comment><USER11> As someone who has tried to document and report shitty behavior, it's important to keep in mind how risky that is.

Here are a few patterns I've observed:

pattern (a) MAN: _does shitty thing_ ; WOMAN: hey please stop; WOMAN's performance review: "has conflicts with MAN"

pattern (b) MAN: _does shitty thing_ ; WOMAN: _reports shitty thing_ ; MANAGER: oh MAN is a nice guy, why don't you try working it out yourself

pattern (c) MAN: _does shitty thing_ ; WOMAN: _does nothing because she actually reports to MAN_

<comment><USER34> This happens in hierarchies regardless of genders. Anyone bullied in school or a workplace can tell you this. You would need to measure if it in fact happens more often if it's a woman being a victim which is very difficult as most of those situations are not reported by neither gender.

<comment><USER11> See, I actually know it has to do with gender because I used to have a beard. I got treated very differently back then.

<comment><USER22> How are you sure that what your experienced was solely based on gender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps the people who have downvoted every comment so far would like to contribute to the conversation?

<comment><USER30> The conversation is they're right and your sexist!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> She doesn't mention other women at her internships. If she had spoken to other women and they too experienced levels of sexism then yes; but since she doesn't make the mention we don't know.

</comment><comment><USER37> Most of these incidents just sound like guys who were genuinely trying to be nice or funny, but because anything can be seen through the lens of sexism, this woman took the opportunity to consider herself oppressed.

<comment><USER38> Hopefully you can understand that intent isn't everything?

Being considerate of others isn't just saying "pshht i didn't mean anything by it!" it's actually thinking about how other people might react in the circumstances they've been put in.

You can call sexism a lens, but it might also help to understand the experiences others have lived (from their POV, not yours) to see why it's a lens that others are brought to employing.

<comment><USER37> Perhaps, but there certainly are some incidents which are ambiguous. I fear that by taking that mindset we will create an environment where people have more incentive to not speak to or interact with women because they might get in trouble for an action that was either careless or consciously intended not to be sexist but gets twisted around and made to look that way. I certainly think that saying something like "you are less capable because you are a woman" is sexist but saying something like "your dress is fun" does not unambiguously imply that it was a sexual advance. Why can't it just be a nice unthreatening comment?

<comment><USER39> > people have more incentive to not speak to or interact with women because > they might get in trouble for an action that was either careless or > consciously intended not to be sexist but gets twisted around and made to > look that way

This is how I feel about most tech gatherings now, even online discussions (I'm actually a bit nervous about this comment). Any interaction I have with a woman in tech, or any discussion about women in tech that I might participate in, has the potential for career-threatening blowback. So far I've been following the War Games strategy: "The only way to win, is not to play." But that doesn't feel great either, because now I'm consciously avoiding people who otherwise might have been great to have a conversation with.

The worst part is, I didn't have that problem until the whole women in tech thing was dragged into the light. I'm not saying that shouldn't have happened: it's obvious by now that there are problems that need solving. There have been consequences, however, of which I'm not sure the more vocal members of this movement are cognizant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wow another privileged woman speaking about her "feels".

I take a bus with Mexican woman whose husband beats her but she is too scared to go to law enforcement( her being an illegal immigrant and all).

The contrast between two women is insane. Yet we talk everyday endlessly about the former not the latter. I am disgusted by this whole thing. Seriously WTF.

<comment><USER41> Just because the Mexican woman is in a worse situation compared to the Stanford grad, it doesn't make the Stanford grad's situation any less worse. If you were not allowed to eat any food once a week, and I told you "there's starving children in Africa with NO food 3 times a week" does that make you feel better about your situation? You also happen to be posting on a tech website, so that would explain why we talk about the former and not the latter. Outside silicon valley no one cares about the former but there are many organizations trying their best to help with the latter.

<comment><USER42> In case you were wondering, that argument is known as the fallacy of relative privation: "an opponent's arguments should be dismissed or ignored, on the grounds of there existing more important problems, despite these issues being often completely unrelated to the subject at hand."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation)

<comment><USER40> I knew someone would post this. I am talking about two people who work in the same office but one is treated like a princesses and another like invisible.

This whole gender gap thing is used by profiteers like "diversity consultants", media outlets like the original post for page views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There seems to be something wrong with this commenting system. I tried to respond to someone who responded to what I wrote and the response did not take twice.

This is what I wrote: Changing others, changing men, changing culture is very difficult. Nice to talk about it but it really doesn't happen. What one can do is to change themselves and part of that is understanding that those people are ASD are more likely to be insensitive than others and that is partially a genetic phenomena. There is nothing wrong with women being more competitive than men in general and learning new technologies by going to meetups and otherwise. For example, most programmers know Java/Hadoop and far fewer really work with Scala/Spark. Learn advanced machine learning algorithms. Have a good understanding of computer architecture and computer chip fabrication.

I have been to a number of meetups and I have never seen any hostility towards women. These tend to be rather technical where meritocracy is respected.

In sum, those in technology are not wishful thinkers. One cannot change others, only themselves. Men are not going to change at least in the short term. I have given examples of a realistic means for dealing with the situation that I have seen women and others use.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ahhh Stanford undergrads. Whenever I'm thinking this life is too brutal I can always count on them to remind me there are people out there whose entire lives have been shrouded in naiveté and privilege.

I wonder how much the media is to blame for this young woman's mindset? Did she ever consider that her boss might not be asking her opinion because she was an intern? Or just jump to I'm not getting 100% attention on a silver platter, must be sexism? It's not clear from the article.

<comment><USER45> _" I've had middle-aged coworkers ... GChat me pickup lines"_

She is also kind of age-biased. Age doesn't matter, all kind of gender/legal- age/race relations are accepted by modern society.

<comment><USER46> Let's posit "middle-aged" means "in their 40s". She's a junior in college, so let's say 20 or so.

So you're suggesting that objecting to getting pickup lines from people _literally old enough to be her father_ is "age-biased", and not, you know, "creepy"? Hmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Many men who program computers, especially those who are very competent, are ASD (on the Autistic Spectrum), eg, perhaps some form of Aspergers. In Autism Researcher Simon Baron-Cohen's terminology they are "hyper" systemic but "hypo" empathic. Thus, they may be acting socially unaware, especially compared with women and people should keep that in mind.

Also, women should consider at working and at least understanding and be able to talk about higher levels of technology that many of their male counterparts have not worked with. One woman I knew who has never worried about the issues in this article got an EE degree from a top rated university and did a lot of C++ contract work at high rates. Part of her education was being mentored by men who were very competent in programming yet older than she was.

Any guy that thinks he is smarter can be "put in his place" by someone who knows technology better and can show it.

Also, women should go to Meetups where they can me people in industry and learn new technologies that they may not have had in school. In the meetups that I attend in NYC, I see relatively few women and meetups are a great place to make contacts and learn new technologies.

<comment><USER47> 1\. Being ASD is not a carte blanche.

2\. Suggesting that "simply knowing more" is sufficient ignores the way many men will discount a woman's knowledge compared to a man's knowledge simply because she's a woman.

3\. Can we not resort to putting people into their place to establish dominance hierarchies? What about synergistic differences? Those are tremendously valuable.

4\. Many meetups can be frustrating or downright hostile to women. Even well intentioned organizers can have a difficult time attracting women if attendance is already primarily male. Let's not forget that women make about 70¢ per $1 that men make, so they tend to have less opportunity to spend leisure time at a meetup.

This is a problem, and we can't ask women to simply try harder. They've been trying harder their whole lives. Perhaps it's time for us men to try harder for once.</comment></comment>


Show HN: WildDuck – Self-hosted modern email server - <AUTHOR> https://wildduck.email/ <comment><USER3> I would love to set this up but I've seen too many posts on the front page of HN about how gmail is blocking their incoming mail and they are powerless to do anything about it.

<comment><USER4> If your hosting email on a residential ISP, your gonna have a rough time. Comparatively, hosting on any of the notable VPS providers (DO, Linode, OVH, etc) has had fine deliverability in my experience, though emails may occasionally get flagged as spam.

Beyond that, the only insidious behavior I've seen has been Outlook.com hosted addresses accepting email, but then not delivering the email to the Inbox or Spam. Mysteriously, this issue disappears whenever I start going up the IT chain on the reciever's side. If the MTA is going to drop email, it should reject it rather than accept it (as otherwise the Outlook MTAs are falsely accepting mail that they will not deliver).

<comment><USER5> IIRC though DO tries to make sure a released IP is returned back to you if you re-provision quickly, you run the risk of losing your well groomed IP for outbound mail if there is an issue with your droplet.

Additionally, IIRC they forbid outbound SMTP on their Floating IP system. (I can't find an official doc on this matter). Either way, you can't get a PTR for your floating IP, which can harm deliverability[1]

For that reason, you may want to consider AWS & an Elastic IP that you can own, groom, and move around [2]

[1] [https://ideas.digitalocean.com/ideas/DO-I-1023](https://ideas.digitalocean.com/ideas/DO-I-1023)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/ec2-p...](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- center/ec2-port-25-throttle/)

<comment><USER6> Furthermore, DigitalOcean silently drops all SMTP traffic on IPv6, which can be really confusing since you'll simply timeout and it isn't mentioned in the documentation. They do that because they implemented IPv6 against all standard industry practices (which were helpfully gathered in a RFC) and within hours of launching IPv6 the few /64s from which they were allocating customers /124s to landed on blacklists.

It's been 5 years since and they still have no plans to do IPv6 properly and allocate /64s [0].

This is the main reason I switched to Linode, who will happily allocate you a IPv6 range (/116, /64, /56) that can be rerouted between VPSes with a simple ticket (takes <1 hour).

[0]: [https://ideas.digitalocean.com/ideas/DO-I-1366](https://ideas.digitalocean.com/ideas/DO-I-1366)

<comment><USER7> Damn....

I wish I'd seen this literally yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > While WildDuck is more secure by definition than most alternatives > ... > > You can run WildDuck on any system that supports Node.js,

Node.js and more secure by definition? That sounds _very_ strange to me...

<comment><USER9> I get that this is a meme, but v8 is one of the most battle-hardened runtimes out there, plus you don't manage your own memory or concurrency primitives, which are the sources of most security issues.

<comment><USER10> v8 may be badass. but the quality of many of the libraries in the node ecosystem is .... questionable at best. Lots of newbs with no clues about security throwing out packages that people end up with in their dependency trees and never stop to ponder the security / quality of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like self hosted emails is gonna be the next big thing, kinda like the pi-hole trend. This is awesome

<comment><USER12> Been running a postfix/dovecot/spamassassin stack for years. Absolutely love it. Want to wrote up a joke server side filter that bounces emails that are too snarky by sentiment analysis? That's a simple dovecot-pigeonhole-sieve filter. Lots of fun for all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always interesting to see new MTAs! I'm not convinced that storing mails (including attachments) in MongoDB is a good solution. What's wrong with the filesystem? It's designed for that purpose. You can (and should) of course store metadata in a DB to make searching easier, but when it comes to the actual emails I think the filesystem is the best place. One less thing to break. Easier to backup, mangle etc.

<comment><USER14> It's significantly easier to make an external data store resilient than to try to do that with a local filesystem. Backups, clustering, HA are all easier when there's a strong separation. In addition things like querying and lookups will be faster if you're utilizing a database

<comment><USER13> A filesystem doesn't have to be local. There are plenty of filesystems to choose from with different properties.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using maildir (the current standard for mail storage) with any kind of remote file system is not the best environment to have. Maildir stores every email into a separate file and then uses rename() for every flag change. Marking 1000 messages as "Seen/Unseen" or adding a flag or moving to Trash means 1000 rename() calls in the file system. Multiply that with thousands of users also logged in to the system and doing their own things - you get many millions of inodes and rename()'s flying around all over. Good luck keeping a consistent copy or not crashing the mail server software as it waits for some queued rename() call over network FS to finish (and expects it to take nanoseconds as this is how long it takes in a local FS) while blocking everything else.

<comment><USER13> I don't see how storing the mails in a database will improve the situation. You will still have to update 1000s of records when you mark 1000 messages as seen/unseen or move them into the trash. And the DB will then write the changes to a filesystem.

One of Maildir's design goals was to make it safer to use on networked file systems such as NFS (compared to mbox).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Back when I was hosting my emails myself, my main complaint was that it required plugging many pieces together, in a traditional Unix fashion. This was before configuration management was really a thing, so it resulted in a Frankenstein setup that worked but was afraid to touch.

If there was a more modern all-in-one-binary solution handling MTA/DKIM/IMAP/webmail with sane defaults I would maybe go back to self hosting.

<comment><USER16> See poste.io, it solves exactly this problem. (I've created poste because I administer multiple smaller mailserevers and thus scratching my own itch)

<comment><USER17> This is really impressive. Perhaps do a Show HN for it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is JMAP support planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, at least not any time soon. JMAP is a beast that should not have been invented. It tries to convert TCP/IMAP (already a bad protocol by todays standards) into HTTP/JSON, just using a different transport while keeping the spirit.

Instead WildDuck has its own simple REST API to build email clients against ([https://api.wildduck.email/](https://api.wildduck.email/)). It is not standard by any means and there are no wide client support but it is really easy to integrate with other projects as it is basically just a wrapper against database access, just like you would access blog posts or whatever via an API.

<comment><USER19> Just to add to this point, I wanted to implement JMAP after only half completing an IMAP server implementation. Unfortunately, its just as bad only "this time with HTTP and Json". The batching advantages of JMAP could be generically done by using HTTP 2 and/or GraphQL.

<comment><USER20> I shall reply to your comment and your parent comment in one go here:

I work on FastMail's web interface, which is now based on JMAP. Here are my opinions on the matter.

What papaf says is flatly not true. What andris9 says is generally unreasonable.

At its core, the API part of JMAP is an RPC framework, with defined semantics for object synchronisation and querying. The most important part of it is those semantics, and they are necessarily more complex than what web developers are generally used to. Simple traditional-REST APIs or the likes of GraphQL lack those object synchronisation semantics altogether, and are _wildly inferior_ for practical email clients. There is just no comparison at all.

There is more to JMAP than just the API calls, though. What I think is the most obviously important part is that it also defines a push mechanism, including the ability for email clients to be notified of changes; this is tied into the object synchronisation semantics with the ability to ask questions like "what changed between these two states?"—so that your email client (be it on the web or not) can be told "something changed in the emails" and efficiently fetch the delta and apply it to the user interface and any persistent storage you may use. This is something that the shown WildDuck API does not appear to support at all, and is in fact something entirely unsupportable on such a style of API. _These things are hard to do properly,_ in a way that will give any semblance of performance or efficiency.

(It looks like WildDuck's web interface does have some way arranged so that changes get pushed to the interface, but that doesn't appear to be part of its public API, and I can't imagine that it's actually a good, flexible and efficient solution. I haven't looked into how it is implemented at all, however. I'm open to discussion of what I'm confident will be its shortcomings, if you don't like the aspersions I am casting.)

Now to return to papaf's remark: JMAP's method batching is _not_ achievable with HTTP/2 or GraphQL; the key difference is backreferences, whereby you can establish data dependencies between method calls, so that you pass part of one method call as an argument to subsequent method calls. To pick a common example of something that the FastMail web interface does, this allows you to express in one HTTP request the following: "find the first ten emails in Inbox, collapsing threads (so that you get one message from each thread only); then, given those, get the threads that they are in; then, given those threads, get the basic details of the emails that are contained in those threads." In the absence of backreferences, you would need probably three round trips, or a special case in the API that limits flexibility.

I will add that JMAP can be usefully combined with HTTP/2 so that you can issue multiple batches of requests simultaneously and use the results as they return.

Please read through all the content on the front page of [https://jmap.io/](https://jmap.io/). It provides good justification for why quite a few things are how they are.

Remember this most important fact: JMAP is an object synchronisation protocol.

<comment><USER21> Would it be best to wait to write a JMAP server until the spec is finalized? Or should I consider the current one mostly final?

I've had one look at it and while the protocol looks really good, it also looks like I'd rather not implement it more than once ;)

<comment><USER20> The spec is currently in the editor's queue for publication. I believe that means that no further changes are anticipated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is cool. The world could definitely use more email server implementations, even if JS isn't my cup of tea.

Have you considered supplementing Mongo with block storage like S3, though? I've found it to be a pretty much perfect match for storing immutable mail messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> For messages no, for attachments yes. WildDuck parses stored messages and separates attachments from rest of message data. Deduplicated attachments are then stored to MongoDB as GridFS files but this could be just as well S3 in the future. Message data needs to be in Mongo because of indexing and speed, attachments do not have such requirements and could be stored anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >андрис@уайлддак.орг

Russian inside me chuckled.

<comment><USER24> firstname.lastname@example.com

For the non-multilingual (like myself).

<comment><USER25> You didn't translate the TLD, which is .org, not .opr.

<comment><USER24> You learn something new every day! Google translate didn't help me there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Made in Estonia as I see. Congrats ! Very cool project, I really like the GUI part.

</comment><comment><USER27> How do you handle spam filtering for self hosted servers? I know there are black lists for SMTP servers, but I mean the content based filters that are updated based on recent spam signatures?

<comment><USER28> Speaking as someone who runs a commercial antispam SAAS, content filtering is increasingly irrelevant, and isn't nearly as effective as reputation filtering or bayesian classification.

<comment><USER29> Back in the day I ran an anti-spam service, users would point their MX to my server(s), I'd do the filtering and pass on valid mails to their real hosts.

It was a great learning experience, and I got to see a lot of volume. Sadly I never had enough customers to make the jump to the big-leagues, but it was fun.

(I'd do proper SMTP-time rejection, but also archive rejected mails in a database for 30 days. Letting you browse / search through the rejected stuff - just in case I made a mistake, and also to see how good I was doing.)

Even then content-scanning was not the best, but I used a lot of heuristics and I was quite proud of some of them. For example I "defeated" fast-flux hosts, via heuristics to lookup the number of addresses for a domain. Even large domains such as gmail only have 1-4 address-records, though of course their anycast and multiplexed. If you got a mail from a domain with 7+ MX records it was 99% spam.)

At one point I documented damn near everything, after I'd shut down, but it seems I left the domains I used expire. I should see if I can dig out copies.

(I used qpsmtpd as my core, and wrote a ton of glue code and custom plugins. Later the qpsmtpd-proxy was ported to javascript as Haraka - but I didn't covert my code even as I ported some plugins back.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice! I recently migrated my home server from Ubuntu to freebsd and was lazy to migrate my postfix/dovecot/sieve/all-the-other-parts and eventually kept it running in a VM instead.. This gives me the idea to try and migrate to Wildduck as it seems easier to deploy.

Two questions that I have:

1\. Is it possible to plug it into a mysql db instead of mongo?Self hosted apps are heavily relying on SQL db, so it feels more fluent to have a sql support

2\. Is there a way to migrate existing postfix/dovecot mail server to this if I end up liking it?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. no. WildDuck is built to use MongoDB sharding to be able to easily scale both vertically and horizontally without single point of failures - <USER2> component of WildDuck (DB, IMAP, POP3, MX, SMTP) can be replicated. SQL does not fit too well into this model. If you want to use SQL then you could look into DBMail

2\. migrating is possible only syncing via IMAP. There is a maildir importer but it is not open sourced (yet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> See also [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net). Thank you Andris for making this possible.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow I was looking for something like that since ages. Best part, it's open source an made with Node.js/Redis, a stack I deeply love :)

</comment><comment><USER33> "it does not touch the filesystem"

How does this work exactly? Mongo would have to touch a FS at the end of the day, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, MongoDB does manage files but for the email app this is behind an abstraction and possibly in a different machine. I was more referring to maildir/mbox where the email server has to write and read files while juggling with user/group permissions, invoking shell and such. WildDuck just writes and reads stuff from a database like a regular web server software.

<comment><USER33> Got it. I suspected that's where you were going with that but just wanted to clarify. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Thanks, this is so timely. I was looking for something like this for weeks. All I want is IMAP server which can be managed via IMAP client api.

</comment><comment><USER35> Cool project. Been looking for something like this for ages. But still cant figure out from the docs how to send email.

</comment><comment><USER36> What's the difference with mailcow (a fully dockerized email solution) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mailcow packages Dovecot, Postfix etc. in an easy to use solution. WildDuck has its own and quite different implementations for most of these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would love to try this.

Is there a way to configure catch-all addresses for domains?

</comment><comment><USER38> Does it come with official Docker image? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't maintain a Docker image myself but the best version you could consider semi-official would be this [https://github.com/astzweig/docker- wildduck](https://github.com/astzweig/docker-wildduck)

<comment><USER21> I'm using this image. Can vouch for greatness.</comment></comment></comment>


Justice Dept. Accuses Yale of Discrimination in Application Process - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/yale-discrimination.html <comment><USER2> Didn't the supreme court rule in favor of hardvard in a recent discrimination case? How are the facts different in this case?

<comment><USER3> They aren't - and as much as I'd like to avoid being political, this is just an example of the White House using the department of justice as a vehicle to carry out its agenda. It's purely politically motivated - another example of an attempt of legislation from the bench.

<comment><USER4> That dastardly agenda of equality before the law

<comment><USER5> I don't genuinely know if it's equality before the law. The justice department appears to apply law in a non-equal fashion (during a recent congressional questioning, the chief of the justice department explained that he was more lenient on allies of the current administration due to their advanced age and their chances of dying from covid in jail, while there are plenty of other people older for which the justice department is not arguing leniency). A tried and true hat of investigation- interviewing someone with truths you know they will deny and then arresting them for lying- was determined by the justice department to be fundamentally unfair to an ally of the current administration, while the same strategy is currently being used to pursue cases related to parties who are not allies of the administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who didn't know that Yale discriminates in their application process has never heard of the Bush family dynasty or they are as thick as a brick.

<comment><USER7> Yes. But for some reason this DOJ isn't concerned with legacy, just a grotesque misapplication of Title VI less than 3 months from a presidential election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The Justice Department accused Yale of violating Title VI of the Civil > Rights Act of 1964, which the university is required to comply with as a > condition of receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.

I wonder how difficult it would be for Yale to just say "no thank you" to all of that gov't funding. Especially if they believed that the justice department finding was politically motivated.

<comment><USER9> If it only affects 'millions of dollars' then it'd be manageable for Yale.

If it affected federal research or pell grants, that would be much more substantial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess if you want to enforce social justice, and only have a few minutes, you need to use proxies like race to speed up the process.

You've got grand scales to balance -- no time to actually learn about the individual.

<comment><USER11> There's actually no need to use race as a proxy. For instance, you could just help poor folks regardless of race. If certain races tend to be poorer than others due to historical circumstances, that gets automatically taken into account. If the distribution of poverty across races changes over time, the process responds automatically to take it into account.

This has the advantage that it can easily react to individual people instead of forcibly identifying people with stereotypes about their race. For instance, members of historically privileged groups who are nevertheless very poor can still get help instead of being treated as if they are an aggressor in society. This could cut down on a considerable amount of vitriol and unrest by treating people more fairly.

<comment> john-shaffer That's unlikely to happen simply because it might actually work. Many political figures want people to feel oppressed. If people's circumstances were improved enough (or their perception changed enough) that they no longer felt oppressed, then those politicians would have trouble getting votes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ongoing discussions.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149606)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think there is an extreme confusion about this portrayal of affirmative action as a sort of 'reverse-racism'. It's not actually a judgement based on race or ethnicity, but on the factors that give people from these groups a harder time to get into the top universities.

I'm sure you could construct a sort of proxy of income/test-scores/hardship or whatever that approximates exactly what affirmative action does while formally avoiding the race issue.

<comment><USER15> "Affirmative action", in the common understanding of the term, refers to non- race-blind processes in admissions and so forth. If, while controlling for all other variables, a person of race A has a different chance of being admitted than a person of race B because of their race, then yes, we certainly are talking about a form of racism.

On the other hand, as you point out, one could design a race-blind system that gives a leg up to people who grew up in poverty, people whose parents were incarcerated on account of the war on drugs, etc. This system would disproportionately give a leg up to black students, so when looked at from an angle of averaged-out racial group dynamics it may "approximate exactly what affirmative action does."

However, crucially, on an _individual_ level such a system would not discriminate between otherwise similar applicants on the arbitrary basis of race. Unlike affirmative action, such an alternative system as you describe would not be racist, and that is no small distinction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are they also going to sue Yale for legacy admissions and preferring children of parents who make large donations?

<comment><USER10> This is about a particular statute that prohibits discrimination based on certain factors.

You could make an indirect argument that legacy admissions are a form of racial preference.

As for having a lot of money... well, that's what private colleges are about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can't drink from that fountain because you're Black. You can't go to that university because you're Asian.

Both looks like plain old racism to me.

<comment><USER18> I think you're being downvoted because you draw a false equivalency.

Fountain rules in the Jim Crow era were uniformly applied to all African Americans. The university question is whether or not race should be included in admission consideration given that some races have been historically disadvantaged relative to others.

When a purely rank-ordered 'merit' based approach would yield a heavily homogeneous outcome does it make sense to try use an approach that gets closer to a representative sample of the country?

<comment><USER19> > _heavily homogeneous outcome_

You can classify people along lots of dimensions including race, ethnicity, gender, religion, wealth, urban vs. rural upbringing, sexual orientation, introvert vs. extrovert, political leaning, and so on.

Your claim of _homogenous outcome_ is based on how many of these dimensions? Just one?

Because of the immigration policies of the United States, people of certain ethnicities tend to be crème de la crème, for example, if you are from Asian countries you have to be in the top 0.1% of your country in order to immigrate to the US. As a result, if you take the top 10% of performers in High School they tend to have more Asians. To limit their advancement based on their race does not just punish them it punishes the nation by depriving the nation of its best brains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The principle of race blindness has consequences. If you ignore those consequences this isn't a tough call, making decisions based on race is bad. If you are willing to take into account things like history, socioeconomic reality, and the motives of people supporting one side or another then this gets much more complicated. Personally I'd be in favor of stating that intentional discrimination against historically privileged or over represented classes is a good thing. Of course, I don't assert that to be an unarguable truth.

<comment><USER21> Bad history wasn't caused by race blindness but quite the opposite, by racial discrimination.

There are many ways to justify racial discrimination, they are all wrong. Not the first time "the privileged" were said to be in the wrong either.

If you want to help people who are poor, live in poor neighbourhoods and whose parents have no degrees (example of effects of bad history), go ahead and no one will judge you use those factors and end up helping mostly people of a certain race, as long as you're not actually taking their race into account when making decisions.

But that's not what's happening, or at least what DOJ is alleging is that Yale does in fact use race as primary decision factor. They should not be looking at race as a factor at all, even if supreme court allows for that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A new way to collect, organize & share topics of interest. - <AUTHOR> http://www.collective.li/

<comment><USER2> Meh, only Facebook login. I never use facebook and I hate logging in with it, so its a no-go for me until they add more OAuth services, or their own login system.

You would think its hard to add more than 1 OAuth, but its not, I absolutely hate how everyone only does facebook. Add a few others. I personally would prefer to use Twitter, others might prefer Google or Live.

Its not hard to add them people.

<comment><USER3> We are working on our own login system because we realize we need to provide another way for people to log in to our site.

Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I regret adding to the pile of negativity, but here's some suggests on how to improve it:

1\. Either scale the page so that it doesn't take up enough space for a scroll bar to appear, or make it so that the photo gallery does not override scrolling. As it currently is, it is a troublesome user experience because I want to scroll down to see the rest of the page but sometimes my action causes the photo gallery to change.

2\. Use different music for the video, as at least for me it is currently synonymous with Treehouse, so it doesn't make your brand as distinct.

3\. Make the padding and margins on elements more consistent(the welcome page has no margin on the top, but lots on the bottom ), and add more in places(such as the index page).

4\. Make a place for the footer. As it is, it appears half hazardously placed and not thought about or deliberate. I would suggest centering (in relation to the entire page) below the rest of the content.

5\. A few fixes on the page you get sent to just after logging in and selecting an FB album: #loading should be position:fixed, not position:absolute; The loading gif should have a transparent background. Getting one that looks good can be hard but it's worth the effort. It's probably an error with my specific account, but the loading screen is all I see when I go to the app after logging in and selecting the album "Profile Pictures" on my Facebook, which is composed of 4 images. It never gets past the loading page, even after refersh.

6\. Re-do the video. It looks more like a family vacation slideshow rather than a presentation for a website. It should have little to no photo effects, and display images in the context of your website. A good chunk of the video is just pictures with animation or effects.

<comment><USER3> Hi I'm the co-founder of Collective.li. Let me say Thank You for the detailed feedback. Each one's a work item on my list for the weekend. I'm sorry you were not able to see the site after the loading symbol. Can you tell me what browser you were using? We support Chrome and Safari for now and Firefox is semi supported.

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Along with the obvious question, how this is different from pinterest, I have one constructive comment, please don't use images for fonts, use a web-font, it will look better, load faster and will be a little bit more up to date generally.

Also the video loads slowly and gets stuck, and has no narration, and doesn't really show what the product does.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. You'll see web-fonts on the home page soon. We cheated with the images because I couldn't find a comparable web-font at the time.

We should have gone the route of hosting the video on YouTube instead of our server. Seems like my shoestring budget video production needs work too.

By the way I'm the cofounder of Collective.li and really appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The video format isn't supported. There is nothing on how to fix this. If I need a plugin to watch the instructional video to use the site I would make that plugin very easy to access. Just a though. Maybe it's just me though.

</comment><comment><USER7> But I'm on Chrome(ium)! <http://i.imgur.com/n0IHH.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> That is weird, looking into it right now.

<comment><USER7> so I cleared my cache and cookies. It works now. Ideas?

(Your video isn't loading)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any sample links? I really don't want to watch a video.

<comment><USER3> Hi I'm the co-founder of Collective.li. Currently we don't support Internet Explorer but you can try the following link on Chrome, Safari or Firefox <http://www.collective.li/App/#/Collection/213>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I must say, it reminds me too much of Windows 8..

<comment><USER3> <http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/27/design-trends-2012/>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all your feedback. A lot of people asked for some Sample Collections, here you go -

<http://www.collective.li/App/#/Collection/671>

<http://www.collective.li/App/#/Collection/3829>

<http://www.collective.li/App/#/Collection/664>

Let me know if you guys want more.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suggest different login options other than FB.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. I wish more sites could support OpenID.</comment></comment>


'Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour': Rise and Fall of a Groundbreaking Show (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-oral-history-1060153 <comment><USER2> I was rather young at the time this was on, but I have very fond memories of this show. Even then I realized the distinction between "wholesome" and "risque" humour based on this show. It's rare and treasured for a punchline to serve both simultaneously. Adult innuendo for the adults watching and innocent jokes for tender-young ears.

I also learned the comedic value of sarcasm.

I don't know how well this show would work for an audience today, but it does hold a warm place in my heart for a good time in my life.

Thanks for the reminder SmackToward. I'm going to go get a tissue while I miss my father.

<comment><USER3> The Smothers Brothers were one of the few "adult" comedy shows my parents let me watch in my preteen years (it was the 1988-1989 revival). Some of the jokes flew right over my head, but there was enough funny stuff in there that I did get that it left an impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is the segment they talk about, in which Keith Moon blows up his drum kit with too much gunpowder, supposedly leaving Pete Townshend permanently deaf in one ear:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiSKu7SbGNQ#t=20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiSKu7SbGNQ#t=20)

It's worth watching the whole thing because the intro shows how subtle Tommy Smothers was with his deadpan, neurotic character.

</comment><comment><USER5> That was a nice read, and I'm especially pleased to read Steve Martin's comments.

Martin is awesome-- besides being a great writer, actor, and comedian he's also a world-class banjo player. Amazingly accomplished.

<comment> mark-r I would love to hear the album he did with Edie Brickell.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r I'm really surprised to see this here, I wouldn't think the typical HNer would be old enough to remember the show. Those guys were brilliant.

<comment><USER6> Plenty of us old farts here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I came along well after this show ended, but my dad had a CD of them that we listened to as he took me with him on computer repair service calls. Those trips were why I'm in CS now, so this brings back fond memories. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER8> My parents had an LP of Mom Always Liked You Best, and we listened to it countless times when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. I just played it for my 13-year-old, who found it exactly as hilarious and relatable as I did. (Even when I was a kid I had no idea who Frank Gorshin was; the pop cultural references were old back then when I listened to it!)

Highly recommend listening to them.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a good article too (2010): [https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130569...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130569467)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this -- I've added the _Dangerously Funny_ book to my to-read list!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dear HN: I see you have changed the title of this submission from the article's actual title, "'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour' at 50: The Rise and Fall of a Groundbreaking Variety Show."

I would argue that this changes it for the worse. The _Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour_ really was a groundbreaking show; it was a significant part of the revolution in comedy and culture that was happening in the late '60s. But if you aren't old enough to know that from experience, the name of the show itself won't tell you that; it'll just sound like one more old TV show. You won't have any idea why you should bother clicking through to read the article.

I understand the desire to de-linkbaitify headlines, but the way that's done currently ends up doing lots of submissions a disservice. It completely removes any indication of why the submission is actually interesting.

<comment><USER4> I'm not old enough to have watched it, but know it was a groundbreaking show. No doubt that's true of many readers here. I think it's good for HN to err on the side of assuming literacy.

Not every title should explain itself. It's good for curiosity if readers have to work a little ([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22work%20a%20little%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)). Being on HN's front page, given the unusual topic, indicates something that might be worth clicking on. By the way, the article is on the front page because moderators saw that it had been overlooked and put it in the second- chance pool (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)).

I don't think we changed this title because the submitted title was linkbaity. It was because we needed to squeeze in "(2017)". That requires 7 chars and the submitted title was already running up against the 80 char limit. I'll take another crack at it above.</comment></comment>


Words Make the Man - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.org/words-make-the-man/ <comment><USER2> > Similarly, people who refer to a single person as "they," or cannot bring > themselves to accurately describe another person by sexual characteristics > also broadcast important things about the durability of their connection to > reality.

First half of the sentence is idiotic because singular "they" has hundreds of years of historical use behind it and I don't think you'll find a professional grammarian or linguist who would object to its use.

Second half of the sentence is thinly veiled transphobia.

The rest is just the same old conservative "why can't words by words!!" bleating.</comment>


Pandas (Python data analysis tookit) version 0.8.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#v0-8-0-june-29-2012

<comment><USER2> wesm, I can't thank you enough for this library.

I own and operate a quantitative finance business. Pandas (+ numpy) has been a godsend. Not only do I not have to pay for matlab licenses, but even the less experience programmers on my team have been insanely productive.

Thank you.

<comment><USER3> What do you see the advantages of Python/pandas/numpy/etc over matlab as? Do you use any toolboxes?

<comment><USER2> Basically, pandas, numpy, and matplotlib give me everything I could have wanted out of matlab from a numerical capabilities and graphing perspective.

In my opinion, matlab's excellent object inspection and debugging capabilities can be replaced with strict testing standards in your code-base.

On top of that, I get to use a whole slew of libraries that are non mathematically related -- frameworks for web services, accessing ftp servers, sending e-mails -- a lot of automated "utility" stuff.

And it is all "free". Fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pandas is outstanding, I love it.

This may not be the place for this, but...

I just built pandas 0.8.0 and it would not build with MinGW 0.5. The problem is -mno-cygwin is no longer recognized by MinGW's gcc. My solution was to edit distutils/cygwincompiler.py and remove references to -mno-cygwin. THIS IS NOT PANDAS'S FAULT! I just thought I'd point it out in case other people run into the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wes: Thanks!

Anyone reading this who wants to get started with Pandas: The early release of "Python for Data Analysis" (<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do>) is already very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> This release looks like a great upgrade to a great library. The idea of using python as my "one language" is really appealing, but I still find myself falling back on R pretty consistently when it comes to data manipulation/analysis. As pandas matures I see myself doing this less and less.

Thanks Wes and everyone else who pitched in!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested to see some of your R use cases where you perceive that things could be improved in pandas; a year ago there were lots of things you couldn't do, but a lot has changed :) Nowadays, the tables have turned and there are lots of things you can do in pandas that are nearly impossible to do in a non-kludgy way in R (particularly many things with hierarchical indexing).

<comment><USER7> Wes - I think that the reason I would keep using R over pandas is all the packages in the R universe. Which I suppose is the reason why you would use pandas over R if you had more experience with python.

E.g. ggplot2 still seems to be quite a bit better than matplotlib. Also for the random data examination/sketching I absolutely love rstudio due to it's integrated help/plotting/file browsing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone give a rundown about how Pandas compares with numpy ?

<comment><USER9> It's intended to be a library for working with data stored in multi dimensional in-memory tables. Think loading a .csv file or relational table into memory, performing some transformations, adding columns, merging with other tables, and grouping data, filtering, sorting, all while handling missing data gracefully.

Maybe I would describe it as combing a spreadsheet with SQL data transformation capabilities - but better.

It requires numpy because it uses ndarray as it's underlying data structure and you can also use many/most? of the numpy data analysis functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome to see this release. Great stuff for timeseries data analysis among other things. Thanks Pandas!</comment>