So, what would you say to an underprivileged, unattractive, short, Caucasian male? Perhaps, "I'm sorry, but I'm going step on your rights and make you a casualty in the fight for the 'greater good', as defined by me. Please step aside and keep quiet." Or would you bother saying anything to him at all?
Maybe you aren't obsessed with driving wedges between various groups in society, causing them to become factions with increasing animosity towards one another, but you're doing it.
It's odd: No group hates underprivileged, unattractive whites males nearly as much as privileged, attractive white males. It's a cruel form of preening.
Race, gender, class, etc. are inextricably tangled up together. I'm not sure why you (seem to) think being underprivileged and Caucasian somehow means you will be trampled on or have your rights taken away. (How exactly?)
These "wedges between various groups in society" have existed ever since we've had an amygdala. They are innate, in that sense. We ought to accept that people as individuals, and more so as groups, are too biased when it comes to things like race, gender, etc, and we should address these problems in honest terms, as opposed to presuming that everyone is a rational actor who will realize that Racism Is Bad After All if only we did/didn't do X.
> Maybe you aren't obsessed with driving wedges between various groups in society, causing them to become factions with increasing animosity towards one another, but you're doing it.
Most of the animosity you might be referring to, has existed since day 1, but is just getting more attention from the media. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.
> It's odd: No group hates underprivileged, unattractive whites males nearly as much as privileged, attractive white males. It's a cruel form of preening.
It's easier to hate people that you can relate to. Nothing odd about that. It's why you often see nerds making fun of other nerds with a ferocity greater than a non-nerd would ever muster.
Funding applicants based on sex, race, religion, etc. is very common among private schools of all sorts. Of course this results in sub-optimal funding distribution if your goal is to maximize, let's say, "total cumulative aptitude."
If, on the other hand, your goal is something different, for instance, promoting diversity, such a restriction is perfectly reasonable.
"What do you do about trans/intersex applicants, or do they not matter to you?"
Transsexuals identify with one gender or the other. I want you to guess how many intersex individuals have ever applied that don't also consider themselves either a man or a woman.
ETA: Having read the section on funding I see that the school itself is free, and that Etsy is providing small grants to defray the cost of living in NYC for female hackers. I don't think something like paying room for adults, even if others are neglected, should warrant such vitriol.
Oh, come on now. It's explicitly unfair. Some people in the community feel that there is a chicken and egg problem of having too few women programmers and that it is a bad thing. So HS is purposefully giving a hand up to the female programmers in order to ameliorate the issue. They don't have to be fair here when their goal is long term equality in the future.
Also, should they care if it's legal? How is being unfair in pursuit of a greater good definitely a bad thing? And I presume trans applicants could pitch to be covered as women as they either are or were at one time women, though I expect the most understanding way to treat trans people is as the sex they have changed to and identify with. Same with intersex. So it appears you're using an ugly rhetorical game to cast negative light without saying much at all. It's possible that HS has had no trans or intersex people at their gatherings so it's a moot point anyway.
In short. Fairness need not be ones highest ideal. There are reasons why fairness may need to be traded off for other benefits or fairness over another term. And sorry for my tone. This sort worried impracticality frustrates me. I would have just down-voted and flagged your comment had I been able to log into my own account.
Way to take this too far. This is a private company, Etsy, offering grants to women for, I guess, living expenses etc to be a part of the program. Those poor underprivileged males ... I mean, it's not as if going to Hacker "School" is going to make or break you. You are welcome to start a fund. Lighten up a bit on faux-indignation.
your kidding, right? It certainly is legal, colleges practice this all the time!
They give large grants to women, not because they are better, but because they are attempting to equalize the gender ratio.
The money is an extra. They won't accept you if you don't think you belong there. You are not entitled to any money. They are a private enterprise who are entitled to attempt to equalize the gender ratio... through whatever means they chose.
Whether gender-specific scholarships are legal is a question for lawyers and courts.
But regarding "equalizing the gender ratio", the gender balance for college undergraduates in the USA swung far in favor of women 10 or more years ago. Today, most colleges that want to 'equalize the gender ratio' would have to offer male-only scholarships.
You're aggregating up over all the possible degrees at all US colleges, in which case you're right, but come on. You know that in departments like computer science and pure math and various engineering disciplines and even physics the gender ratio is still heavily in favor of men. That's what's being addressed by scholarships. At many US colleges the female-only scholarships are typically conditional on entering one of the degrees with a predominantly male population and completing it.
So would male-only scholarships be appropriate in all the other female-dominated majors? And, because of the overall undergraduate imbalance, offering more male-only scholarships than female-only scholarships when netted over all fields? Simply to achieve gender balance, of course.
Sure, if achieving gender balance is desired. Racial balance also seems to be desired by most places, leading to implicit and explicit benefits for different races as well as genders. Just don't expect to see too many male-only scholarships. Few people seem to be concerned over the gender imbalance in, say for rhetorical purposes, English literature. Why do we want a greater balance in CS but not Eng. Lit? Regardless of why, the fact remains that we do, and thus we'll see tricks like scholarships trying to effect that change. Perhaps it would be better if it was all based on intellectual merit, but if you argue for that earnestly you'll be called any of a sexist/racist/elitist or something else. If that's really the path forward it will be a long time before we get on it.
There’s a long history of discussion about what exactly intelligence is, how whatever it is is measured, and why some social groups have statistically higher scores than others. Here’s an easy place to start looking into it:
The Wikipedia article raganwald kindly linked to has an archived set of talk pages that go on almost endlessly, as the article has long been the subject of edit-warring. That article and related pages have been the subject of an Arbitration Committee case (opened at about the time I became a wikipedian, by coincidence)
with ongoing administrative sanctions. In other words, I'm not sure if the article is currently in good enough shape to recommend. The Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations"
Why not just say, "people who spent a lot of their time studying cryptography strongly recommend this approach. They feel the approach that you are considering is simply insecure."?
Framing things in terms of intelligence isn't going to win anyone over, if that's your goal. And it probably isn't accurate, either.
He's probably using "smart" in the sense of "accumulated knowledge in a particular space" instead of in the sense of raw mental horsepower. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3583985
Yes, that's right. It doesn't mean that you are hopelessly non-cognitive if you can't understand the complexities of cryptography. (As I said, I certainly can't.) It just means that unless you are one of the very few people who are 1) exceptionally mathematically talented and 2) able to have spent your entire life studying the subject, it's unlikely that you could make an informed choice.
By all means, use different wording when passing this message along if you're worried about hurting the recipient's fee-fees. But you won't be doing them any favors if you change the message to a Stuart Smalley-style "You can do it! You're good enough! You're smart enough! And gosh darn it, people like you!" Because on this specific subject, the odds are very, very, very unlikely that they actually are.
I think "smarter" in this context means more well read about the particular subject of crypto, although people good at that are likely to very intelligence all round too.
A different approach is not necessarily "less secure" it's just that it may have had less people banging on it trying to figure out ways to break it.
Yes! But this depends a bit on the use case. The main benefit of Backbone is that it helps you organize your code into separated data model and view/interaction objects, so that you don’t wind up with a giant mess of deeply nested, arbitrarily interconnected, and unmaintainable DOM event handlers. It also has a nice object designed for coordinating browser history/URL views in single-page apps. If any of those components would be helpful to your project, absolutely try using Backbone for it
Is it necessary to do this before ever reaching any conclusion? Should we never trust our own observations until they've been approved with such vigor?
Mongo is specifically designed for horizontal scaling, so it makes it easy to establish replica sets and shards, and it includes an auto-balancer that will distribute your data between the shards. Pg (the database, not the guy!) can do much of this, but it's not quite as built-in.
Which isn't to say there aren't things that Pg is better for. Full text search comes to mind.
Here, you're saying you don't know whether to support the warrentless censorship of websites you disagree with. Why are you saying two different things?
Maybe you aren't obsessed with driving wedges between various groups in society, causing them to become factions with increasing animosity towards one another, but you're doing it.
It's odd: No group hates underprivileged, unattractive whites males nearly as much as privileged, attractive white males. It's a cruel form of preening.