Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because this is, whether I like it or not, a commons for a community that I'm part of. So occasionally I still get sucked in if only to providing a contrasting voice to some of the grossly unempathetic stuff I see here.
Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN.
You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago had clear, specific concerns, and some of them were directly harmed by Stallman.
If you would like to rebut their complaints, feel free to give it a go. Or you could also claim that the harm caused was justified or excusable given the positive things he's done. But you have to actually make the case, rather than just smearing them like this.
I do think this belongs on HN as a topic. This isn't a character assassination since I didn't name anyone. Quite the contrary, the character assassination was directed against Stallman and it was based on toxic slender and rumors and it even lead to consequences. If someone does feel addressed by my comment, I welcome that of course and perhaps it will lead to some self-reflection because I want to underline that it is strong criticism.
That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference.
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar, but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be struck by how easily I could compose one of those that would be perfect for a novel imagining our era.
And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments:
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
> Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness.
So people are rebelling so hard that they just end up embracing the epitome of what they hate?
There sure is good reason to criticize Firefox but what's crazy to me is that this generally leads to using Chrome. You're not a rebel if you turn to the enemy, you're a saboteur
Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.
Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.
My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.
Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.
Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.
So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.
It's because claims of true merit have for a long time been used as the justification for the exclusion of people systems have been rigged to exclude.
Just to pick the most obvious example, the US's slave states systematically kept black people uneducated and beaten down, and then used their condition to justify their ongoing subjugation. For example, from the Texas declaration of Secession talks about the how the Northerners had "an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law." In their view, the southern aristocracy were the obvious and true holders of merit, and the system that put them on top was just proof of their merit.
Or you could look at how women were systematically excluded for generations from education and economic resources, and then their condition was used at the justification for not letting them vote.
I'll add that if people want a historical perspective on the dynamics, CS Professor Ellen Spertus long ago wrote the paper "Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?" It helped me see a lot of the things I might have otherwise been inclined to dismiss: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040
The feminist perspective is rooted in the massive amount of sexism and misogyny that necessitated the development of a feminist perspective.
If you'd like to know about CS in specific, here's a good paper from one of the few women who made it through to be a CS professor: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040
I happened to meet her at the 20 year anniversary of the paper and asked her if she was planning an update. As I recall it, she said that not much had changed, so she didn't see the point.
The idea that nothing has changed is by itself pretty preposterous. The gender ratio of college students is a big one, for instance, which keeps shifting in women's favor.
Plus, we just came out of a decade and a half of focused and persistent activism. If none of that changed anything, then a big lesson ought to be not to listen to the activists or their suggestions.
If you look at the outline of the paper, something should also stand out. Despite the fact that this claims to be science which examines the nature of how men and women are treated in CS, the ultimate focus is purely on confirming the pre-existing conclusions:
- that when women and men are being treated differently, this is always biased against women and in favor of men
- that it is the fault of men and male attitudes
- that is never the fault of women or female attitudes
In fact, feminism has a great sleight-of-hand that they consistently use for this. When they can blame men, they blame men. But if logic and evidence would require them to blame women, then it's suddenly the fault of "society", "unconscious biases" and "attitudes" whose origin is a mystery.
Just one example. While the paper dedicates a lot of ink to the ills of the "male environment", it does note that women communicate differently, e.g. with more "hesitation", "excessive qualifiers" and "excessively polite and deferential".
If you then go look at what the paper's recommendations are for women to "build confidence" it is to:
- attend classes with other women
- find female role models
- join women's groups
At no point is it considered that maybe women in a masculine environment should instead start acting and talking more like men, if they want the men to include them in their discussions and feel like she is one of them.
So yeah. Not much has changed. Not much will change. Because they keep entering a field full of people who are not like them, and expecting that mere complaints will feminize the whole lot.
I don't really see this as a productive perspective.
AS the paper says, there is no overt sexism and misogyny. Computer science lacks social appreciation in general. All you need to do to experience this is be a male software developer in Germany. Germany is a horrible country to be a software developer in. The silicon valley types and maybe the new yorkers have a strong prestigious tech culture, but go away from these tech hubs and you will encounter that software development is pretty much low status work. The envy comes from cherry picking the most successful men working in the most successful locations. A lot of men get into software because they play a lot of video games and want to make their own video games. They don't get paid very much, because they trade passion for less money. These days men get harassed for playing video games. They get harassed for their primary motivation to sit in front of the computer.
The paper also goes into the fact that men are pressured to perform and be successful. They don't have the luxury to sit things out because things are biased against them. If there is bias, then they are expected to overcome it through their own strength and to not rely on others. Take parts like this
"Singly, these behaviors probably have little effect. But when they occur again and again, they give a powerful message to women: they are not as worthwhile as men nor are they expected to participate fully in class, in college, or in life at large"
This seems incredibly outdated. These days things are swinging the exact opposite. Men are not considered as worthwhile as women, nor are they attending college and life at large as much as women, but here is the thing. Men are supposed to figure it out and face adversity themselves, whereas women often simply ask for help and support and they can often count on it. This means the pressure to perform simply isn't as high. Calling this "a bias" is essentially the same as begging for handcuffs and forced labor. The rat race must develop to a higher level.
