It's telling that we only know him as "the guy from PlayHaven" while we all know Adria Richards by name. In that picture Adria took at PyCon, I'm not even sure which guy got fired.
Okay, so the PlayHaven guy got fired. Adria had death threats made against her, was the subject of a beheading picture, had her home address and phone number publicized, her employer was DDOSed, and she was ultimately fired, like the PlayHaven guy.
That's misogyny in action. That's what needs to end.
On one side, it's a few people using their real names and identities to be harshly and specifically critical on Twitter. On the other side, it's an avalanche of anonymous death threats. I know which one bothers me more.
There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here:
(1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed.
(2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere.
Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.
If you go through the trouble of setting up an A/B test and determining a statistically significant result, you're not blindly following it when you implement the winning variant.
It's totally cool to disregard the result an A/B test gives you. But don't justify that decision by saying that if you do follow the results of well-run A/B test, that it's somehow blind.
Overall I think Broder acquits himself well, and his explanation about circling the Milford parking lot makes sense. Also, the Tesla engineer he was on the phone with at the time should have been able to tell Musk that happened (or Tesla should have just asked Broder to comment before posting the rebuttal).
His action here is still hard to understand:
> The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino –told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored. I did not ignore their advice.
So it sounds like he didn't speak to Tesla personnel after he charged at the weak station in Norwich for an hour. If I were him, I'd call them back and say, "Uh guys, it says it only has 32 miles left and I have 61 to go. Maybe I should give it another hour?"
Criticizing the results of a speaker selection process is not "beating up on the people who organized" the event. Aral does indeed point to resources that describe speaker selection processes which successfully achieved healthy diversity. I'm not sure why efficiency needs to be a consideration here. Organizing a conference is not an efficient endeavor to begin with.
The notion that the people who organize these events shouldn't be held accountable is profoundly wrong. Event organizers appoint themselves leaders of the community that they're holding the event for. Sure, they're well-meaning volunteers usually, but that doesn't mean they're absolved of any and all criticism. Leaders organizing a software conference should recognize that an industry-wide lack of diversity is a problem, and should take steps to solve it. And the community should call them out when they fail at that.
I'm in the middle of reading "Tubes" by Andrew Blum, which is the story of how the Internet was physically built. MAE-East, PAIX, Ashburn, and all that.
The Kindle version is $1.99 right now. I paid $9.99 for it last week.
http://luigimontanez.com/2012/actually-social-media-buttons-...
The Nieman Journalism Lab followed up a few months ago:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/tweet-buttons-are-less-of-a...