> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing
Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting?
If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancient Greece claiming to know of a woman who was so ugly that looking at her could turn a man to stone.
We can kind of sanity check the claim by looking at modern peoples. Anthropologists have extensive experience with pre-literate peoples, and they do have fine memories --but not magical ones [1].
Yeah, I myself use an adblocker because there is no other reasonable choice - but the poliferation of add-ons that can break pages that are not tested with them is concerning.
> The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl
False. They did not know she was a woman when they made fun of the code. And that was not the consensus. [1]
In fact, if they had known that she was a woman, they would have known better than to criticize. Us men in tech are well aware by now that you have to shelter women from the real world, lest they shatter into a million pieces.
> I’m not entirely sure what drives someone to the conclusion that because “harthur”, which turns out to be be “Heather”, is a woman, that by default, I would intentionally discriminate against [Women]. Not every single thing on the internet is about gender equality, or about a minority. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this post is because this kind of continued behavior on the internet is one of the primary reasons this is such a problem.
The Harvey Mudd story is just actually the really boring fact that if you get to pick and choose whoever you want from a large applicant pool, you can have whatever composition of whatever random demographic your hear desires.
> Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains.
How fragile are women, really? It seems amazing to me that they don't all just shatter the day they are born (from what I read on the internet at least).
> I, a female geek, was an outcast too and participated in many of the activities you mention, yet I came out mature.
Perhaps you should try being less insufferable.
The reason why no one should ever give in to this women in tech nonsense is that because the complaints are mostly just a projection of the complainer's own social awkwardness -it is easier to blame other people, and to join causes that attribute your (social) difficulties to things other than yourself. If one complaint is resolved, they will just dream up another -because the content of the complaint is not important to them, it is the act of complaining that sustains them.
> lets keep being sexist, and bash etsy for trying
No, lets stop circle jerking about how progressive we are at the expense of reason.
> If women are discriminated against in IT (and lets face it ...) then there is a huge pool of under-tapped engineers out there
If this was actually true, then people would try and keep it secret, because it could be so profitable. A true "huge pool of under-tapped" resources would sell itself, not have to be pushed so mindlessly.
No one is bashing Etsy; it's just this concept is kind of silly, I could go on Monster.com, search for software engineers and only make offers to the female ones, that would get me an engineering team of 100% women! I am not sure that would prove anything, though.