joaren

A year from now the people who turned their avatars purple today won't remember the hash tag or what it was for. This isn't about one kid dying, or many kids dying. It's about a bunch of people frantically acting to hide their sense of impotence.

Try being a bit less condescending. Just because someone thinks displays like this are hypocritical doesn't mean they are heartless. It could mean they are acutely aware that the only reason people care about this is incidental circumstance, and that equally sad events pass by without scrutiny because it didn't happen to someone who's milked it out for attention. Because that's what blogging about your daughter's cancer is.

If you're the kind of person who prefers fairness over indulging feels, then token efforts like pinning ribbons to things look like an ostentatious display of hypocrisy to friends and family, to show that you care about something everyone still collectively agrees not to do anything about (i.e. a kid dying).

For Christ's sake, are you incapable of making a coherent argument? Your own list is inconsistent, lumping together ineffectual platitude salesmen and corrupt politicians with product developers.

If you'd manage to extract your head from your ass for 5 seconds, you'd realize these spoiled princesses have set back the cause of "marginalized tech professionals" more than a dozen titstares combined.

Nice straw man. Most of those actually produce something useful, and there is a direct relationship between money given and product delivered.

I mean Jesus, earlier I saw Ashe Dryden complain that Gittip "doesn't care about her safety" and that she's now in a precarious position because she's "locked in" to it. Pretty sure she's the one who asked people to give her all that money. If she doesn't like it, she can go back to actually working for a living, like the rest of us. I took one look at Gittip when it opened up and said "Nope".

I never liked Gittip because of how it advertises its top earners and givers... it stops being about rewarding good work and starts to become a game of who can score the most validation points and use them for political gain.

Yelling on Twitter and demonizing men for existing is not "promoting empathy and equality". Begging for legal money for your civil lawsuit is not "sustainable crowd funding" (hint: what is she being sued for? it doesn't say.).

Sorry Gittip, but your site has turned into a joke dominated by professional victims.

Who the hell cares about definitions? Oh right, mathematicians, and they manage to make a beautiful subject terribly boring by insisting it's all about manipulating symbols, instead of the underlying structures they represent.

I mean, programming is about typing and manipulating text into a box, right?

Because today, despite 60% of college grads being female, only 16% of comp sci students are women. Choices. Agency. Isn't that what equality is supposed to be about?

Oh good, you replied to factual statistics with a bunch of feel good nonsense from Jezebel, which we all know is a respected journal in the social sciences.

And it's exactly this sort of visceral reaction that will keep the "women are victims" meme going long after we're all dead. It's evolutionarily beneficial, after all, we are descended from twice as many women as men. You don't think that happened purely by coincidence or as a "societal construct" did you?

Really? I've had several links posted to metafilter, in every instance the comment thread was full of petty, small minded nagging. Seems like just another 'intellectual' echo chamber to me.

Absolutely. Go look at the Middle East, visit Tehran. See how many 80 year old male taxi drivers there are. The men are obliged to support to women into old age, who are legally entitled to privileges. See how many 80 year old women do the same.

Of course this gets rewritten into a "woman are victims" narrative where they aren't allowed to leave the house, even though few Iranian women care to change this situation.

Women have in group bias, the Women are Wonderful effect exists, and the bottom half of the men are invisible.

If you really want to understand this as a man, start to engage in feminist discussions with a female nickname. All of a sudden, you can be hyperbolic, hypersensitive and hysterical, and people will somehow find a way to excuse such behaviour. Post the exact same comment as a man, and you will not only be dismissed, but often seen as a credible threat.

Exactly. What's going on is that the feminists of MVC are looking at the extremes: extreme abuse, or extreme success. What they don't care about is that this is an industry where 40 hour work weeks are a luxury, and the average neckbeard sysadmin is despised by HR even as he fixes their boxes for the n'th time.

As a general rule of thumb: if women have it bad, men have it worse. But since the bottom half of men are invisible, everyone focuses on the 'poor' victimized women instead.

Roy Baumeister's "Is There Anything Good About Men?" explains this well, but they'd never read it because it's "MRA".

The fact that you seriously say "our website is not the product" shows how utterly misguided you are in your marketing. I am not trying to be mean, this is simple and logical advice.

You make a platform for making websites. Your website is a huge turn-off that reminds everyone of every shitty over designed web brochure / 'experience' they've ever seen. And you think this is just a problem because people are picky.

Amazing.

If you work insane hours for over a year, your company is broken. That is a problem of time allocation and unrealistic expectations, and has no bearing on the quality or usefulness of the work being done.

As for "capable of doing amazing things", this is stuff that Flash was able to do better 10 years ago. If people hadn't forgotten where we came from, and browser makers hadn't ridden the CSS train to performance hell, Famous wouldn't even be necessary.

So far, all I've seen is a) huge, hyped up promises and b) janky demos that feel like some interaction design student's wild experiments. You don't need to be Apple to do this right, you just have to be able to be honest about the output of your own work.