I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and it's getting old.
Sure this article's partially about feminism, but it's also about academic integrity, which I think falls well under the purview of "Hacker News". Not to mention the fact that CS and programming are often the focus of gender difference issues by feminists.
This is an essay from an AEI fellow about gender politics. The fact that it centers on academia does give it a foothold on HN, but it's misleading to suggest that this editorial is more than a borderline Hacker News submission.
I wouldn't flag it, but I wouldn't protest if it had gotten flagged off. There are hundreds and hundreds of similar articles, all epsilon from "Hacker-Newsworthy", that thankfully don't make it onto HN.
I think if you gave folks some public way of indicating their complain, instead of an anonymous/invisible flag, it might help. Sometimes people are just driven to do something publicly. After all, flagging might be the way HN works, but it's not necessarily the way people work.
CS and programming are actually /not/ often the focus of gender issues by feminists.
The discussion on the gender-balance in said fields is brought up internally, most of the time, if not always. The 'feminist' crowd (gender theorists, women's studies academics, etc.) is honestly not that interested, or aware, of our problems.
That is because computer programming is (still) not a particularly prestigious job, it still suffers from negative stereotypes, nerd, geek, etc. Right now, we're under their radar.
There is a reason feminists want us to say "chairperson" but don't care if you say "binman".
Data point: My mother was a programmer back in the 1950s. She wrote numerical programs that simulated missile trajectories... in octal. She thought it was great when she got an assembler.
I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no place for a woman.
Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual orientation.)
That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in software for 25 years.
So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women in software isn't really the software guys' fault?
No, that's not what I was implying. I'm suggesting that the issue would be brought up less often if feminists did not have significant influence in our society. I can put a positive spin on it if you prefer: Thanks to the work of feminists over the past few decades, women and men in computing know well enough to bring up the issue of sexism in their field on their own.
> I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and it's getting old.
If people would post less of this sort of thing, then you wouldn't see it. Are you really interested in hacker / startup articles or do you just want to see "interesting" things? There are good subreddits for the latter.
Taken at face value, this means that if you get enough people to vote for something, then it's ok, no matter how "off topic" it is.
Since there is no check for "being a hacker" to join this site, presumably I could find a bunch of people interested in, say, the Tour de France, get them to join, and start voting up bike racing articles. Or for that matter, perhaps there are enough people already here interested in bike racing to vote up those articles.
"This kind of article completely fails the "of more interest to hackers than other people" test"
Au contraire, it's front page news at HN, and I don't see it enjoying such popularity at any other aggregator service. That does suggest it is, in fact, of more interest to hackers - or at least the HN variety - than other people.
"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.
What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."
But not Hacker News.