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Ada Initiative Organization To End, But Its Work Will Continue
An anonymous reader writes: Today the Ada Initiative announced that the nonprofit will shut down in mid-October. Founded in 2011, the Ada Initiative is a nonprofit feminist organization created to help improve open source culture and build a more inviting, productive, safe environment for women. In this interview with Opensource.com, the co-founders look back at the organization's successes, and the work that still needs to be done.
I thought this article was about Ada the programming language.
Neo: How do you know that name? Trinity: I know a lot about you. Neo: Who are you? Trinity: My name is Trinity. Neo: Trinity. Thé Trinity? That cracked the IRS d-base? Trinity: That was a long time ago. Neo: Jesus. Trinity: What? Neo: I just thought, uhm, you were a girl. Trinity: Most guys do.
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except if you are on facebook
FTFA: "Check back for our Diversity in Open Source series, which starts August 10."
Yes, of fucking course, because the product takes second place to having enough women and minorities that are safe from microaggressions working on it.
I admit that I respond to a lot of this stuff, and I probably should back off, but the number one reason why I do is because I feel I have to offer a counter-message to stuff like this. As much as I don't want to talk about it anymore, I feel like the more of the stuff like this that gets posted, the more it gets accepted as "truth" that women are somehow under attack by "the boys club".
For every woman that claims there's some inherent "truth" that conferences need "anti-harassment policies" and "safe spaces", I'd like to be a woman that says there are plenty of women with experiences that indicate the problem isn't as bad as they say it is.
(And, no, your feminist blog is not proof that it is. Any and all feminist blogs offering such "proof" will be roundly ignored.)
Yes, you have assholes. You have them everywhere. You can't keep them out of your arena.
But I go to Code Camps and other technical events fairly regularly. And I've never once got the sense that I (or any of the other women in the room) have been hounded, or hounded out or treated with derision.
Maybe the problem is because that one asshole draws so much attention to him- (and indeed, her-) self, we create archetypes based on those personalities which we then elevate into "the norm", and then we forget all the nice, normal people around us that aren't being assholes to us. And believe me, there are far fewer assholes than there are decent people out there.
If you can't find any decent people around you, and you're calling everyone an asshole, you might want to grab some toilet paper and give yourself a good once-over. Or as we used to say when we were kids: "She who smelt it, dealt it."
Maybe, then, the solution is to stop treating sexism as if it's a constant problem for everyone at all times. Maybe it's time to start understanding that what's creating a hostile work environment in many places is the assumption that it's going to be hostile from the jump. Maybe it's time to start acknowledging that when you have an organization that's a hammer, perhaps you've developed a myopia that tells you everything around you looks like a nail.
Men don't need to be taught not to rape (or for the purposes of this discussion, harass).
Women need to toughen up and realize that no space is ever completely "safe", and sometimes you just have to deal with it.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Seems to me that some of these groups are the ones doing the harassment. Accusing men of this type of activity just because they're men is wrong.
Ada was never a "mainstream" language, and in fact is still used widely in aerospace and other mission critical control applications.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think the solution is obvious.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The Ada Initiative is a hardcore feminist organisation whose conference guidelines were used to justify the expulsion and subsequent firings of two engineers in the donglegate debacle. Despite claiming to be non violent, apparently they aren't bothered by suggestions to hand out the S.C.U.M. Manifesto at conferences - that would be the Society For Cutting Up Men - whose deranged author had attempted to murder Andy Warhol. They were also responsible for shutting down a well known and respected speaker at another conference.
These sorts of parasitic strident supremacist organisations aren't helping women, they're actively trying to damage men, and the sooner they are revealed for what they are the better. The extent to which this diseased movement has made its way into many parts of society will, for future generations, become a matter for horrified fascination, an education in mass institutionalised fraud and hysteria, an object lesson in the ease with which a moral panic can be raised.
And don't even bother with accusations of misogyny. Seriously, it's a sad and transparent attempt to shame the voices of truth into silence.
I read some of Valerie's technical texts a while back. Driven, focuses, maybe, but smart, not so much. She even gets intermediary technical things wrong that are quite obvious to any precise thinker. Then she uses emotional appeal to cover up her lack of arguments and to convince the reader anyways. That is a real problem, as physical reality is quite unforgiving to those that do not understand it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wouldn't it be nice if we all just followed some common sense principles? I know, not going to happen, but still....
How about: try to be nice and not to deliberately offend others. On the other hand, try to be reasonable and not be offended by every little thing, especially something not intended to offend.
A little consideration, met with a little forgiveness and understanding, would go a long way.
Also note that getting one's work criticized is neither "threats" nor "harassment". Some women apparently do not understand that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are saying that calling for a workplace free from harassment and threats is actually itself harassment of men. Because men must be free to harass...
For some exceedingly ridiculous values of "harassment" and "threats" that, somehow, extend to being able to be the victim of these things in spite of being neither a participant nor the target in said "threatening/harassing" behavior, and even being completely ignored is just another form of "harassment by exclusion" or some stupidity.
I'm a man
Clearly a matter of some debate.
You do not write a "meh" paper on an important design aspect in an area you are currently working if you are smart.
Yeah you do. I used to be in academia. Everyone I know had written papers they weren't especially proud of in their area. Many (most?) were caused by looming conference deadlines and pushing in something a bit late and a bit rushed. I know I've done it.
As to wrong, it needs a bit more than a first glance and it needs some understanding of the crypto and computer hardware involved.
But you haven't said what's wrong with it. PErhaps I haven't spotted it because I disagree with your conclusions of what is "wrong".
The paper, as it is, shows "ego".
It's a perfectly normal if rather unremarkable paper. I don't get "ego" from it.
It does not show "smart", but the absence of it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Sure it does't show smart, but it also doesn't have any indications to the contrary. I'm an author on some really quite mediocre papers which got kinda creamed when they were presented. I'm not proud of those. I'm also author on at least one paper where I badly reinvented an established technique---it's even in Num-Rec---for part of the paper, but wasn't technically unsound. Though I've come to feel that one of the other parts was kinda dubious even if it worked and there's better ways of doing it. I'm also author on some papers I am very proud of.
My point: everyone who writes papers writes some mediocre ones.
This being /. I am not going to do more research for you.
Of course. This is slashdot. You make a wild claim, post some non evidence then feel smug and superior when I don't go down the rabbit hole trying to do "research" to back up a point that you brought up and I don't really care either way about.
At this stage, I'm inclined to feel you're full of it because your response to a request for evidence if for me to find it for you. Naturally if I fail you will claim it's because I haven't put in enough work.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Clearly a matter of some debate.
Ah I see you are using insults. It's kind of amusingly on topic that you can believe you can insult him by implying he's like a woman.
The assumption that it's an insult is predicated on him operates with the sexist position that women are worse then men, as that is the only way it could possibly be construed as an insult.
Given who you're trying to insult and the contents of his posts, I think you may find that your assumption is faulty and so implying that he might be female or female-like is therefore not an effective insult.
To use a tech analogy, it would be like trying to insult someone by calling them a "clojure programmer". Such an attempt at an insult would merely be baffling to most people. It would also give illuminating but not flattering insight into the opinions of the person attempting to use the insult.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't feel harassed or oppressed when people suggest I shouldn't abuse women.
Similarly, black people shouldn't feel harassed or oppressed when people constantly remind them that they shouldn't steal things.
Wow, they let people out of the cave before they finish evolving. Pornographic images are demeaning and insulting; keep them to yourself and in private please. If a woman does not like to see a "sexy" image does not mean the woman does not find herself sexy; instead that is you projecting your one dimensional view on women that they are always comparing themselves to each other. Thinking that the goal of women is to seduce bottom feeders as a tech conference is just amazingly stupid; I understand that the rush of testosterone you got in puberty has yet to wear off the point where you can view females as human beings which is why thinking twice before speaking is a helpful tool.
Seriously, do you think this way about the females in your life? Such as your mother or grandmother?
The biggest problem at the tech conferences is the infantile behavior that most well adjusted people leave behind in junior high school. Drawing pictures of penises during a presentation or showing sexy pictures? That's seriously maladjusted and amazingly unprofessional.
She gives reasons as to why the comparison is not appropriate. Are these reasons bad? Which ones are bad, and why are they bad?
Well it's a pity that only filesystem might use compare by hash and that she's unaware of salting hashes. Oh wait neither of those is true and in fact the paper you gave mentions salting but not filesystems. You know git uses compare by hash, right? How world you keep salt secret with git? And git is not the only system out there.
Frankly, I think the claims are a bit over blown / the paper is not widely applicable, but that still doesn't make it anything like as wrong as you appear to believe. It's still just a mediocre paper and you can't glean much from that for reasons I've already elucidated and you haven't rebutted.
Look, I don't know this Valerie person from Adam, and I don't care if she's competent or not, but given that you are making demonstrably false claims about the evidence you provided, I'm now firmly of the belief that you're for some reason emotionally invested in proving her wrong. That's kinda weird.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It probably never even occurred to you that the same words could be used as an implication that he is acting/reasoning/behaving like a child.
We both know what you meant. You at least had the good grace not to restospectively claim you meant it. Fact is, he isn't acting or reasoning like a child (seriously what children talk about harassment), and that's not what you were implying.
You used bad insult and it backfired. Own it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The salt isn't supposed to be secret. That's now how it works to increase difficulty of reversing a hash.
Salt surves multiple different purposes.
One is to essentilly make your hashing function effectively unique. It doesn't matter if it is known in advance, because it breaks pre-computed tables of hashes, such as rainbow tables.
The other purpose is to guard against intentional collsisions. A secret salt is required for that. Take the wor'd simplest and stupidest hash: sum up all the bytes in a file modulo 256. If I give you a hash, you can trivially create a file which will cause a collision. If insist that I'm going to add on a secret salt after you create the file, the only way for you to create a collision is to brute force it.
Secret salts of that sort are used to prevent algorithmic complexity attacks against fast non crytographic hashes such as are used in hash tables. It's covered here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I really don't see how my analysis can be flawed because I was replying to the grandparent and that is literally exactly what he's talking about. From the grand parent:
For example, one thing you do to prevent crafted collisions when you do not control the input to a hashing-scheme is to add a "salt" that is not accessible to the attacker. This makes even broken crypto hashes exceptionally resistant against crafted collisions.
In the case of compare by hash, a public salt does not help protect against collisions.
SJW n. One who posts facts.