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Comment by exstudent2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how they can say "Ultimately, our goal is egalitarianism" and yet point #1 is "Make Women a Priority". Targets, arbitrary quotas, not holding events if 50% of the participants aren't female... does not sound like egalitarianism to me.

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Oh no. Not again.

This generic objection is automatically off-topic on HN [1]. We've all heard it a zillion times, and we all know everything that comes next. What about nurses! What about coal miners! Why aren't there diversity efforts for preschool teachers! Well, there are! Well fuck you! You're a sexist, no you're the sexist. Yawn, yawn, snooze. Those of you who actually want to replay this discussion, please find a different corner of the internet to enjoy yourselves. The rest of us want respite from the tedium.

1. This is well covered by the HN guideline that says: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well, I did support the moratorium on political posts but it got reversed and here we are again. As long as posts like this hit the front page you should expect people to point out inconsistencies in message.

This has nothing to do with the experiment we tried on political posts. It has to do with the outright ban on pointless repetition.

People come here to have their intellectual curiosity satisfied, and there stopped being anything new in any of this a long time ago. The way I see it, the options are: (1) would we like to be both bored and blared at? or (2) neither. On behalf of the community, I choose "neither".

I also tire of seeing the repetitive "let's get more X into tech!". I've quoted the article not raised points out of thin air.

50% isn't arbitrary in this case. Preventing people from being excluded is egalitarian, and the specific actions they are taking differentiates this from some sort of virtue signaling or tokenism. Hackathons and meetups are also great cases for this because everyone is better off if more people participate.

I don't see how everyone is better off if the event doesn't even get held. Unless 50% of the applicants are women then a 50% participation quota _is_ arbitrary.

Please stop and don't do this again.

It helps to consider the societal context and the unique constraints which certain populations face. Depends on your starting point IMHO - if it's already unequal, it takes additional effort.

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