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Comment by eventhough | Hacker News Reader

Leah Culver is hot. Problem solved.

I know Leah and she is also sick of comments like that.

Aside from being one of the lead engineers on Pownce she wrote parts of the OAuth spec as well as the standard Python implementation.

Why not comment on her engineering talents instead?

If you think physical attraction was a 0% factor, you are deluding yourself.

Right, but you didn't say "Leah being good lucking probably helps" you boiled her down to a single attribute which was looks.

Inc and the rest of the tech press have featured plenty of less attractive people who get a professional photoshoot and come out on top. They don't get reduced to being successful because they are "hot" because they aren't girls.

While I know her looks haven't hurt her career I see HN as a place where people make more rounded comments than yours. Just because you can say it that way, doesn't mean it's worth saying.

I know where you're coming from, but I think you're shooting the messenger. When it comes to tech press coverage, it's pretty clear that Leah Culver benefits from her gender and looks.

Quite - it's like Martha Lane Fox. Lastminute.com wasn't even a dotcom in the proper sense, but she got tons and tons of press... And then vanished. Regardless of anyone's stance on gender issues, the media believes women in tech are newsworthy in their own right (and the people who buy their magazines and click their links validate this belief).

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Brevity … is wit.

She is only hot by geek culture standards. She's a 6.5, 7 tops. Same thing with Sarah Lacey.

Terrible. The only thing worse than alienating a female developer by saying she's hot is coming along and criticizing her appearance.

I think the main problem for female science entrepreneurs is they're in the tiny sliver of the Venn diagram where Entrepreneurial women (a minority, but perhaps larger than the amount of male entrepreneurs) and women in science (a minority no matter how you slice it) meet. There are many self-employed women working as fashion designers, restauranteurs, Innkeepers, real-estate agents, and Yoga instructors. There are likewise millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) of women in the sciences and in engineering, but yaw, they're a minority. Finally, some of these entrepreneurial engineer women are attractive. But now you're getting into a minority among a minority among a minority, and it is unlikely any of these women would be noteworthy if compared to the richest entrepreneurs (Rockefeller, Vanderbilt), the most prominent scientists (Feynman, Newton), or the most beautiful people. For someone who is also a woman [1] to be notable in all three fields would be astronomically unlikely even if these fields were not somewhat incompatible [2]. If a woman is fairly good at all three fields, that's amazing, but it shouldn't come as a surprise that she is neither very attractive compared the most beautiful women or very talented compared to the best programmers.

[1] Notable women are presumably twice as scarce of notable people or either gender.

[2] One can only do so much with one's life, especially if one aims at being the best at something.

I respectfully disagree. It's a free country.

That's a strange response. I'm saying that what he said was inappropriate, not that he shouldn't have the right to say it.

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