This is pathetic Hacker News, pathetic.
I do take issue with her blaming the CS107 professor for contributing to sexism. She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out. She notes that women seem to drop out disproportionately often, but this might not be something the professor has the power to do anything about - she certainly doesn't say anything the professor does which might be part of the problem, other than just making the class hard. Watering down core classes in the name of increasing diversity doesn't help anyone.
It does take some privilege to have a computer. Maybe the kids who are dropping out haven't had the time. Maybe they just need a longer runway to get up to speed.
Connecting students with upperclassmen in their majors, assigning study groups, creating additional projects or courses to help newcomers learn are all ways to counteract the negative effects of study group bias without watering down the material at all.
For example - someone who has never coded before in their life - there shouldn't be some expectation that you had a computer growing up, built a website for peers in middle school and are already an expert by the time you hit your first class. There's plenty of capable people who a) never had the advantages/wealth to support some of these things b) haven't discovered their interest and "weed out" core classes don't help with that. You may take longer to get up to the same place as someone with the advantages above, but that doesn't rule you out from being an effective engineer/computer scientist.
(At least, at the good schools; this may not be true at third rate schools, I wouldn't know.)
This requires that someone spent years playing an instrument, typically with lots of instruction, both of which are very hard to do with no money.
Some may get this free in high school, but the high school I went to had performance exams to get into those high school freshman classes.
There was no music at all at my junior high.
I got 6 months of instrument training in 6th grade, and that was all that public schools offered me, and I know that some people had even less than that from the schools in their area.
The point being that it's not just computers. If we want to give an equal opportunity to students, there's a tremendous amount that needs fixing that is not at all limited to computers.
Each racial group has subsets that trend towards different desires; e.g. as a white guy I knew lots of other white guys in high school who were anti-intellectual, and thought that going to college inherently meant you were a snob.
I don't know how to change subgroup attitudes like that, but at any rate it sure would be nice to give opportunity to those who want it.
The primary way that that is hard is that it costs hard money. In my example, money for student instruments and money for music instructors (typically far more than for the instruments, although both are nontrivial).
(In my areas public libraries have been cutting hours (and days) for decades. This is part of the ridiculously negative trend that we, as a society, must stop being foolish about, like these other issues.)
Statistics, OTOH, averages together those who don't want, along with those who do want, which is clearly unfair to those who do want.
> coming up with things that can happen...can get great talent
Do you mean things like the famous programs by Intel and Westinghouse or something else?
Very, very true.
If the professor doesn't have the responsibility to make the class accessible to a diverse group, who does?
> She seems to be saying that CS107 is discriminatory merely because it is difficult and many people drop out.
She does not say that. You implying that she says that or that that is the reason is BLATANTLY racist and sexist. The reason that there are not enough black women making it through that class is NOT because they are stupid or lazy.
I find your attitude offensive.
EDIT: I'll take your downvotes with pride. Care to actually indicate how I am wrong?
No, the commenter said many of them were weeded out because the classes were hard. If you have affirmative action helping people get into university with lower test scores, isn't that exactly what you'd expect to see?
When you don't have logic on your side, just call people names, right?
Ah, and here we have uncovered the elephant in the room.
Damn elephant.
I'm sure this woman has a legitimate complaint, I'm sure at least two people have asked her if she was lost before. I'm also guessing she may be bloviating a little bit. Nobody in college gives a damn if you're lost, lets be honest. If you're lost, you ask for directions. Happens all the time. Unless, of course, you actually look lost. Even then, people usually don't give a damn.
I went to UMD, College Park, and the weed-out classes were damn hard. UMDCP is only a top 15 program, I can't imagine how hard Stanford would be.
At UMDCP people asked me for directions all the time, and I was happy to help. Not once did I ever ask anyone if they were lost. Nobody gives a shit. They really, truly just don't. Anyone who "does" care actually doesn't, they're just trying to break the ice or whatever.
Please learn to separate demographic differences from individual differences before calling someone ignorant.
And you wanted to assume "affirmative action" had some part in this without knowing a thing about this woman. Horrible.
Please learn to stop perpetuating racism by blaming the victims. It's ignorant, disgusting, and cowardly.
Clearly there's more to comment ordering than karma - I find it hard to believe that in less than 60 seconds, a comment is posted, then the page is refreshed enough times by enough viewers to find the fresh karmaless comment, who then upvote it in time for me to load it on my pageview.
In short, stop it with these "top comment(s) = HN hivemind" whines.
Also when it's a controversial subject like diversity/racism.
Hacker news is open to the public last time I checked.
What is pathetic is you base the community on 'First' not on how it progresses out.
They are getting down voted atm pretty fast, this style of karma harvesting by mis-representing comments not liked by the community is pretty Reddit.
Something like, not being able to reply to the "root" of a comment tree without some paltry number of karma, like 10.
Don't get me wrong, I don't care about karma scores, but as you point out, it isn't very hard to "farm" karma if one so chooses.
Initially when I read this story I was gobsmacked. How could there be so many racist idiots at Stanford? Then I thought of other possible explanations: perhaps she was just looking around at the architecture and just looked lost?
I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I don't think it's fair to automatically assume racism. Could she not just politely ask one of the people "no, I'm not lost, why do you ask?"
[edit] please a comment explaining what you disagree with, rather than just downvoting.