joaren

A year from now the people who turned their avatars purple today won't remember the hash tag or what it was for. This isn't about one kid dying, or many kids dying. It's about a bunch of people frantically acting to hide their sense of impotence.

Try being a bit less condescending. Just because someone thinks displays like this are hypocritical doesn't mean they are heartless. It could mean they are acutely aware that the only reason people care about this is incidental circumstance, and that equally sad events pass by without scrutiny because it didn't happen to someone who's milked it out for attention. Because that's what blogging about your daughter's cancer is.

If you're the kind of person who prefers fairness over indulging feels, then token efforts like pinning ribbons to things look like an ostentatious display of hypocrisy to friends and family, to show that you care about something everyone still collectively agrees not to do anything about (i.e. a kid dying).

Right, "educated", on their false statistics? Like Shanley Kane's claim that men have a much easier time getting a 6 figure job out of college... except that unemployment among male college graduates is 50% higher than women's, and women already earn 60% of all college degrees. Let's ignore all that, tell guys to "shut the fuck up and listen", because the patriarchy is propagating systemic inequality.

Or how about Ashe Dryden's ignorance of the Norwegian Gender Paradox which shows that the more gender equal the opportunity, the less equal the outcome? See Richard Lippa of Fullerton's research, which shows this trend applies worldwide with an enormous sample size (i.e. gender is not a societal construct) and shows that the countries where there are more women in IT are the ones where it is a disproportionately lucrative career. I could also point to her hypocritical call to get people fired for starring the satirical Feminist Software Foundation github repo, a tweet so low even she eventually deleted it.

How about Noirin Plunkett's defamation lawsuit, for which she is soliciting money on Gittip? I'll just quote from the legal documents shall I:

> Plaintiff Michael G. Schwern was a leader for gender equity and a campaigner against sexual misconduct in the open-source software community. Complaint ¶2, Schwern Decl. ¶9. When plaintiff and his ex-wife, defendant Nóirín Plunkett, divorced, defendant — for reasons best known to her — chose to salt the earth by deliberately and maliciously spreading the lie that plaintiff had raped defendant. Complaint ¶¶8, 9, 13-23; Schwern Decl. ¶¶2-4, 8, 9; Exhibits 1-3. The criminal justice system rejected defendant’s allegations.

http://ia601204.us.archive.org/19/items/gov.uscourts.ord.115...

Yeah, these are the people who are "educating" the wider tech world with their informed opinions. Also, remember, false rape accusations never happen, no matter what Charles McDowell (1985) and Eugene Kanin (1994) found.

For Christ's sake, are you incapable of making a coherent argument? Your own list is inconsistent, lumping together ineffectual platitude salesmen and corrupt politicians with product developers.

If you'd manage to extract your head from your ass for 5 seconds, you'd realize these spoiled princesses have set back the cause of "marginalized tech professionals" more than a dozen titstares combined.

Nice straw man. Most of those actually produce something useful, and there is a direct relationship between money given and product delivered.

I mean Jesus, earlier I saw Ashe Dryden complain that Gittip "doesn't care about her safety" and that she's now in a precarious position because she's "locked in" to it. Pretty sure she's the one who asked people to give her all that money. If she doesn't like it, she can go back to actually working for a living, like the rest of us. I took one look at Gittip when it opened up and said "Nope".

I never liked Gittip because of how it advertises its top earners and givers... it stops being about rewarding good work and starts to become a game of who can score the most validation points and use them for political gain.

Yelling on Twitter and demonizing men for existing is not "promoting empathy and equality". Begging for legal money for your civil lawsuit is not "sustainable crowd funding" (hint: what is she being sued for? it doesn't say.).

Sorry Gittip, but your site has turned into a joke dominated by professional victims.

Who the hell cares about definitions? Oh right, mathematicians, and they manage to make a beautiful subject terribly boring by insisting it's all about manipulating symbols, instead of the underlying structures they represent.

I mean, programming is about typing and manipulating text into a box, right?

Because today, despite 60% of college grads being female, only 16% of comp sci students are women. Choices. Agency. Isn't that what equality is supposed to be about?

Oh good, you replied to factual statistics with a bunch of feel good nonsense from Jezebel, which we all know is a respected journal in the social sciences.

And it's exactly this sort of visceral reaction that will keep the "women are victims" meme going long after we're all dead. It's evolutionarily beneficial, after all, we are descended from twice as many women as men. You don't think that happened purely by coincidence or as a "societal construct" did you?

Really? I've had several links posted to metafilter, in every instance the comment thread was full of petty, small minded nagging. Seems like just another 'intellectual' echo chamber to me.

Absolutely. Go look at the Middle East, visit Tehran. See how many 80 year old male taxi drivers there are. The men are obliged to support to women into old age, who are legally entitled to privileges. See how many 80 year old women do the same.

Of course this gets rewritten into a "woman are victims" narrative where they aren't allowed to leave the house, even though few Iranian women care to change this situation.

Women have in group bias, the Women are Wonderful effect exists, and the bottom half of the men are invisible.

If you really want to understand this as a man, start to engage in feminist discussions with a female nickname. All of a sudden, you can be hyperbolic, hypersensitive and hysterical, and people will somehow find a way to excuse such behaviour. Post the exact same comment as a man, and you will not only be dismissed, but often seen as a credible threat.

Exactly. What's going on is that the feminists of MVC are looking at the extremes: extreme abuse, or extreme success. What they don't care about is that this is an industry where 40 hour work weeks are a luxury, and the average neckbeard sysadmin is despised by HR even as he fixes their boxes for the n'th time.

As a general rule of thumb: if women have it bad, men have it worse. But since the bottom half of men are invisible, everyone focuses on the 'poor' victimized women instead.

Roy Baumeister's "Is There Anything Good About Men?" explains this well, but they'd never read it because it's "MRA".

The fact that you seriously say "our website is not the product" shows how utterly misguided you are in your marketing. I am not trying to be mean, this is simple and logical advice.

You make a platform for making websites. Your website is a huge turn-off that reminds everyone of every shitty over designed web brochure / 'experience' they've ever seen. And you think this is just a problem because people are picky.

Amazing.

If you work insane hours for over a year, your company is broken. That is a problem of time allocation and unrealistic expectations, and has no bearing on the quality or usefulness of the work being done.

As for "capable of doing amazing things", this is stuff that Flash was able to do better 10 years ago. If people hadn't forgotten where we came from, and browser makers hadn't ridden the CSS train to performance hell, Famous wouldn't even be necessary.

So far, all I've seen is a) huge, hyped up promises and b) janky demos that feel like some interaction design student's wild experiments. You don't need to be Apple to do this right, you just have to be able to be honest about the output of your own work.

No, this comment was factual, and consists of all the questions clearly nobody is asking loudly enough at famous HQ.

I find myself agreeing with most of what you wrote, and yet, it doesn't matter. You keep sabotaging yourselves.

Does no-one do QA? Do you not have a Steve Jobs-esque character who has taste and an eye for detail and who can look at this stuff the way your users will? Because such a person would've looked at this and Noped the fuck out of there, cancelled whatever PR you had planned, and put everyone around a table saying "we're not there and can we fix it?".

Your first hyped launch thing was a sign-up form with blurry fonts leading no where. Now you've implemented a giant janky scrollbar with easing equations calibrated for "instant turn off". The parallels to Flash really are quite similar.

You should not imitate native behaviour unless you have someone going over it with a fine toothed comb, and you shouldn't be making grand claims about the future when you cock up the present.

If you believe your own claims, then why does your page work terribly on my brand new laptop, never mind the 4 year old one it just replaced?

Go open a theatre, you're great at projecting. The problem is exactly that I'm supposed to love Linux and Mozilla, because these are the approved choices of the Free Software World. As a result, both suck, and none of the people involved want to hear it, because how could you not love freedom and puppies and doing good?

I've seen up close and personal how Mozilla spends its oodles of cash, I've spoken to folks from all the browser vendors at conferences. The only thing different about Mozilla is the sanctimonious attitude and the utter shock when you dare suggest their actions do not necessarily match words. Everyone else already knows how the game is being played.

Are you for real? Mozilla gets $300 million per year from Google to maintain the pretense of freedom. Meanwhile I have to pay my own bills and deliver projects that my clients will pay for. To bring money into this argument and somehow blame "the users" for this string of epic mess ups is fucking rich.

Was I supposed to not diagnose jank using Chrome's frame analysis tools? Not profile memory allocations in its timeline? Develop my WebGL against an incomplete, broken and slow implementation to spare Mozilla's feelings? Firefox is a buggy and slow hunk of code whose maintainers are high on their own supply, and are only now starting to eat the humble pie now it's far too late. Simple as that.

Oh and the reasons why people switched to OS X are more related to connecting to wifi in under 1 second and implementing sleep/hibernate in a way that makes sense. Elegant solutions to real problems, not hack piled upon hack. Not that the hardcore free software nerds will ever get any of that, because it's too nice and shiny for them to even consider.

Oh really?

Mozilla brought this on itself when they took the epic lead they had with Firebug and utterly squandered it by thinking real dev tools were not something a browser should include out of the box, in favour of an utterly useless "3D" DOM view that is a made up diagram conveying no useful information about compositing or layering.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated memory leaks and extension crashes as performance issues to be papered over rather than fundamental flaws in an architecture unprepared for how people wanted to use it.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated OS X like the idiot stepchild instead of delivering the native experience users clearly loved in Chrome and Safari, thus alienating the Mac-dominated cutting edge of web tech.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they provided incomplete implementations of CSS transforms, Web Audio and WebGL (an idea they originated!), and a bunch of other specs people actually wanted. Parts of WebGL are broken in the current stable release of Firefox, and yet Mozilla wants to go around claiming the high ground with Unreal and asm.js?

If they'd spend less money on having their 'evangelists' show off trivial toys around the world, and more on actually solving real daily problems (like the Chrome developer tools team did), we wouldn't be in this mess, and they wouldn't think moves of desperation like asm.js are a good idea.

No, he used a figure of speech, which you chose to interpret in the least useful way possible.

It's a pretty crappy experience. I'm reading an article, suddenly the text decides to move left for 'no good reason' to create a narrow but empty sidebar.

WTF? I don't like reading things on the left side of my monitor, so I make the window wider to try and put the text back in the middle. Except now the demo area gets even wider (why? you don't use it for anything but tiny things?).

As I scroll, the various iframe loads create annoying jank, and to top it off, there's a bug at the end of the post where it moves horizontally for no good reason.

If you're going to do stuff like this, you need to polish it waaay better. This reminds me of the UI animations in the new Firefox. A good idea ruined by implementation, would've been better to leave them out.

> by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set...

Does everyone at Mozilla get a shiny new Retina MacBook or something? Because on my machine, Firefox is definitely worse at rendering than Chrome or Opera. It's just no contest. I can't get a solid 60 fps with WebGL in Firefox, there's constant intermittent jankyness, it's not a problem on Chrome.

Maybe this a Windows vs OS X thing? I keep hearing Mozilla folks insist they're faster, and I've just never seen that actually happen.

No, what you're saying is the opposite of intriguing. It was exactly what I expected: an admission that CSS is insufficient for "really advanced layouts" without JavaScript.

So how do you make it so that text always sizes to fit its container, vertically and horizontally? i.e. Sliding font size and letter spacing. Pixel perfect on any screen?