lizdenys

It's unlikely that they meant "preferred pronoun" to be about a singular person generally, since it commonly refers to preferences about oneself.

People often use pronouns other than the ones someone prefers for a variety of reasons: sometimes the preferred pronoun is new, sometimes people forget, sometimes people don't respect that person's preferred pronoun.

I wouldn't use the term "women's center", but in many ways, sororities are examples of the "safe spaces" referenced in the sentence before:

> Men also can and do suffer terrible experiences as the hands of women, and can be dominated by them. If a woman gets "safe spaces", so, too, should men.

I feel like other people have said what I want to say about your other points, but...

> If you go to a college campus and attempt to set up a "mens center" in the same vein as the womens centers that are increasingly common, you will most likely be 1) called a misogynist, 2) not taken seriously, 3) not succeed.

Interestingly, one of the longest running institutions at universities are fraternities.

Except that Bill O'Reilly speaks on behalf a group that already has a lot of power, and Shanley doesn't. When O'Reilly pushes the Overton window for the Republican party, he's only "making space" for politicians and pundits who already have a very visible platform. Shanley pushing the Overton window makes space for a lot of voices who aren't already being heard.

There are many informal ways study groups organize that leave various groups behind. They can form around extracurriculars, and freshmen in computer clubs tend to have significant previous exposure and some experience. Groups can form around independent living groups, which often are gendered and often have large libraries of past class notes. And, of course, social circles often bias themselves based on race.

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.

It's true that WHOIS always catalogued both name and IP, but in the early days, they corresponded to the same position in the network. The information for the owner of that block was already in the ARPANET directory that WHOIS duplicated.

Domains and IPs used to be closely tied together, but that’s not the case anymore - when you WHOIS the IP lizdenys.com is at, you don’t get anything, but when you WHOIS the name lizdenys.com, you get information about me. Getting my personal information when you WHOIS lizdenys.com isn’t in the spirit of getting the information in the original WHOIS directory.

My machine is going to be upgraded to the next LTS, 14.04, sometime over the summer, but that doesn't change the fact that 12.04 will still be around in 2017.

More importantly, 12.04 is the most current Ubuntu LTS. It's definitely still around now.

My point about acceptance isn't about social acceptance, but acceptance based on merit and potential. When I was a young woman, I was discouraged not because hacking felt socially alienating, but because authority figures went out of their way to discourage me, despite my enthusiasm, aptitude, and desire for more.

I don't care that I don't dress like the "hacker" stereotype--if I really did, I'd have stopped wearing dresses already. What I find frustrating there is that other people judge "hacker" merit upon the stereotype, such as in http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/dress.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639740. In my life, this clothing stereotype has caused a bit of confusion: while not everyone is surprised a girl in heels can speak with technical merit, many have been. The clothing issue is hardly the end all and be all of the "hacker" stereotype--a stereotype which, like many other stereotypes, has some basis in reality but doesn't paint the full picture of the people who play around with difficult problems in clever ways.

> Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.

Hi! I am not, and I agree that it would be sad. I am happy to be satisfied with who I am, what I do, and where I'm going. I may not identify with the term "hacker" due to some of its connotations, but I do feel like I get to playfully work on difficult things--one of the few definitions of a hacker I relate to and fortunately the one that I think best embodies its true spirit.

Unfortunately, many people I know who have yet to feel established in the field do feel at least a small need to relate to the "hacker" to feel like a software engineer. As there are parts of this I could relate to (even if they are not bringing me down right now), I thought I'd share my experiences.