jd0

To clarify, check my recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Maybe I should have thought this one out a bit... I'm pretty drunk!!

Take a look at my most recent comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

I'm commenting here as a response to a few posts that highlight my use of the word "hostile" - a somewhat inflammatory word but my time in the journalism world taught me to bait clicks.... c:

I wouldn't say -hostile- in the sense that there's an active conscious attempt to bar women and people of color from computer science, what I mean is that in the computer science world there's an underlying structure which is rapidly ejecting (as one example) women. A structure which is reducing the number of women in computer science every year. Let's look at reports from the Computing Research Association:

"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998.[2] Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.[3]"

that's a quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

which separately sources that paragraph to this study: http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_De...

Your attitude is childish and short-sighted. When certain groups are -by default- disadvantaged compared to a dominant group, just saying "go do work like I did" - is meaningless.

Honestly, trying to be "friendly" isn't enough. I know nobody told you that it's your job to include others different than yourself, but personally, I feel it's a moral obligation, one that in the end increases productive output of the whole group.

I'll take a guess here and say that it's easier for a white males to find those resources you posted above. More whites have computers. Males are encouraged to explore more-so than women. I could go on and on.. it's not enough to just post something online and assume anyone with the gusto and the self-will can find it. We don't live in a utopia, less than 35% of the worlds population are active internet users.

I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit.

I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?

Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.

As an example, in the USA 13.6% of Americans are African American (born in America and of African descent): (http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/black.htm...)

While the Computing Research Association reported that only 6.9% of the population of computer workers in the USA are black. (http://cra.org/resources/crn-archive-view-detail/expanding_t...)

Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.

Today on the birthday of legendary female computer scientist Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler and the term "debugging", among other achievements - I ask the Hacker News community, why is the computer science overwhelmingly male and becoming increasingly so as time goes on? The hacker community seems to be absolutely comfortable in this state, and to me that's disturbing. Diversity creates innovation - and for an industry that prides itself as innovators, the silicon-valley idea pool seems like a dangerous closed-loop.

This has been an issue for a while, so I'm posting this somewhat dated yet historically relevant article from 1999 which brings up this very issue, an issue which was never answered.

You can probably skip the first two sections defining and explaining hackers and hacking.