"The law requires medical laboratories to retain some testing data and materials for various lengths of time, often 2 years, but as long as 10 years for some kinds of test."
My personal experience: I also failed the birth date test, even with my usual fake birth date. I also refused to provide a copy of my ID. They escalated my request and agreed to delete it anyway. All my samples and data are more than 10 years old, so they have no legal obligation to retain anything, which I pointed out to them in my confirmation.
I'm hoping they delete it but don't have the resources to do anything more than hope.
It was safe to rename() a file and expect the data it contained after crash to either be (1) the data before the rename(), (2) the data after the rename(). What changing the ext4 default logging mode to "data=writeback" did is add two more options, (3) nothing (0 bytes), and (4) whatever random garbage it found on disk, potentially including a copy of /etc/shadow. No-one misread the docs, the behavior changed.
But hey, if you're angling to be hired by a YC-funded storage startup, this is certainly a post.
I write this without a hint of snarkiness or ill will. Please keep this fact in mind as you read on.
If you read the message by Lortie [0] that Ts'o responded to [1] you find that Lortie was specifically talking about the guarantees made by ext4 in regards to rename behavior. In that message Lortie says "[the documentation of ext4 in Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt] says to me "replace by rename is guaranteed safe in modern ext4, under default mount options"." Ts'o opens his message with "It's not _guaranteed_ safe."
I understand that people are frustrated about ext4's default options. In the referenced exchange, neither Lortie nor Ts'o were talking about the merits of the differences between the rename robustness guarantees of ext4 and other filesystems. Lortie was double-checking his understanding of the documentation of the guarantees that ext4 provides with its default options. Ts'o was correcting Lortie's misunderstanding of that documentation.
Trying to figure out how to apply Charles' Rules of Argument to the situation, I realized I wrote an entire article on this topic (and linked to it from the OP):
Will you volunteer to filter my social media and email for rape threats, and compensate me for the lifetime earnings loss that is the result of naming someone who controls whether my code gets merged or whether I get invited to the top Linux invite-only summits? I've learned not to name names unless I'm ready to face the consequences of speaking out to protect other people.
OP here. To all the people flustered that I'm calling "listening politely" and "respecting people" feminist acts, I'll point out that, at the time, the only place you could reasonably expect that behavior in the Linux community was... a feminist collective, LinuxChix.
To this day, women in $COMPUTER_THING groups tend to be overrun by men searching for a civil place to have a technical conversation. It happened with the #debian-women IRC channel too. Just today, another man told me how volunteering for Women Who Code taught him to be more welcoming to newcomers in his own open source project. And have you seen the stickers on Guido Van Rossum's laptop?
So, yeah, it's possible to have these values without identifying as feminist, but in open source software today, explicitly feminist communities are usually the only ones that put these values into practice.
Regardless of any gender discussion, kudos for the atime hack. It's so much easier to say atime is a dumb feature or that apps relying on it are stupid. But you found a great compromise.
I don't care to get into that, it is a more complex subject than a single work like OP's article or the entirety of this thread can do justice towards. I am merely sayng a good hack is a good hack and discussing it on its merits.
Again, the OP makes it clear that taking seriously some of the basic tenets of feminism was operational in realizing the code. So, it is one of the merits. Otherwise, arguing that
> I am merely sayng a good hack is a good hack
and refusing, against your own argument, the merits of the code, is just a simplistic attempt to de-legitimize feminism as if it were a topic unworthy of serious debate. That, in turn, is just a redo of the very behavior (of not taking people and their stories seriously) that the OP (and the OP over at G+) was talking about in relation to the failures of the open source communities.
> is just a simplistic attempt to de-legitimize feminism
Please refrain from making assumptions about my motives. You don't know where I stand on this issue, I merely said it was complex and I was not attempting to solve it in a single comment.
I just wanted to comment on the idea itself and personally congratulate the author. I chose to not make your preferred topic the focus of my comment. I think you can live with that without making this kind of assumption about me, or making personal attacks.
I'd say the biggest success story so far in making a linux community that listens politely and respects people has been the Ubuntu project and I didn't think that was explicitly feminist. I also think it has flaws in how it implements policy sometimes, but it is so big I would be surprised if it never had any issues and I think in general it has changed the culture of linux community for the better.
Some of us, many of whom are involved in the Ubuntu Women project, spent the better part of a decade working to make Ubuntu that way. I'm glad our work paid off :)
Your comment suggests a strong confounding factor: feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large.
Without controlling for these factors, attaching the behaviors you do to "feminism" is nothing but saying "good things are done by those who agree with me, and bad things are done by those /others/".
Your argument does nothing to explain why you think this happens, and simply admits you're appropriating them without knowing why the correlation exists in communities.
Classic propaganda.
Ed:
I'm glad I've been downvoted and apologized for because I raised a methodological issue with trying to ascribe behaviors to a community, instead of actually showing me where she discussed why she doesn't think it's either of the (relatively well known) effects I asked about. I couldn't find anywhere she addressed this topic, but I'm entirely open to being corrected.
> feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large
Is Python small? I'm sure there were other small linux communities (the term seems almost redundant) who were much less welcoming to women.
I don't know what to say to convince you that open source communities are traditionally hyper male and sexist. It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.
Here's some reading, I encourage you to read it if you think I'm wrong.
> Also, these communities’ openness means that a minority of difficult members (including, for example, a sincere misogynist or an insincere troll) can disproportionately affect the tone and dynamics of interactions. Finally, the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used to (a) suppress concerns by labeling them as “censorship” and, to (b) rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of women’s choice.
> I argue that some otherwise commendable features of the free culture movement also contribute to the gender gap. That is, the geek stereotype and discursive style can be unappealing, open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people, and the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.
I'm making a second reply purely to point out that the article you cited talked about confounding influences as being one of the main sources of the problem, while you attacked my comment for talking about confounding influences being part of the solution.
That seems absolutely insane, and suggests you didn't actually respond to my comment on the merits, but rather, out of anger someone didn't agree with you.
> It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.
No one (at least, not me) was talking about this.
What I said is that ascribing certain common behaviors to being a result of being feminist or being part of a feminist community without examining other causes is such a common fallacy is has a Latin name and wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...
It's also a classic propaganda maneuver.
Ed:
Been too long since school, can't Latin on the fly.
OP provided evidence from personal experience: "In these communities, I observed this." You speculated about both qualities of feminist communities and qualities of user group size and composition, and then used that to drive the premise of your argument. That is unsound criticism.
That in a community you experience something doesn't necessarily imply that it's related to the core ideology of the group being different - there often are other factors which cause the change and would independent of that core ideology. "With this, therefore because of this" is such a common fallacy, it has a name in Latin: cum hoc ergo propter hoc. [1]
Further, my experience with online communities, which dates over a decade - and the experiences of my friends managing both large and small internet communities - implies that there are two correlations: a larger group will tend to have more problematic actors, who tend to be overrepresented in the number of comments, and that a group which focuses more on the behavior of members will tend to have better behaving members (if only because they ban the others).
Without controlling for two well known internet community effects, arguing that your community is somehow special is the height of improper reasoning.
> my experience with online communities,
> which dates over a decade
Translation: "I am over twenty"
Seriously though, I love logic too, but it doesn't always make you right. Sometimes it makes you that guy that stops everyone making progress. I've been that guy before, and I've fired that guy before.
Translation: I don't approach very serious questions with the best tools to come to the correct answer, I just go with whatever feels good to me so I can be seen Doing Something!(tm) even if it ends up not helping, and I'll punish or censor anyone who disagrees with me!
Seriously, I don't understand this view when taken in response to serious topics: aren't sexism and the challenges women face in technology topics serious enough that they deserve us at our best, not us at our most base and animalistic? aren't serious topics the ones we should most realize we're emotional beings and strive to approach with rationality, knowing that they're complex and full of correlations caused by confounding variables, which are known to be deceptive to our instincts and intuitions? aren't serious topics the ones we should realize our own propensity to shout down dissent for less-than-good reasons, and instead strive to discuss as mature individuals our different experiences and views with each other?
Social topics are large, complex, and full of all kinds of confounding variables that make sussing out the true cause of things a complex task. That you think now is the time we should abandon the tools we invented just to do that - like questioning if a correlation is actually causal or not - is just kind of weird to me.
I'm open to being wrong, but so far, no one has taken the time to point out what they think I'm wrong about here (it would have just been a quick cite if she'd address that point!), and instead have attacked me personally for asking a methodological question about a sensitive topic.
So I'll be blunt: I don't think you actually care about women, sexism, or making things better. I think you just want to feel good about it, about Doing Something!(tm), rather than having to deal with the real work of sorting out a complex social issue.
That's all I hear from you when you say "Let's not be logical here, let's just go with what I feel is right", that you don't care enough about the topic to even be concerned if you're right or not.
The only logical approach is to demand rigor in situations that demand it. For me this is not one of those situations, because the cost (to me) of the OP being mistaken in her conclusions or actions is zero, as it should be to you. So we logically we should support her because if she's right we all benefit.
For some reason something about the OP's position has made you angry and defensive, as demonstrated by the lengthy replies you've made to a number of people, in my case containing some quite personal comments. Up to you, but I'd suggest taking some time to explore why that is.
I'm actually very supportive of the effort to make safe spaces for women in tech.
Rather, I'm unhappy the OP is going out of her way - to the point of making a separate post about it - trying to appropriate values common to other world views as being inherently feminist. I don't think that's empirically true, and I think that's pretty clear from the fact no one factually corrected me and attacked me for asking about it.
Rather, her comment classic "othering" of people you disagree with, and is not how we should conduct ourselves on sensitive topics such as sexism.
> Rather, I'm unhappy the OP is going out of her way - to the point of making a separate post about it - trying to appropriate values common to other world views as being inherently feminist
So you felt "othered" and didn't like it. That's natural, and fine. I feel the same way sometimes. It's clear that others here do too.
Where you're hitting turbulence is rationalising that emotional response and building hard logic on top of that soft foundation.
It's actually fine for feminists to appropriate values. It doesn't stop anyone else using them. Sure, we can resent the implication that we don't hold those values, but the way to deal with that insecurity is by proving it to yourself. If you're human-centred, be human-centred. If you know, other people will know too.
I think we both know that if I had made the implication in the reverse direction, everyone here would be lecturing me in response on how I shouldn't be othering people I disagree with.
I think the response to me has shown that people weren't objecting to the question I asked and instead because I dared to call out such behavior from a feminist, instead of Approved Bad Guys(tm). Read up to where someone posted a study agreeing with me to tell me I was wrong.
I have two objections to her comment:
1. It's empirically untrue, and that does us no service if we're concerned with actually solving the problem. As the study cited to me points out, many of the problems related to sexism are actually caused by confounding factors in the community, and not necessarily just because a few problematic actors are sexist. Similarly, my point was that solutions are often about addressing these confounding factors, such as reducing the undue influence of problematic actors (eg, posting way more than most people).
2. No, I don't think it's okay for feminists to use propaganda tactics regularly used by groups to "other" people they don't like just because we agree with the goals the feminists have, and I think such poor behavior should be called out when anyone does it - including people we agree with. We may just have a difference of opinion here on what's acceptable, but you've been incredibly dismissive of me simply having a different opinion on what's appropriate conduct and attacked me personally for it. I regard this, too, as poor conduct.
I think at this point, everyone responding to me has shown two things:
1. They're not concerned if "feminism" (no one even seems to be clear what that means in this context) actually fixes the named problem of having safer spaces for women in online communities, they're supporting the claim for ideological reasons, not because it's true. All the data actually suggests that changes to the community orthogonal to the concerns of feminism have the dominant effect on the comfort level of women in the community, because they serve to amplify or diminish the role of problematic actors (of several stripes).
2. People who are supporting her comments aren't interested in actually engaging with others, and will use all kinds of fallacies, irrationalities, and outright abuse to try and shout down opinions that don't fit with with their chosen ideology.
I guess it's not surprising that you feel like I've been attacking you, but I'm really not. At no point have I criticised your character or said anything that should be insulting (unless your self-esteem is bound up with being right, which is justifiably not my problem). I admit that me not engaging with your arguments must be frustrating, but I hold firm to my position because you have consistently missed the point in your replies.
Unpicking this stuff is hard, especially for the person under the looking glass. I guess it was arrogant of me to try to get you to buy into this perspective, especially in a HN thread.
You're simply being dishonest if you're going to say you weren't subtly attacking my credibility to even speak on the topic in your replies. An implied ad hominem is still an ad hominem.
They have been nothing but condescending responses with the implication I'm being unreasonable, but without actually engaging with what I'm saying in response in any manner, pointing out what specifically I've said that's unreasonable, or anywhere that any of my statements haven't been accurate.
You've been extremely rude, and I wouldn't be surprised if you often get negative responses if you interact with people in this style.
None the less, I wish you well and hope that you learn to interact sincerely with people about topics, rather than feeling the need to preach at them.
I stand by that comment in light of the fact no one factually corrected me, and attacked me personally in a fit of irrationality, going so far as to cite a study that agreed with me it was confounding factors that largely influenced these kind of community behaviors as if it was correcting me.
I think this shows that people's support of the claim is not because feminist communities actually cause that (or rather, that it hasn't been shown in any clear fashion), but because they want to adhere to the ideology and claim successes for it, even when those successes may be caused by other factors.
Propaganda intended to other people who aren't in their party, start to finish. And I think we should expect better of people than that, when talking about serious and sensitive topics.
First, it's incredibly patronizing to apologize on behalf of another commentator without first engaging with the commentator directly. Not detailing what exactly you disagree with doesn't enhance your argument and is frankly, a bit of a cop-out.
Second, thanks for the link, Guido's just an all-round awesome guy!
Third, to reproduce an excerpt from the other HN discussion you linked (as per your comment):
>> _The whole tech scene needs to collectively take a sensitivity training course to regain its humanity._
That's a pretty heavy statement. How about the fact that the OP has mentioned at least on 3 different occasions in the article that she was taking the feminist "AKA" human-centered approach to solving the problem. Many would read and be left with the impression that the OP is somehow under the impression that non-feminist approaches are clearly not human-centric enough. There's far too much convenient conflation weaved in there, and if we're making a huge brouhaha about being politically correct, I would you encourage yourself and the OP to take the sensitivity training before brandishing such accusatory remarks on the community that doesn't necessarily identify itself as feminist.
> the impression that the OP is somehow under the impression that non-feminist approaches are clearly not human-centric enough.
Feminism is well-founded on the premise that personal experiences matter ("personal is political"). That is what the OP is refering to in that statement.
> politically correct
Political correctness (a symlink to hypocricy) has nothing to do with this. OP is telling the story of how feminism's teachings on how one should pay specific and careful attention to individual stories of their experiences pays off significantly in the long run for social change.
Almost no other critical political approach pays more attention to personal experience than feminism. The ones that do borrow their attentiveness from feminism. Henceforth, rather than being offended for some reason for OP's comments on feminism, I'd suggest you check out feminist approaches to methodology.
There was already code written to zero out the BSS shared across all the bootloaders for PowerPC, the call to it had just gotten lost when our enthusiastic fellow kernel dev rewrote bootloaders for platforms they couldn't test. I assume I just added the call to the existing code back in.
This study is so flawed as to be scientifically worthless.
The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."
"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:
"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."
Not being double blind doesn't make it scientifically worthless.
Not does it invalidate male/female roles being consistent across over 200 cultures.
If you accept that men build muscle different from women, and have different hormones, could you not also accept that the differences in gray/white matter proportions, size etc are not 'cultural'?
Er, while trying to research Jessamyn, I think you instead tracked down the leader of the Dreamwidth project, Denise Paolucci. Yes, she updates the Dreamwidth documentation, among other things...
If you've ever been annoyed by a sexist comment on Hacker News, you should donate to the Ada Initiative. We're working hard to change the culture and attitudes in open source and free/open culture.
Have you met any of the "core regulars" in the Linux community?
The short answer is that the people who do these things include both regulars and newbies. I have personally been groped or fondled by two "core regulars."
https://bourniquelaw.com/2024/10/09/data-23-and-me/
Most relevant bit:
"The law requires medical laboratories to retain some testing data and materials for various lengths of time, often 2 years, but as long as 10 years for some kinds of test."
My personal experience: I also failed the birth date test, even with my usual fake birth date. I also refused to provide a copy of my ID. They escalated my request and agreed to delete it anyway. All my samples and data are more than 10 years old, so they have no legal obligation to retain anything, which I pointed out to them in my confirmation.
I'm hoping they delete it but don't have the resources to do anything more than hope.