[vog]

Among all aspects of that discussion, the author's gender is about the most uninteresting detail. "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position."

[yareally]

Agreed. I didn't even take the time to find out what their gender was since it's not any related issue. "Guy" was just used in a generic sense[1].

[1] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/generic-s...

[Svip]

I apologise, I am not familiar enough with the usage of 'guy' to know it is generic in singular (I know it is in plural).

[yareally]

No worries :). I just think of it as another way of saying "dude".

[ars]

Bad example because officially dude is also male. The female is dudine, dudette, or dudess.

But like like guy, dude because gender neutral in common speech.

[king_jester]

Just to nitpick, guy and dude are not gender neutral, they just happened to be heavily used by the community in general, mostly because people assume users are men by default.

[Dylan16807]

Speak for yourself. A lot of people use it as a real gender neutral.