[melindajb]

No, no, no, no and no. Stop it. Pattern matching isn't science. Stop pretending it is.

https://medium.com/best-thing-i-found-online-today/8178b2794...

To be direct: Pattern recognition is bullshit voodoo pseudo-science masquerading as objectivity and meritocracy. It’s sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and xenophobia dressed up as science. It sickens me.

[balls187]

> No, no, no, no and no. Stop it.

Nice job in raising the level of discourse here.

[melindajb]

oh because claiming a bullshit voodoo science as argument was so earth shattering? seriously. especially coming from someone with "balls" in the name. read the link. Love it, i'm now not being allowed to reply. I love how it's ok for guys on hacker news to denigrate and insult women and minorities but if we say, look stop it, you're all suddenly begging for rationality. NOTHING about pattern matching is rational. So you have no right to expect rationality as a response.

all the links to reply to any comment are now gone. would you like a screen shot?

[balls187]

> all the links to reply to any comment are now gone. would you like a screen shot?

Hrm...sure it's not that you're trying to reply to a new comment (there is a delay before you can reply)

I understand your point. Unfortunately the way you made it makes you come across as an irrational individual.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi+profiling&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...

> especially coming from someone with "balls" in the name

Considering that's my name...

> i'm now not being allowed to reply.

Did someone prevent you from replying? Did your comment get deleted?

No one is preventing you from replying. You disagree with the above commented, I disagreed with how you came across.

> NOTHING about pattern matching is rational. So you have no right to expect rationality as a response.

How so?

Think that it's okay for TSA agents to search a 82 year old women, instead of say me (a dark ass dude who looks like a terrorist)? Should their sampling of passengers should be completely random?

People shouldn't denigrate anyone: women, men, minorities, or majorities.

[melindajb]

Now that I have the access to reply again.

Suggesting that it's ok to accept that automatically thinking a woman at a trade show is not an engineer is simply irrational. We are humans and with that comes the ability to override animal thinking. Dare I say, I expect the person to have that thought to override it, think rationally, and say something other than what most of them do? And is asking for that somehow in and of itself irrational? Look, having heard these bullshit arguments hundreds of times, I am right tired of having them. We've been discussing this issue long enough that the people who keep doing this, need to not be tolerated. We need to stop expecting those without power to always be the ones to take the high road.

Anger is a valid and rational response to continued discrimination. To say otherwise comes dangerously close to tone policing.

[balls187]

> Suggesting that it's ok to accept that automatically thinking a woman at a trade show is not an engineer is simply irrational.

Agreed, mostly. What if it was a women who was dressed provocatively, i.e. a booth babe? Would that change the circumstance.

In the case of the main article, the woman at the trade show WASNT and engineer.

But that's beside the point.

Slight semantics here--I think it's okay to make assumptions. I don't think it's okay to make assumptions and then act upon them as if they're fact. Like, asking a women if she's in HR.

For example: if you saw two guys at a company booth, one guy who was slightly overweight, had a unkept beard, and wore a t-shirt that had the Perl deCSS code, and standing next to him, was someone in dockers, a button up shirt, and had a blackberry, you might make some snap assumptions.

> Anger is a valid and rational response to continued discrimination.

How so? Does it end the discrimination? Does it further your point?

I think being angry is a valid and healthy emotional response, but not a rational one.

[ipince]

> For example: if you saw two guys at a company booth, one guy who was slightly overweight, had a unkept beard, and wore a t-shirt that had the Perl deCSS code, and standing next to him, was someone in dockers, a button up shirt, and had a blackberry, you might make some snap assumptions.

I think the point here is that even if you (internally) make those assumptions, you shouldn't externalize them. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so to speak.

[melindajb]

Working backwards: Throwing around the word rational on hacker news is a bit misleading, don't you think? The original comments reek of irrationality and bias. Also, "irrational" is a word men love to throw at women when they disagree with what they say. That's typically called "tone policing" but I'm not going to assign you that label at the moment.

Regarding the two men, as I've said repeatedly on this thread, it's not the assumptions I'm making, it's the actions I take as a result. What I might do is look at both of them, for example, and say, "Who's the right person to talk to me about your APIs?"

Now regarding your question vis a vis the booth babe: booth babes are a terrible invention. they are a huge part of the problem. But I'll ask it this way: wouldn't you rather be known as a man who treats a booth babe like an engineer, than the douchebag who treats an engineer like a booth babe?

In general, when it comes to women (ahem and all other humans too) you're much more likely to get along with them if you treat them as if they have brains first.

[haukilup]

I'm having a hard time determining if you comments are meant to be trolling or not. You see to be adamantly against an opinion the people you're replying to don't exactly hold. You're doing the equivalent of yelling out a boilerplate rant anytime a keyword you've been waiting for pops up.

[melindajb]

Why do you feel the need to determine whether I'm a troll or not?

I'm tired of hearing the same old excuses for discrimination, namely "pattern matching." It's bullshit. It's everywhere on this thread as it so often is when posts about discrimination and harassment reach any level of awareness on Hacker News. And while most of the time I generally ignore it, rolling my eyes and occasionally just become depressed as hell, sometimes I just get fed up and decide to call it out. Then I vent it out and get back to work. I don't care what you label it as, in fact the whole concept of labeling is precisely the issue.

Treat people with respect. That's all any of us want. But when we say that nicely we get ignored. When we say it strongly, we get labeled everything from bitch, to sociopath, to irrational, to whatever. There's no win. So I just say what I think and let the chips fall where they may. Upvote me, downvote me, I honestly do not give a shit.

[antdaddy]

> Upvote me, downvote me, I honestly do not give a shit.

If you really don't care, why even say this?

[Dewie]

> Love it, i'm now not being allowed to reply.

If someone just posted something, there is a cool down period before you can reply. Maybe that was the case.