I'm sure I'll get buried for this, but I have a hard time believing I'm not right. Before I start, I don't know Leah and I'm not judging her character or her coding abilities.
Leah gets a lot of attention for the one obvious reason that doesn't need to be restated. That is why these articles are posted. This blog post doesn't contain any unique information that is presented any better than you could find elsewhere. She has not been involved in that many projects and few of them have gone very far. Pownce was probably her peak.
So I'm not trying to be negative or a nitpicker or anything else like that. I just can't stand that people post the most minute things she does. I remember Techcrunch posted an article the other day because she joined some other company and left SixApart.
There are so many developers and designers that are switching around every day and we barely hear about it aside from the big league players. The fact that Ms. Culver gets her own slice of attention for doing almost nothing of noteworthiness starts to wear on my patience is all.
Have you seen her work in OAuth? Her other open-source projects?
You are guilty for the same reason you are accusing others for giving her attention.
You don't think she's good enough because of it.
Seriously, the startup world and the Valley is such a male-dominated place. I would imagine it's not easy being a woman in this space.
There are so many blog posts from men who went to the top of Hacker News and some of them from people who have no experience delivering. I also haven't seen any of her posts here for a long time.
I'm not saying we cut her slack but let's hold her to the same standard we do for posts by men here on Hacker News.
Look at the article that was linked here. I'm not blaming any of this on her. The guy who added this and the people who upvote it only did so for one reason.
There is hardly anything informative in this article that hasn't been said a million times over. EDIT: I shouldn't even be calling it an article.
Your idea that its hard being a woman in a male-dominated industry such as this...that's a whole other argument for another time.
People like you are part of the reason it is hard. You should follow a good rule for commenting: don't say things that you wouldn't say to someone's face.
Even if you were right (and I have no idea if you are), this is a pretty poisonous form of ad hominem. Is a few too many people upvoting her posts such a bad thing that it justifies making a comment like this in order to correct it?
Kudos to pg for stepping in here. There is an increasingly venomous tone in HN and even when someone responds they are voted down.
In my case maybe I deserve a little of it for being an over the top marketer some of the time, but civil discourse evaporating here. the ad hominem stuff basically drives away the good people.
Even if you were right (and I have no idea if you are), this is an even more insidious form of ad hominem. Would you have felt the need to post that if someone pointed out the lack of accomplishments of some random male developer?
People are quite ruthless with what they perceive as fluff blog posts from ANY source, and I'm not sure your generation's social mores regarding politeness or chivalry are necessarily the correct prescription for alleviating discrimination.
Your implication that women shouldn't be held to the same standard is inherently condescending.
Pocket Fun Games - would you have funded a MALE single founder in another country doing a FREE iPhone app? Not exactly a million-dollar idea, those free, ad-free iPhone apps.
It's not just throwing away your/Sequoia's money, it's that when you fail to hold female applicants to the same standard, the resulting failures add grist to the mill for the other side of the sexist argument, which presumably is the opposite effect from what you intend.
Yes, I would have. I'm quite concerned about the increasingly nasty tone on HN, of which your comment is a startling example. I've read a lot of the comments on HN over the last 3 years and I've seen few so venomous. And ironically, completely mistaken. Pocket Fun Games has two founders, one of them male, and they are one of the most profitable companies from their YC cycle.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think it's the "obvious reason." I think the reason is because many Hacker News users seem to adore celebrity in all its forms.. in the past we've had similarly trivial posts from certain "names" in our field crop up on HN with regularity. All of them men so far, in my recollection.
I'd agree that that effect is in play to some extent, but I did learn a couple of things, which is more than I can say about many articles that get posted here.
Because of this article, I now know about ASIHTTPRequest, which is very likely going to find its way into my iPhone app in the near future as a result.
I agree. It's a shame. TBH If I were a woman, I'd likely create a male online persona just so I could compete on a level playing field without the silly reverse sexism and condescending "oh wow! You're a woman, well in that case this is even more impressive then! Well done you."
The problem is, often online if a woman steps into a geeky world, their comment/post/whatever is voted up into the stratosphere, by probably well meaning men who want to prove they're not sexist.
Judge stories/posts/comments on their merit. Not the identity of the author.
Why complain about it? She can't control whether others give her attention. I respect your comment, but one thing is a little . . . off. How would you like if someone pointed to your most prominent project to date and said, "that was probably his peak"?
On the actual article - I would've found this interesting regardless of who wrote it (even though, yes, if it hadn't been by her I might not have seen it)
> She can't control whether others give her attention.
He did say "I just can't stand that people post the most minute things she does", which is a complaint aimed at HN (or other sites') posters, not at her.
I'd say the article isn't without interest, but I agree with the commenter that it's not really HN material: it's on a very specific programming problem, and it's not something that'll make you think or gain new insight. Compare to the Knuth submission. It'd rather call it 'stackoverflow answer' material.
Yes, I may have a geek crush on her, but that doesn't matter. I read her stuff because she's smart and has built some good things in the past. You can't go wrong reading what smart people have to say.
You could ignore it, just like you ignore dozens of other stories every day. You could flag it if you think it's inappropriate for Hacker News. You could write a blog post about the problem you see and submit it. You could stop reading the offending sites. You could develop a CulverBlock browser extension and share it with like-minded people.
I thought I was going to be the only one commenting on how terrible this article is. Its a few sentences away from being aimless. Someone just has a personal problem with Facebook. The crowd that's using Facebook isn't the same crowd that was inhabiting some old message boards with him/her back in the AOL days. Those are the borderline geeks.
News Flash: You can't turn off people. If you really can't learn to deal with the inane comments of morons, your life is going to be nothing but stress. Plugging your ears just attracts more attention and will make people want to kick and scream more than before.
This is going to happen with big announcements. Just suck it up and deal.
Firefox was never a lightweight browser. It was fairly minimalist, especially compared with what came before it, but those things were just switched off or hidden, not removed, because that would have been a lot more work.
It's probably only got more "lightweight" with time as they've had more opportunity and funding to optimise and actually remove things they don't use.
I pirate because I would never be afford all the things I want or use.
I'm not saying I wouldn't pay someday when I have money, but the $ to content ratio is too high. It is not stealing a product, but a service. I'm stealing an experience created by a company (video games) or a sound created by musicians and not paying the entrance fee.
There is another side to the issue that he completely ignores.
> I pirate because I would never be afford all the things I want or use.
That may apply for you, but seems empirically false. Take, for instance, 2D Boy's recent "Pay Want You Want". The plurality[0] chose to give $0.01 (the lowest possible amount). I really have a hard time believing that $0.01 was anywhere near the maximum of what the average customer could afford, or valued the game at.
As long as it's without consequence and easy enough, people will take what they can. Leave a six-pack of beer in a communal college dorm and see how long it lasts, if you don't believe me.
True, but 2D Boy should also be the exception when it comes to these "charitable" payments. They're a small indie game shop that produces top value content. How many of those >$1 payments would've disappeared if this was EA?
Presumably because it's societally optimal for everyone to be able to consume as much media as they like (since it has a marginal cost of zero). He gains, no one else loses.
Of course, there's a massive externality to deal with: how do the people who create media get money for it? But in an optimal system (which we might not be able to create) everyone would still be able to consume as much as they want.
> Of course, there's a massive externality to deal with: how do the people who create media get money for it? But in an optimal system (which we might not be able to create) everyone would still be able to consume as much as they want.
How is it "optimal" if it doesn't address the obvious cost?
We don't consider compensating producers as an externality where physical goods are concerned, so why is it an externality for intangible goods?
> We don't consider compensating producers as an externality where physical goods are concerned, so why is it an externality for intangible goods?
That's a good question. One important difference is that, at the point of which duplication is possible, the intangible good already exists. Compensating the creator for creating the good may or may not encourage future creations. It's a sunk cost. It's also the only cost.
> One important difference is that, at the point of which duplication is possible, the intangible good already exists.
Not so fast. Yes, duplicating intangible goods is relatively inexpensive, but at point of purchase and use, tangible goods also exist, the costs are sunk, etc, so they're exactly the same.
In both cases, payment compensates producers for effort and resources that have already been expended.
Each incremental physical good deprives someone else of a copy of that good which could otherwise be gained. This is not true for digital goods, which have zero marginal cost. No tangible good has a zero marginal cost.
> Each incremental physical good deprives someone else of a copy of that good which could otherwise be gained. This is not true for digital goods, which have zero marginal cost. No tangible good has a zero marginal cost.
While true, that's irrelevant to an argument that claimed that sunk costs were an externality that wasn't all that important.
I think the reason people feel this way is because of the competitive capitalistic nature of the society we live in.
If I know X% of the population has acquired something for free, how am I supposed to feel when I'm expected to pay for it. Our society places a lot of emphasis on being the best and always being competitive with one another. How am I supposed to be the best or be competitive with others, when the playing field isn't level. The only way in this case to level the playing field is to also engage in piracy.
