It seems to be a social justice tech pundit initiation ritual to attack Linus Torvalds' management style and the culture that surrounds the Linux kernel.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's not supposed to be welcoming, it is supposed to be a filter, because the wanna-bees far outnumber the bees. Complaining about it is like complaining about the nature of special forces training. It is demanding, unsympathetic, and hostile to failure for a damned good reason - because the cost of failure is high, higher than every other open source project. The claim that that is what keeps women out is self-defeating, because you're not advocating for women, you're calling them weak and incompetent far more plainly the dog whistling of the Internet misogynist.

No one is obliged to change their culture to suit the delicate sensibilities of someone else. You want to fit in with a foreign culture, the onus is on you to change, not the other way around. If you want more women to participate in the Linux kernel, the onus is on you to change how the wider culture indoctrinates women, so that they can learn how to correctly perceive the nuance that exists in that style of hyperbolic insulting criticism, which most men understand even if they don't like it.

Give it a chance and I think you'll find that it's a lot more fun and honest and helpful than the passive aggressive style of criticism that the social justice cult considers "constructive".

This one sticks out the most:

On the other hand, when he got up on stage, he did look like those guys. "So you probably assumed I was a real programmer." These sorts of assumptions contribute to the attrition of marginalized people in tech, he said.

Bullshit, in the picture he's wearing a tie.

Right winger before denial became untenable: you can't trust the models! Climate change is a hoax!

Right winger after denial became untenable: our models say geo-engineering is safe and will work! Trust us!

If you can't get the political will to do the simple safe thing, you won't get it to do the complex reckless thing.

You both made a decision to have sex, knowing that contraception is not 100% reliable and that the other person could be lying, and decided to chance it.

This is what feminists actually believe.

Somehow I doubt they would say this if the issue was a man sleeping around and lying about having a venereal disease.

Fallacy fallacy, appeal to fallacy.

I suppose this means I win.

The anti-fluoride people are cranks and we're under no obligation to entertain them. Like creationists, merely arguing with them gives them more credibility than they had before.

I've been doing mobile development for the last fifteen years, and my experience with PhoneGap about three years ago was the most ridiculous and painful experience of my career.

Developing with HTML and JavaScript is a pointless chore. It is literally easier to learn both iOS and Android programming and write the same app twice than to put up with and hack around the stupid limitations of hosted web apps. You lose nothing but the ability to write once and debug everywhere shared code, and you gain native performance, native look and feel, and you can use two vastly superior programming languages. Your code can execute in background threads, and you can use a real debugger and whatever IDE you prefer.

That doesn't mean you can't write decent apps using HTML and JavaScript. But be honest. When you use one, you're not actually impressed by what you see. You're impressed the same way you're impressed when you see a demo written for the C64. The accomplishment is not what it does, but what it does given the severe limitations of the platform.

It's like Kool Aid. Some people find it refreshing. To some people, it signals faith and loyalty to their favorite brand. And to others, it just tastes like different kinds of tacky sugar water.

iOS has perfectly functional networking libraries and simple objects that provide an API to them.

Not for doing anything even the slightest bit complex. Like, for example, certificate pinning and certificate validation, which is what AFNetworking fucked up.

Do you think Apple is better? The APIs are shit. They are horribly documented. They don't "just work" with the high level Objective C APIs, but require a lot of low-level tinkering. They don't perform revocation checks consistently.

People use AFNetworking because the standard APIs are not good enough. I would have been using it had I not already rolled my own wrappers long before AFNetworking had the features I required. The average iOS developer cannot do that.

You're trolling, right? Because what you said is textbook stupid, an example that sounds contrived because it too perfectly illustrates the links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/N...

I wonder what the intersection is between the people complaining about this and the people who want to do active SETI, aka "METI".

Because we're all fucked if the aliens you alert to our existence share your conveniently simplistic notion of personhood. They'll most likely be further beyond us than we are to our higher primate cousins.

I mean, do you people even believe in evolution? Or do you believe in souls and animals not having them and all that claptrap?

It's also a rational assumption that we'll develop some form of strong AI eventually, even if it requires the complete simulation of human brains. You don't have to drink the Singularity kool-aid to know where that leads. If I were you I'd be a little more circumspect about promoting a worldview that would discard your grandchildren as dumb meaty animals.

That has nothing to do with it. The apps themselves are actually running on the phone, not the watch. Even the most basic app is laggy, and all third party apps necessarily have dumbed down, almost WAP-like user interfaces because of limitations in the API and GUI toolkit.

So, where are all the environmentalists demanding we build integral fast reactors as fast as we can?

Given that it seems everyone who talks about breeder reactors talks like you do, maybe they're distancing themselves so they aren't associated with right-wing cranks?

Anyways, I found some environmentalists, I'm sure at least a few are interested in the technology you're evangelizing.

If Snowden wasn't made aware of the angle Oliver was taking before the interview, it's pretty obvious is on board with it by the end of it. Being a dick to him and asking "hard questions" was part of the schtick. If you don't perceive that, you probably shouldn't be holding up Idiocracy as your banner.

What I think is funny, especially in light of your "that's the media's job" complaint, is that I thought he was going to take the angle "you don't trust the government with our privacy, but you just trust less competent journalists with our secrets... hypocrite much?" Oliver didn't go quite that far, maybe because it would implicate himself, though the entire exercise is him doing precisely what you claim should be his job and not Snowden's.

Myself, I have a feeling they're going to learn a few things about him during the investigation that they'd rather were not true.

His fleshlight in a box of pictures of Angela Merkel?

I have a feeling the thing you desperately wish were not true is the fact that depression alone can drive people to do things like this, and it makes you uncomfortable given your own paranoid metal state.

Here's how foolish this nonsense is. Assume we have two classes, Woman, and Kitchen, which are written by different women. Passing the Bechdel test:

self.sandwich = [woman getSandwichFromKitchen:kitchen];

I learned something about myself writing that. Objective C really is as shitty as Java. I should stop oppressing Java programmers.