Just thought I'd update this now that more details have been revealed. Horvath was dating someone at github, who at the time much of this happened was an ex; however, he's not the bully; Ted Nyman is the guy who vengefully reverted her commits after she refused to get involved with him--that's a classic pattern of sexual harassment. She never dated Nyman.

Subsequently revealed emails and texts show that TPW and his wife were pretty much as bad as alleged, and that various upper-ups at github worked with them to protect github and the upper-ups. Most of what comes out of this story is that github is a pretty drama-heavy, toxic place to work.

Women like Julie Ann Horvath who intentionally antagonize those who aren't perfectly politically correct

I didn't realize that complaining about your commits being vengefully reverted by the guy you wouldn't fuck, was antagonizing, and demanding of an unreasonable level of political correctness. So sorry!

Nonsense, a woman who makes an allegation will almost always get everything she wants.

Bwahahahahahahah!

This would all be a much more meaningful comment if it were 80 years ago and we were debating allowing women into the workplace at all. Outside of the tech industry--in medicine, law, business, factory work--women make up a substantial, if not equal, portion of the workforce, and the employers have figured out how to handle men and women working together. You have an express policy forbidding harassment, an HR department that responds properly to accusations, and bam! You're in the clear. For employers who do these things, they have cases of sexual harassment. They also have cases of theft, embezzlement, incompetence, misunderstandings, and all the other normal workplace issues that get worked out by having competent management and HR, and the company isn't in any particular danger from a lawsuit. Companies have to be grossly negligent in handling complaints or allowing particular environments to persist, to be liable.

Except in the tech industry, the retarded manchild of the working world, where the male/female ratios are from the 1960s, and so are the attitudes of your average techie--and the startup world is 10 times worse than everywhere else because they're not big enough to need competent HR professionals and they imagine themselves to be "disruptors" of the status quo. It's improved a lot over the last couple decades, if only because of the general improvement in society's attitude towards women. But if you want to see truly caveman sexism, look no further than the latest Hacker News darling.

BTW, women in the workplace don't really want a change in the status quo--more flexible hours, etc., is just more sexist "men are from mars" bullshit. What women want is not to have to put up with crap because they're women. Figure that part out (and as I said, most of the Fortune 1000 could give lessons on it), and you're golden.

The term itself has a dictionary meaning, but in a practical sense it's one of the lies that startups and HR departments tell themselves about themselves and their employees (like "we're passionate about changing how payments are processed" or "we only hire rockstar ninjas") to avoid dealing with difficult real world concerns.

I have no problem with the concept as an ideal, but as with many other practical lies, it's as often used as a bludgeon, as a way to dismiss external factors, and as a means of post facto reasoning while committing the Just World fallacy--we're a meritocracy, you haven't advanced, therefore you lack merit.

The time cube guy has nothing to lose by being time cube guy. Horvath's prospects in the startup world are in a shambles now, and she's faced a volume of shit that crazy people like time cube guy don't care about because they're crazy, but is a huge disincentive to normal people. It's not proof, but it's a point in her favour.

If you mean "the official story from the people hired by github to investigate github's wrongdoing, who found that their employer github did nothing wrong, but for totally unrelated reasons one of our founders is going to spend more time with his other interests," then I agree.

Good points all, but I would one thing to your diagnosis that this is particularly bad in Silicon Valley: when you create a culture that celebrates "disruption" and sees rule-breaking as entrepeneurialism, you're almost certain to have a much harder time living within social boundaries that are the result of a lot of hard-earned lessons.

Rules can be profitably broken, but doing so tends to require understanding those rules in the first place and figuring out why some particular point is no longer worth obeying, not just willy-nilly smashing of barriers in the hope that a VC will pay you to keep making messes.

It's so cute that you think the term "meritocracy" is meaningful, especially in the context of Silicon Valley.

The original accusation has a human being who's come forward and publicly attached her name and career prospects to it, and is accepting significant personal costs to do so. The anonymous blog post is 100% consequence free for the author. That does imply a relative difference in credibility.

The source of the "ex boyfriend" claim is an anonymous blog post with no sourcing or corroboration, and it's a detail that was completely missing until now, despite plentiful opportunities to introduce it. Since claimed, no one has confirmed it. A troll is throwing up sand.

According to an anonymous blog post with no sourcing, confirmation, or corroboration. It's bullshit.

Nothing, thanks for asking.

I think the point Tarruda's making very effectively is that refactoring can be unnecessarily difficult if your codebase has too much technical debt, too little mechanism for contributing, that this is a barrier to entry, and that at a certain point breaking things and then fixing the important bits while improving the underlying organization, is necessary to maintain forward progress.

Time will tell. The original vi was written by Bill Joy, and is still available as traditional vi. Bram's reimplementation took over because it was more freely available and more feature rich. If Tarruda proves to be a good BDFL, this might be the moment we look back on as the third big fork of vi.

If I'm entering a lot of text, then I'll stay in insert mode, typing away, backspacing to delete and tabbing to indent if auto-indent doesn't do it right. What you're missing is that most software development isn't about entering text. It's about reading existing code to understand the landscape, it's about refactoring code by moving chunks around or renaming things or adding comments here and there, it's about searching and finding, it's about structuring the code or grasping that structure. Unless you're the kind of prodigy who just starts typing and then stops when it's done perfectly the first time, then you're likely doing it too, you're just using the mouse a lot or hitting the cursor keys way more than you have to.

I'm fairly certain that you're doing it wrong.

If the quality of your code matches the quality of your insights here, I feel bad for your employer.