In other words, it has nothing to do with skin color or gender but just with seniority?

No. I did not say nor imply that. There is a kind of behavior that is not just hostile toward new people but is particularly hostile to women and POC. White men might not see any difference between that behavior and how newbies are treated but apparently women and POC do perceive a difference.

People are free to deny that such a difference is real. People are likewise free to invalidate the perceptions that traditionally non-priveleged people experience. Apparently SO has chosen to accept that something is going on and it's more than just antagonism toward new people. SO has chosen to accept that the patterns of behavior seen on SO are similar enough to what women and POC experience (and white men do not) when interacting with STEM communities in real life that they feel unwelcome at SO.

Such a thing is difficult to prove. But clearly there is something going on. SO has chosen one explanatory path that apparently most of /. finds difficult to believe. I'm guessing that most /.ers have a different explanation for the observed disparities.

My argument is that the behavior observed on SO by people who are new to the site reminds them of the exact same behavior they see within the white male-dominated world of CS. So yes, everyone on SO might actually be a black woman (and just lie on those surveys) but they are acting like the people who marginalize women and POC within the world of STEM, as perceived, presumably, by women and POC. It's the behavior that we're looking at.

Or could it just maybe be that the only kind of discriminator whether respecting someone or not is whether that person knows what they're talking about or whether they're talking out of their ass?

Because that's what geeks really care about and that's what I base the respect I give to people on. Because that's all a medium like Stack Overflow allows you to use, because that's all you actually see about a person.

Do you not see that people have different styles of writing? And therefore maybe the styles of writing adopted by most of the responders on SO, which in turn is encouraged by the overall culture at SO, mimics the marginalizing actions that women and POC observe in the real world? There is no "pure" writing that is free from all social conditioning and norms. Try as you might, your "natural" form of writing is a product of your culture and experiences.

So ...could it be that a lot of that "sexual/racial/whatever discrimination" is happening just in the user's imagination?

I don't think discrimination is being claimed here. What I gathered is that certain kinds of people do not feel comfortable engaging with the community. Some of these are people who are new. This is definitely something I've picked up on. I used to be fairly active on the TeX/LaTeX site but am not any more for unrelated reasons. And I am a new programmer working on a massive lifetime program. Even though I know how SE works overall and know how to form good questions, etc, I never seek out help from SO because of its clear animosity toward new programmers. It's not worth the headache. I look for help/answers elsewhere.

For women and POC they, apparently, experience something similar that is keeping them away. It could just be newbishness, or it could be that they see in the culture of SO the same toxic aspects they see in STEM fields at school or work.

I imagine the reasoning goes like this. Out in the real world, white men are automatically treated with a higher level of respect and deference especially when it comes to STEM fields. They are the majority in the professional world and make the most money and have the most prestige. Women and POCs who are just coming into the field see all of this as a kind of Good Ol' Boys club and feel excluded or at least marginalized. There is a culture surrounding this and styles of behavior that communicate these ideas to people even if not done consciously.

So when a woman or POC comes to SO they see that exact same kind of behavior and receive those same kinds of signals that they see in real life and this is what discourages them from trying to engage or break into a club that doesn't want them (or at least seems like it doesn't want any outsiders).

This isn't to put the blame on all white men as many are sensitive to these issues and try to be more inclusive. This is to point out that a cultural problem does exist in STEM fields, especially programming, and SO just kind of falls into the same pattern because it isn't actively trying to not fall into that pattern.

I have no idea what the solution would be or if there can be a solution that works well.

Yes you can read -- between the lines. Remember, Amazon is famously anti-union. Do you think they don't have some kind of ulterior motive here? Save money, lower/eliminate benefits eventually, make even the "skilled" employees interchangeable and easily replaceable. Being at the very bottom rung of the economic ladder in America, it's nice to see that the upper middle-class is finally starting to get a taste of what's happening to everyone else.

Sorry for the early morning cynicism. From the bottom we're all just saying "duh, what did you expect?"

I was given a Vic-20 by my parents for Christmas one year when I was about 10 instead of the Atari 2600 I really wanted. I did enjoy the game that came with it (Radar Rat Race) but was still disappointed. Later that day I cracked open the manual and began typing in the commands. "HELLO, WORLD!" appeared on my screen. Eh. And then an animated ASCII jumping-jack man. That's pretty cool. And then a program that asks for your age, runs it against several IF-THEN statements and prints out an answer based on your age.

What a second. What?

So I added numbers together and did more IF-THEN checks. Holy fucking shit. I realized at that moment that I could do anything with these commands. I could create any program I wanted including games like Pacman. There was no limit. I had the Power.

So I programmed hardcore for the next 6 years. I became very good in Basic and proficient in machine language. And then I stopped programming around 17. I was burned out and it wasn't fun anymore.

Eventually I became a music major (composition) and gave up on computers altogether. Then a few years ago I came up with an idea for a super massively large music generating program. While I had forgotten how to program and had no feel for modern technology (when programming) and anything that had happened in languages in those 30 years, I still knew how to think like a programmer.

I chose Lua for this project (which didn't even exist when last I had typed code into a machine) and have become fairly proficient in it (some 6000 lines of code or so).

So yeah, entirely self-taught and then re-self-taught.

I have some huge gaps in my knowledge concerning really cool mathematical algorithms that I'll probably never learn. But I'm not really a programmer. I'm a composer using programming to realize a bigger project.

I went straight to college and nearly flunked out that first year. I really, really needed a break and took it at the cost of my GPA. After that I was fine but the damage was done. Take a year off if you need it.

I'm not a programmer but I've gotten way in over my head on this one program I'm developing (music generating software). I'm constantly using code from all over the place and I attribute it and provide license information for all of it. I don't know what's considered trivial or what any other relevant laws are so I make sure I am always covered. And if I can't find licensing information about some code then I search elsewhere for a solution. Since this one big project is my entire life I want to make sure every single little i is dotted and t crossed. If this makes it easier for me to use code from SE then great with a clear conscience then great!

Sorry I'm so late to reply. Most distros are horribly out of date with the version they package thus missing out on bug fixes and new packages. But even if it is up-to-date it's unnecessary. TeXLive has its own method for upgrading that's similar to apt-get. Basically every day I run: tlmgr update --all which lists and updates everything that needs an update as well as installing any new packages. Every year there's a new version of TeXLive so you just install it into a new directory, change a link to point to it instead of the old one and you're ready to go.

emacs (apt-get ...)
Lilypond (latest development version from the site)
TeXLive (never use your distro's version of TeX/LaTeX -- always just install TeXLive)
Timidity (playback of the MIDI files that Lilypond creates and convert them to FLAC)
mplayer

John Cage's experience in an anechoic chamber was instrumental to much of his thinking about music and silence. Or at least it made for a good anecdote that he used quite often:

"There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."

I have no friends or family and I usually find Christmas less depressing.

The pride of my personal library is my copy of the 20 volume edition of the OED (2nd). I have it conveniently placed near my writing desk and make constant use of it. I fully appreciate the greater convenience of an online version but there's nothing quite like seeing it all laid out like this. While the market for something this expensive and large might be dwindling I doubt it will ever go away completely. And then at $295/year currently for the online version I just cannot justify spending that much (due to the weird price fluctuations at Amazon, and a lot of patience, that's the exact price I paid for my printed version). I also have the OED Historical Thesaurus which is an amazing work. The article mentions that they're going to combine it with the OED for the online version. That would make the yearly price more reasonable but it still seems more than I'd be willing to do for every year for the rest of my life.

I've given this a lot of thought over the years and I believe you can break it down into three circumstances

1) If you're using a monosaced typeface or a typewriter, use two spaces. It's the convention and I personally think it makes reading the text much easier. Of course how often does this situation arise these days? Not very.

2) With a typesetter or typesetting software a "space" has no specific length as it varies depending on the needs of the typesetter. That said some typesetters pad the space after a period and some don't. Either way it will look good and consistent. Trust your typesetter. Though if you use TeX you have your choice of which style to go with. It doesn't matter which you choose, it'll look fine.

3) If you're using a word processor it doesn't matter. Word processors produce crap for output. By using one you are stating up front that you don't care how the final product looks. By definition you are producing an informal text and as such you can use as many spaces as you want since it's not going to affect the aesthetic value or readability of the text any more than the decision to use a word processor in the first place. If you do care about how it looks and reads use typesetting software.