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[Linguoboy]

I wouldn't mind trying a "real" paczki--I assume everything I've had has been at least a little bastardized by exposure to the US. Certainly I've never tried the more traditional fillings like prune or rose.

Here in Chicago, rose is very rare, but I would definitely raise an eyebrow at any bakery which didn't offer prune/plum.

About five years ago now, a friend from Cologne was visiting around this time of year and announced a desire to try pączki so we visited one of the best-regarded "European" bakeries in the area. On the one hand, he was like, "They're just Berliner" and on the other, he was struck by how super-sized they were. Back in Germany, a baker would probably have made the amount of filling in just one American pączek stretch to fill three or four donuts.

[alynnidalar]

Oh, I suppose we've got prune around, I've just never actually tried it (I don't like prunes under normal circumstances so if I'm going to eat prune I want to make sure it's very authentic ). Rose, though, I would be very interested in! I know rose isn't a common American flavor, but paczki aren't a common American food either. And even the specialty type places I've gone to before never seem to carry rose.

EDIT: aaaand we're going to be getting loads of snow tonight/tomorrow morning and I doubt I'll want to drive in it that early. Never mind. Guess I won't get fresh paczki after all...

[Qwynegold]

I'd never heard of semla before - they look delicious!

I got one on my new internship on Tuesday.

I had applied for another job, located in Ireland. It combined two things I was interested in, it had good pay, and I was the only candidate. But I didn't get the job. I was looking forward to going to Ireland and see all the handsome guys there.

[Vijay]

I have so much literature in Malayalam to read, but will I manage to read any of it anytime soon? For all I know, I may have to begin an 8-to-5 job as early as tomorrow.

[Ares Land]

Perhaps this'll amuse some of you.

For reasons of hygiene, I had a washing machine delivered this morning. I went out to help the delivery guys (they had trouble finding the place). After they parked, as they were unloading, one of them commented:

"Oh, yeah, I recognize the building! My brother stole two TV sets here!"

[Vijay]

That's like the story my dad told me about some political party in Kerala. They were accused of killing some guy, but then they strongly denied it. A spokesperson from the party said, "We did not kill this guy!

...We killed this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy......but not this guy!"

[Travis B.]

I have been reading about women in FOSS, and how appallingly low a percentage of FOSS developers are women (the figure I see is 3%) compared to even the general population of programmers (where even then they are highly underrepresented). The reasons I have seen given are hostile culture (but there has got to be more to it, because men can be just as targets of hostility), gender bias (e.g. on GitHub women who are not visibly such are more likely to have their pull requests accepted than men, but if they are visibly female, then it is the other way around), and less free time (but are enough women primary caregivers of young children, as is posited, for this to explain the disparity?). About the first one, I have seen the likes of Slashdot and Reddit often being extremely hostile in many cases towards everyone regardless of gender, but amongst actual programmers on projects as opposed to randos on the Interwebs I have seen little actual hostility (on the programming-oriented IRC channels I frequent, the only real case I can think of was basically some Libertarian types loudly spouting off about how taxes were theft no matter the purpose, and this was not aimed at women at all). I cannot speak about gender bias much, simply because I have encountered few visible women on freenode or like in the first place, but I have not actually observed it in action. And about women having less free time, can we actually explain such a low percentage on established gender roles on this (I would presume that it would have some effect, but this view assumes that a very large proportion of female potential FOSS contributors have children and are of the age where a large portion of one's time would be taken up by taking care of said children and that gender roles are such that they have no help in doing so)? So what are your thoughts? I feel there is something people are missing here, because none of these seem to be sufficient to explain such a low percentage of female FOSS contributors.

[alice]

The "fake geek girl" pseudo-phenomenon might be related.

[Travis B.]

Note that what I have seen is dismissiveness towards comments and contributions; e.g. I once found a bug in someone else's code that was getting in the way of my using it (as it affected a board that I was trying to upload code to), where I already had written a fix to it, and the developers of the project just said "oh, it interferes with a fix to problem X that someone else made" without trying to reconcile my changes with theirs, so now I have to use my own hacked-up version of the code when I want to upload binaries to the board in question. The thing about this, though, is while this is identified as a problem with FOSS development, I do not see why it would necessarily be gender-specific.

[Travis B.]

The "fake geek girl" pseudo-phenomenon might be related.

I have heard of that, never seen it in action. One thing to remember, though, is there is a difference between programmers and mere geeks - you might be able to put on a geek persona, but you can't fake being a programmer except through passing someone else's code off as your own (where then it is obvious).

[alynnidalar]

I cannot speak about gender bias much, simply because I have encountered few visible women on freenode or like in the first place, but I have not actually observed it in action.

do you think perhaps these things are connected in some way

(to be more clear, before this devolves into a classic "too busy being snarky to properly explain themselves" thing -- the reason why you claim to not have observed much gender bias is itself a result of gender bias--because women have been so successfully kept out of those spaces.

also, to be blunt, men are frequently very bad at noticing gender bias when it occurs. It is entirely possible it has occurred in your presence but you didn't see it.)

[Travis B.]

I cannot speak about gender bias much, simply because I have encountered few visible women on freenode or like in the first place, but I have not actually observed it in action.

do you think perhaps these things are connected in some way

(to be more clear, before this devolves into a classic "too busy being snarky to properly explain themselves" thing -- the reason why you claim to not have observed much gender bias is itself a result of gender bias--because women have been so successfully kept out of those spaces.

also, to be blunt, men are frequently very bad at noticing gender bias when it occurs. It is entirely possible it has occurred in your presence but you didn't see it.)

Yes, I understand that perfectly well. My question is why. My big problem is that one of the primary proposed reasons, general hostility within the development environment about development-related things, leads to unfortunate implications, that men can handle hostility and women can't, that women need to be treated with kid gloves while men don't.

[zompist]

Yes, I understand that perfectly well. My question is why. My big problem is that one of the primary proposed reasons, general hostility within the development environment about development-related things, leads to unfortunate implications, that men can handle hostility and women can't, that women need to be treated with kid gloves while men don't.

"Why don't women like a shitty environment? Oh I know, it's beause there's something wrong with women!"

Some alternatives to your "implications" you should have thought of, but strangely didn't:
* the toxicity ramps up tenfold for women
* the toxicity is bad for a large number of men too, but male geeks have strongly internalized a notion that toxic people should be coddled just in case they're geniuses
* an environment designed by and catering to white males will need adjustments when it's opened up to more people; more likely, it's crawling with bad behavior
* treating people non-toxically is not "kid gloves", but human decency, and you should wonder why you're against it

[Linguoboy]

Yes, I understand that perfectly well. My question is why. My big problem is that one of the primary proposed reasons, general hostility within the development environment about development-related things, leads to unfortunate implications, that men can handle hostility and women can't, that women need to be treated with kid gloves while men don't.

I think you badly underestimate the amount of hostility women encountre just trying to live their live and get their work done.

Did you see this article about a male manager who switched places with a female employee simply by changing the names each of them signed their emails with? The results were shocking--if you're a man: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/manager ... weeks.html.

And--as with all kinds of bigotry in action--"hostility" is more than just the blatant "what colour is your thong harassment. Once you start paying attention to how much men talk over women, mansplain, disparage their ideas (only to later claim credit for them), dismiss their experiences, ignore them, exclude them, question them at every opportunity, etc. you can't unsee it again and it is everywhere. If anything, I think white men are less good at handling hostility, as evidenced by how many of them freak out simply at being called "white men".

In short, I think the answer is staring you right there in the face and you're ignoring it because you just can't imagine things are as bad as women keep saying they are.

ETA:

* the toxicity is bad for a large number of men too, but male geeks have strongly internalized a notion that toxic people should be coddled just in case they're geniuses

OMG, this. I just want to take the mythic archetype of the asshole genius and just keep stabbing it through the heart until I have no strength left in my body.

[Vijay]

It's funny this discussion is happening now. My brother happens to be a CS professor and has been getting tons of complaints of sexual harassment by both other faculty and his own TAs. Racism is also a similarly huge problem in CS.

[Travis B.]

When I said there are unfortunate implications, what I meant is following that particular line of thought, that hostility not linked to gender in the area of FOSS development is what drives off women, leads to conclusions that are highly questionable. That is not to say that there is not a substantial amount of sexism, which is not surprising given our society, which likely leads to what we see here to a good extent - but the matter is that from reading on the subject this isn't brought up ("gender bias" is mentioned, but with regard to things such as how frequently GitHub pull requests are accepted, not with regard to work environment). This leads me to another question, though - why FOSS development? The sexism in our society should affect all areas, not just FOSS development. I have worked with many women in positions of authority, but associated with almost none in the context of FOSS.

[Travis B.]

It's funny this discussion is happening now. My brother happens to be a CS professor and has been getting tons of complaints of sexual harassment by both other faculty and his own TAs. Racism is also a similarly huge problem in CS.

I was reading on how there essentially is major problems with discrimination against black people in the computing job market, for instance. (And likewise I have worked with very few black people, while I have worked with many Indian people and a good number of Asian people.)

[Vijay]

I'm just going to point out that raping women is also common in CS, and the sexual harassment I mentioned includes that.

[Travis B.]

The only conclusion that I can think of is that FOSS developers just happen to be especially sexist, because it avoids unfortunate implications, but then that goes back to the question why, since I can't figure out any particular reason this must be so. (And indeed, in some countries like India, CS is far more popular amongst women than it is here in the US, so there cannot be any inherent reason why CS here in the US should necessarily be sexist.)

[Vijay]

I'm not sure it's so much that they're especially sexist as it is that frank discussions of sexism are less common. People in CS are allowed to get away with murder because usually, people don't talk about it, whereas there's more attention atm on, say, politicians. Because of all the attention sex scandals in politics get, we hold politicians to a high standard; sex scandals in CS, by contrast, don't seem to have attracted so much attention, so we don't really do the same for people who work in CS. (Probably an oversimplification, but hopefully, you get the idea. When we don't talk about problems, they keep getting worse).