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cmiles8 5 hours ago [-]
Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
pseudosavant 1 hours ago [-]
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
JuniperMesos 49 minutes ago [-]
There was definitely gender-based affirmative action benefitting women in 1994 - the term DEI is newer than that (as far as I'm aware), but the concept is definitely not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
smolder 9 minutes ago [-]
"where is the conference celebrating white men?" -how you sound
Geezus_42 42 minutes ago [-]
Why do you find it concerning that a conference would focus on women?
datsci_est_2015 16 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think they were expressing concern, just the fact.
I read it as a damning indictment against anti-“DEI” fanatics that they’re on the wrong side of history when they push the envelope too far in the direction of “merit-based hiring”, as if DEI was something relatively-recently concocted.
Laughably, in the days before “DEI”, “merit-based hiring” usually equated to “good old boys club”. Based on the industries in which I’ve been involved, it’s still very much “good old boys club”, despite best efforts for DEI to try to make things more merit-based.
jjgreen 29 minutes ago [-]
Huh? Someone saying something is a DEI concern does not mean they find it concerning.
a-french-anon 32 minutes ago [-]
Because it undermines claims of equality? Make conferences for everyone, men and women.
And actually, don't give gold stars to people just for being women (as in, would the same person as a man receive even half the attention), this is the worst way to belittle actual achievements coming from them.
15 minutes ago [-]
peterfirefly 24 minutes ago [-]
Isn't the problem here the Anita Borg foundation and not Grace Hopper?
sdcfgy 2 hours ago [-]
DEI didn’t implode. It stopped being a valuable marketing exercise for most companies as it wasn’t trending on social media any more.
rurjckci384 2 hours ago [-]
It became a liability - corporates were legally threatened
There's a big difference between suing people for prima facie illegal hiring practices and suing people for holding Grace Hopper celebrations. We probably shouldn't conflate them. Your links, as best as I can tell, are about the former sort of activity - hiring or paying people differently on the basis of protected characteristics.
throw830373 54 minutes ago [-]
Every statement from company officials such as "we only employ women" or "toxic males", can be used as evidence at court. It is very difficult to prove bias from vague sanitized corporate language, direct "activist" statements make proving such bias very easy. For example recent lawsuit with IBM!
bossyTeacher 1 minutes ago [-]
> "we only employ women"
But I highly doubt most companies were saying that or implying it. There's more to DEI than having minority quotas. Would DEI practices such as campaigns to encourage more men to go into nursing, midwifery or teaching be targeted too?
philipallstar 1 hours ago [-]
Don't know about corporates, but Harvard was sued[0] for DEI-esque discrimination.
Harvard lost due to obvious "anti" racist discrimination. It still seems to discriminate against whites and asians and in favour of blacks, but not as heavily as it used to.
Edit: forgot to to write "and asians".
58 minutes ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
lynx97 57 minutes ago [-]
While cynical, there is a lot of truth to your statement. I wish the activist type would realize that they are actually being used, but it appears there isn't much chance they will ever listen to the old dogs in this game.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors
Do we know any sponsors who pulled out? Even if that was the case, pulling the plug like this at t minus two weeks speaks to problems internally.
cmiles8 4 hours ago [-]
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
throw830373 52 minutes ago [-]
Post is very clear there is also less interest from individuals to participate. Tech jobs are going through implosion now (for several reasons), and working in tech is not so attractive anymore.
> Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations
Geezus_42 40 minutes ago [-]
Mainly because the people in power believe they'll be able to replace us all any day now.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
usernomdeguerre 3 hours ago [-]
>It's a shame that events like this are affected, but I can't help but be glad that this ended...
Or just canceling scientific research because keywords like "diversity" showed up in the abstract.
mkesper 3 hours ago [-]
As a matter of fact non-white, non-male individuals are disadvantaged in many societies. The consequences of improving the equality of opportunities may sometimes feel like disadvantage to groups that received preferential treatment before. The goal needs to be a levelled playing field for everyone, not denying inequality and punishing those who point out and strive to improve those social injustices.
account42 55 minutes ago [-]
Collective punishment or priviledges baced on race or sex is ... racism/sexism, pure and simple. If you want to help disadvantaged people then help those who are disadvantaged. But that's harder and generally requires you to actually show that they are disadvantaged rather than making racist/sexist claims.
Geezus_42 38 minutes ago [-]
Or just help everyone and not worry about means testing. It won't be hard to spot the ones taking more than their fair share.
lynx97 1 hours ago [-]
Real equality isn't obtainable. What we are doing currently is just moving things around. The classic case of the vocal minority being louder then another minority. This isn't creating honest fairness, it just highlights certain groups to the detriment of others. Since LGBTQ has become louder, disabled people are being more forgotten again. Accessibility is HARD, so, just cater to LGBTQ and your corporate conscience is magically cleared up. Activists HATE this insight, since they are also blind to the needs of even smaller groups. I know what I am talking about, I am disabled, and I am watching the "landscape" since 35 years.
If your knee jerk reaction is to downvote this, I am not surprised, because, you know, that just underlines my point.
Geezus_42 36 minutes ago [-]
It's almost like capitalism is inherently unequal.
lynx97 11 minutes ago [-]
Is a bit like with democracy. Its the best system we have... Everything we, as humans, do, will eventually be unfair, because, frankly, humans are just not fair. Sure, a select few have high goals, and might even DTRT... But thats always just a small group. The rest of us will try to take advantage of others, some coniscously, some unconsciously. Humankind will only be fair once it has ended.
georgemcbay 3 hours ago [-]
"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression".
This sort of talk will get you downvoted here on HN by the "oppressed".
But as a white male, I agree with you.
DEI "imploded" not because it was unfair, but because a bunch of mediocre baby back bitches can't reckon with the fact that they have always benefited from a ton of privilege.
InsideOutSanta 3 hours ago [-]
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "DEI" in real life were the most incompetent men I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
theodric 45 minutes ago [-]
We had a physical laborer position in the datacenter (lift and shift) get "flagged for diversity (female)" and sit open and unfilled for a year because we were unable to recruit a woman. THIS is the kind of thing that causes problems: some HR analyst pulled the datacenter team stats, saw there were no women working in the grunt team, and decided to try and change that by force. We had LOTS of women in the datacenter group, majority in analysts and coordination, pretty balanced overall, but just none in the grunts. No thoughts were given to why women didn't and likely wouldn't apply for that role. By god, I tried. The few I got to interview noped out once the job responsibilities were made clear. We eventually closed the position unfilled as part of a scaledown/budget giveback.
I'm sure an argument could be made about how the org should seek equity by restructuring the way the team works to eliminate the need for physical strength and replace it with machines, allowing any operative to do the job, but those arguments never seem to come with a budget attached to buy lifts or powered carts to allow us to change the way things have been done in the computing center for 50+ years. Talk is cheap, companies are cheaper. Furthermore, overcoming societal norms such that a woman would choose to apply for that role over a less physically taxing, traditionally male-coded one is likely to be more difficult even than finding budget for machines.
Geezus_42 34 minutes ago [-]
That's just your company's HR being morons. Or more likely, they were doing their best to make sure the position didn't get filled because that would cost money.
zombocomvibes 2 hours ago [-]
Just at the administration and say with a straight face that it's meritocracy in action. Hah.
oddIdentities 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
account42 59 minutes ago [-]
DEI imploded because it's racist and sexist and always was.
Geezus_42 33 minutes ago [-]
Tell me how Hegseth and Patel are remotely qualified for their positions.
lynx97 31 minutes ago [-]
Your post would be way less hilarious if you refrained from using words like "bitches" in a post arguing for DEI! Derogatory sexist terms don't really help your cuase.
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
Clearly a Fox host is the best military super genius.
kelnos 2 hours ago [-]
The federal government has cancelled funding for a ton of genuinely useful scientific research because "o noes not the DEI monster". (Not to mention just putting the word "diversity" in your proposal has been grounds for rejection, even if it you're talking about, say "wifi antenna diversity".)
But sure, I'm glad now you can say whatever you want in your code comments. Seems like a good trade. /s
account42 53 minutes ago [-]
Overcorrection is only a natural reaction to a previously even larger push in the other direction. The correction was sorely needed and wel'll just have to live with a little bit of collateral damage until things normalize.
Geezus_42 31 minutes ago [-]
That is idiotic and stems from the false notion that there is some natural equilibrium that will occur.
netsharc 3 hours ago [-]
Profiles of corporate courage...
To Godwin it (with his assumed blessing (1)), I guess this is how BMW, Hugo Boss, Allianz, etc, ended up being involved in the Holocaust.
Reducing funding for something sometimes harmful, which then correspondingly means the funding is not passed on to others, is not the Holocaust.
The utter degrading of the meanings of powerful words might get us there, though.
dofm 41 minutes ago [-]
> Reducing funding for something sometimes harmful, which then correspondingly means the funding is not passed on to others, is not the Holocaust.
This is a rather boring straw man characterisation of the claim you are replying to. Don’t do this.
philipallstar 35 minutes ago [-]
It might be a good idea to mention what the straw man is, rather than just throw the phrase and see if it sticks.
itake 4 hours ago [-]
yeah, feels like they were hoping something would come through until it didn't
oddIdentities 2 hours ago [-]
> This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it.
Shocking.
foldr 29 minutes ago [-]
>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
yawpitch 2 hours ago [-]
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
philipallstar 1 hours ago [-]
It was definitely and constantly imploding. It was just kept alive by a giant amount of taxpayer and corporate money.
tempfile 16 minutes ago [-]
What does this even mean? Every initiative is kept alive by money. It was very clearly attacked by the Trump administration, and once they started attacking, DEI initiatives stopped. Why else do you think the "implosions", apparently happening all the time, were finally too much to sustain around 2025?
tastyface 3 hours ago [-]
DEI did not implode; it was heavily and viciously assaulted.
cmiles8 1 hours ago [-]
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
tempfile 18 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't seem like that's implied at all. There is no implication about whether it is good or bad actually, but if the fact it was attacked is a bad thing, the only inference is that on balance it did more harm than good.
deadbunny 1 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate on some of these "bad things"?
cmiles8 58 minutes ago [-]
Many DEI programs were highly discriminatory if not outright racist towards certain minorities that were seen as less worthy. Asians and Jewish individuals were often heavily discriminated against via DEI initiatives. The list goes on.
These programs were, in theory, well intentioned but to suggest they did nothing wrong is simply factually incorrect.
krapp 2 minutes ago [-]
The true motivations of the anti-DEI movement were obvious when they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed within the system, and proceeded to do things like blame plane crashes on the hiring of black pilots. There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.
Maybe a few naive people in the movement had good intentions but they were clearly dupes for what was at its core a right-wing white supremacist and incel ideology.
samlinnfer 1 hours ago [-]
Racism
account42 51 minutes ago [-]
As should all things evil be.
tossandthrow 3 hours ago [-]
You could also say that DEI is easier to defend when human work was more valuable and capital was cheaper.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
You could say that it was easier to practice before the executive (that routinely hires the dumbest troglodytes - whose only qualification is loyalty to the fuhrer - into positions of power) started a witchhunt against anyone practicing it.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
JuniperMesos 36 minutes ago [-]
You probably don't actually want corporations that do intrinsically care about being able to violate federal civil rights and anti-discrimination law, and are willing to lose money and give up influence in order to keep doing so.
tossandthrow 39 minutes ago [-]
I should be the last one to defend the existing system.
But IMHO DEI answers the wrong question.
Worthwhile lives does not come from equal access to the hamster wheel.
I am much more pro UBI structures og negative taxation - which are inherently difficult to make descriminatory as there is no personal judgement of the people to receive it.
gmerc 1 hours ago [-]
You don't want to run afoul of Agent Orange by celebrating a woman so close to his coronation
grahar64 3 hours ago [-]
Is it because international registrations were down. I know that I am dodging US travel ATM
hunta2097 3 hours ago [-]
I've had the option of a free trip to the US twice in the past year.
It sounds like this conference had been going downhill for a few years.
beej71 5 hours ago [-]
Ugh. A bunch of our students already booked travel and rooms. What a horrible situation all around.
CodeCompost 3 hours ago [-]
What's stopping those students from holding an impromptu memorial?
vineyardmike 3 hours ago [-]
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
WastedCucumber 3 hours ago [-]
Organizing
swyx 5 hours ago [-]
were there any hints that this might happen at all? so abrupt
murderfs 3 hours ago [-]
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Incredible.
beej71 4 hours ago [-]
We faculty learned about it this evening. :(
roughly 2 hours ago [-]
Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.
chasil 5 hours ago [-]
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
wolfi1 6 hours ago [-]
I have to admit, I suspected the Secretary of War cancelled the funding
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
peterfirefly 20 minutes ago [-]
She was the real deal, just massively overhyped for being a woman.
Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:
Banking & Financial Services
Bank of America - Booth 439
Capital One - Booth 831
Bloomberg - Booth 824
Navy Federal - Booth 426
USAA - Booth 614
Vanguard - Booth 819
Insurance & Financial Tech
Prudential - Booth 526
CHUBB - Booth 344
Voya Financial - Booth 1226
NEXT Insurance - Booth 1227
Manulife - Booth 1122
Tech & Software Companies
Intuit - Booth 422
PayPal - Booth 514
Cloudflare - Booth 533
Wayfair - Booth 342
Xero - Booth 343
Adyen - Booth 605
WEX - Booth 1014
Chewy - Booth 1114
Infoblox - Booth 852
InterSystems - Booth 518
Red Hat - Booth 919
DTCC - Booth 418
Consulting & Professional Services
EY - Booth 1228
E-commerce & Entertainment
Audible - Booth 1251
Automotive & Manufacturing
Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Automotive & Manufacturing
Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Real Estate & Corporate Services
CBRE - Booth 341
Lumen - Booth 345
Retail & Food Services
McDonald's - Booth 339
Healthcare & Medical Technology
Tandem Diabetes Care - Booth 313
Northwestern Medicine - Booth 1214
Mortgage & Real Estate Tech
Rocket - Booth 1211
throw830373 3 hours ago [-]
So they sponsored last year, now you are asking them to pay 50x more?
And if thay paid the whole thing this year, and pulled out next year, th÷pe PR would be 50x worse. Single company cancelled this event in 2027!
Seems like smart move to get out fast!
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
throw830373 2 hours ago [-]
> mportant it is for furthering their industries
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
fortran77 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
adamors 5 hours ago [-]
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
kenjackson 5 hours ago [-]
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
throw830373 3 hours ago [-]
Lets not forget about female CEOs, they should be making 20x more.
tbrownaw 5 hours ago [-]
Path dependence causes problems, it's better to make sure you can just use current state instead.
kenjackson 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry to be dense. What does that mean?
ithkuil 4 hours ago [-]
I believe the meaning in plain English is:
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
kenjackson 4 hours ago [-]
Got it. I agree. If there is no modern negative consequences then no redress is needed.
ithkuil 2 hours ago [-]
and conversely, if there are modern negative consequences, let's focus on those and fix them!
kenjackson 2 hours ago [-]
100%
zombocomvibes 3 hours ago [-]
Look at the current admin's overt tipping of the scales for white heterosexual Christian (in name only) males to see evidence of DEI in action.
They just don't like it when it's other people
ithkuil 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's horrible and blatant.
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it.
I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
> But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
They are happy to do whatever they want, and they don't worry about needing false-equivalence precedent to do it.
ithkuil 22 minutes ago [-]
sure, but this still doesn't mean we should behave like them.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 5 hours ago [-]
> you cannot say you do anything for women anymore
Boy oh boy let me tell you about some stuff going on in sports in the latest years...
ura_yukimitsu 29 minutes ago [-]
Can you please say what exactly you're implying here and what that has to do with the situation AnitaB is in?
tempfile 11 minutes ago [-]
Corrected: you can't say you do anything for women that actually matters.
eddythompson80 1 hours ago [-]
I think they mean women as an abstract concept
2muchcoffeeman 5 hours ago [-]
“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…
Lerc 4 hours ago [-]
Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
n4r9 1 hours ago [-]
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
Lerc 48 minutes ago [-]
>There must be a name for this type of character influence.
Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.
nwatson 32 minutes ago [-]
The term is: antihero
Lerc 5 minutes ago [-]
That's the term for the character. I think they were seeking a term to describe those who perceive antiheroes to be heroes.
3 minutes ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
wood_spirit 3 hours ago [-]
(What stuff is happening to the center left in Sweden right now?)
nyargh 3 hours ago [-]
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
wood_spirit 3 hours ago [-]
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
I would say the center party is center-right.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> centrism
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
oliculipolicula 4 hours ago [-]
Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.
gwd 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
slater 5 hours ago [-]
every accusation, confession, etc.
0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago [-]
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
froh 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mihaaly 2 hours ago [-]
What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
knorker 2 hours ago [-]
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
Oh, the gaslighting. Glad I never went.
surume 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
WangComputers 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zkmon 2 hours ago [-]
There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
I read it as a damning indictment against anti-“DEI” fanatics that they’re on the wrong side of history when they push the envelope too far in the direction of “merit-based hiring”, as if DEI was something relatively-recently concocted.
Laughably, in the days before “DEI”, “merit-based hiring” usually equated to “good old boys club”. Based on the industries in which I’ve been involved, it’s still very much “good old boys club”, despite best efforts for DEI to try to make things more merit-based.
And actually, don't give gold stars to people just for being women (as in, would the same person as a man receive even half the attention), this is the worst way to belittle actual achievements coming from them.
DOJ sued Deloitte over DEI programs, they ended up settling for $21.5 million: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deloitte-pay-215-mi...
Texas Attorney General declared DEI initiatives unconstitutional in a legal opinion: https://www.gibsondunn.com/texas-attorney-general-declares-p...
Several state Attorneys General sent legal threats to 20 major law firms over DEI: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-led-states-deman...
Texas Attorney General warned major banks that DEI programs violate feduciary duty: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/Ibce2fdc5dcec11efb708bbad...
But I highly doubt most companies were saying that or implying it. There's more to DEI than having minority quotas. Would DEI practices such as campaigns to encourage more men to go into nursing, midwifery or teaching be targeted too?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Edit: forgot to to write "and asians".
Do we know any sponsors who pulled out? Even if that was the case, pulling the plug like this at t minus two weeks speaks to problems internally.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
> Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations
I suppose you'll leave it up to the reader to determine what it's been replaced with instead. Things like this perhaps? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/white-house-says-us-amb...
If your knee jerk reaction is to downvote this, I am not surprised, because, you know, that just underlines my point.
This sort of talk will get you downvoted here on HN by the "oppressed".
But as a white male, I agree with you.
DEI "imploded" not because it was unfair, but because a bunch of mediocre baby back bitches can't reckon with the fact that they have always benefited from a ton of privilege.
I'm sure an argument could be made about how the org should seek equity by restructuring the way the team works to eliminate the need for physical strength and replace it with machines, allowing any operative to do the job, but those arguments never seem to come with a budget attached to buy lifts or powered carts to allow us to change the way things have been done in the computing center for 50+ years. Talk is cheap, companies are cheaper. Furthermore, overcoming societal norms such that a woman would choose to apply for that role over a less physically taxing, traditionally male-coded one is likely to be more difficult even than finding budget for machines.
But sure, I'm glad now you can say whatever you want in your code comments. Seems like a good trade. /s
To Godwin it (with his assumed blessing (1)), I guess this is how BMW, Hugo Boss, Allianz, etc, ended up being involved in the Holocaust.
(1) https://www.alternet.org/godwins-law-trump-hitler/
The utter degrading of the meanings of powerful words might get us there, though.
This is a rather boring straw man characterisation of the claim you are replying to. Don’t do this.
Shocking.
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
These programs were, in theory, well intentioned but to suggest they did nothing wrong is simply factually incorrect.
Maybe a few naive people in the movement had good intentions but they were clearly dupes for what was at its core a right-wing white supremacist and incel ideology.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
But IMHO DEI answers the wrong question.
Worthwhile lives does not come from equal access to the hamster wheel.
I am much more pro UBI structures og negative taxation - which are inherently difficult to make descriminatory as there is no personal judgement of the people to receive it.
I've rejected both due toy sentiment right now.
It sounds like this conference had been going downhill for a few years.
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Incredible.
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
https://codewithkate.squarespace.com/blog/the-complete-grace...
Tech Giants & Major Players
Amazon - Booth 751
Google - Booth 1246
Meta - Booth 1010
Nvidia - Booth 1039
Disney - Booth 946
Snap - Booth 447
Roblox - Booth 1209
PlayStation - Booth 433
Nintendo - Booth 429
Finance & Trading Firms
Goldman Sachs - (Location TBD)
Morgan Stanley - Booth 633
Jane Street - Booth 618
Citadel - Booth 62
Two Sigma - Booth 1046
DE Shaw - Booth 410
IMC - Booth 1051
Walleye Capital - Booth 1052
Apollo Global Management - Booth 647
Five Rings - Booth 310
Cboe - Booth 952
Banking & Financial Services Bank of America - Booth 439
Capital One - Booth 831
Bloomberg - Booth 824
Navy Federal - Booth 426
USAA - Booth 614
Vanguard - Booth 819
Insurance & Financial Tech Prudential - Booth 526
CHUBB - Booth 344
Voya Financial - Booth 1226
NEXT Insurance - Booth 1227
Manulife - Booth 1122
Tech & Software Companies Intuit - Booth 422
PayPal - Booth 514
Cloudflare - Booth 533
Wayfair - Booth 342
Xero - Booth 343
Adyen - Booth 605
WEX - Booth 1014
Chewy - Booth 1114
Infoblox - Booth 852
InterSystems - Booth 518
Red Hat - Booth 919
DTCC - Booth 418
Consulting & Professional Services EY - Booth 1228
E-commerce & Entertainment Audible - Booth 1251
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Real Estate & Corporate Services CBRE - Booth 341
Lumen - Booth 345
Retail & Food Services McDonald's - Booth 339
Healthcare & Medical Technology Tandem Diabetes Care - Booth 313
Northwestern Medicine - Booth 1214
Mortgage & Real Estate Tech Rocket - Booth 1211
And if thay paid the whole thing this year, and pulled out next year, th÷pe PR would be 50x worse. Single company cancelled this event in 2027!
Seems like smart move to get out fast!
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
They just don't like it when it's other people
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it. I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
They are happy to do whatever they want, and they don't worry about needing false-equivalence precedent to do it.
Boy oh boy let me tell you about some stuff going on in sports in the latest years...
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...
Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...
2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...
I would say the center party is center-right.
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
Oh, the gaslighting. Glad I never went.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.