Hi HN! I recently opened registrations for the Women Make 30-Day Challenge. I'm inviting members of the HN community who'd like to ship a project. Everybody is welcome, and there is no competition. This is an opportunity to motivate yourself, work among others, and achieve to build & launch something in a month.
Absolutely! This is just the beginning. Just figuring out the right way to capture feedback, and we'll get started, iterating based on what people request.
Hello HN, I’m the person behind Women Make, a community for women founders and makers. In October I organized an online hackathon. Participants had 30 days to build and ship something. 160+ people registered and it resulted in dozens of projects launched at the end of the month!
These are great! but for Show HN, a better fit would be if some of the individual contributors shared their work. Lists are excluded from the Show HN guidelines (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). They also don't tend to make for great HN threads in general, since there's not much that's specific to discuss about them. It's generally better to submit one of the interesting elements from a list than the list itself.
Hi HN! 8 months ago I posted on Show HN about a project of mine, a space I built for women entrepreneurs and makers, and received a lot of great feedback [1]. At the time, it helped me to get new members. The community is still growing and we are almost 900 today! Next month, I’m organizing a hackathon called Just F*ing Ship It [2]. The concept: 30 days to build and launch something. Can be anything as long as you finish before October 31st. It’s the perfect opportunity to get things done! Who’s in?
I started with a Telegram group so I was relying on an existing infrastructure at first. Then when the community got bigger, I thought we needed a website, as an extension of our private group. I don't think it would have make a lot of sense to create a new group on another platform like Facebook or Reddit (since we were already using one).
Thank you, I'm using webshot-node (which relies on PhantomJS) but I might actually change. It doesn't always work well. There are different options (like waiting for the website to respond, or waiting for a specific amount of time), but even by tweaking those parameters it's not always reliable. I might give a try to capture-website soon.
It always feels like the mods are just disagreeing with you. The opposite side feels the same way.
I described your comment as being a jerk because mariedm asked for copywriting suggestions, specifically in the context of being a non-native speaker, and you responded with a polemical smackdown. That's not good-faith discussion.
I heard this word used in a meeting just this week, and it was quite shocking. I almost just got up and walked out. It's sort of like calling someone a "deplorable"--if you want to get people on your side, it's not a word to use.
It is acceptable in native English. I think your target audience will understand. However, some people not in your target audience will get offended so it's up to you as to whether that's a problem for you.
Nonsense. About the only thing that's odd is the unnecessary ellipsis. But otherwise it's perfectly reasonable English. And expresses a perfectly reasonable idea.
Not only Women Make is open to all women, but it's open to everyone. So trans women are more than welcome. Since you're asking this question, maybe I should make it more clear.
I think we are working on different ideas. Women Make is more focused on entrepreneurs and makers, whereas they are more into tech career advice (maybe like a LinkedIn for women). Also, Women Make is an indie project.
I was a member there when they just got started and the idea back then was to make a HN for women and there were more women building stuff in the beginning, now the topics have drifted away from that. (Unfortunate, from my point of view, but maybe people like it more this way)
Just the fact that StackOverflow have been accused of not being inclusive at all is enough to create something else. They also have moderation issues. I’m trying to keep a high quality standard on Women Make, just like dang and sctb here with the moderation.
Also, like I said in another comment, women tend to promote themselves/put themselves in front of others much less. The idea of Women Make is really to show them they can and they should. So basically it’s giving women confidence, and the specific support they don’t necessarily get from other places.
And you don't see any issue with suppressing the discussion around this clearly sensitive issue? You taking one side is a sure way to alienate many on the opposing side. Let's have an unbiased discussion while maintaining civility.
It seems like you're trying to tell people what they can and cannot discuss more and more on HN.
> Can you clarify this? Anyone can sign up with an account and the whole thing is meritocratic.
It isn't a question of suppressing discussion, as you'll see if you look at the voluminous threads HN has had about that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22132714). It's just a question of what's on topic in a given thread. If you allow a hotter topic with greater mass to enter into a smaller thread, the discussion will get sucked into its gravitational field. That approach leads to all threads being dominated by the same handful of hot topics over and over, so we try to avoid that here.
Re "taking one side": it always feels like mods take the other side. The people on the opposite side from you feel that we're taking your side; I guarantee it.
Your comment was perfectly natural. It's just that we know from experience what sort of thread that would likely lead to, as I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22140452. Stack Overflow is much larger than the OP's fledgling community, and the recent controversies about it have burned pretty hot, so it could easily have become the dominant topic. That wouldn't be fair either to the fledgling community or to the HN community, which benefits more from having a new discussion than repeating an old one.
Also, I don't think it's really fair to the OP if we start putting her on the spot about Stack Overflow. She probably hasn't thought that much about it, since for most people the only way to get a project like this off the ground is by focusing on one thing for a long time.
What could us men do to improve the support they give on sites other than Women Make? I'm always afraid that my attempt at a supportive gesture will feel like I'm patronising or mansplaining.
One thing I think is key to being a good ally is to work mostly in the background, to avoid the spotlight unless necessary, and to yield or share it when possible. Speak less, listen more, trust what you hear and defer to the judgment of the underrepresented party.
There was a moment in college when I was participating in a Take Back the Night march, and I was leading the call-and-response chant "What do we want? Safety! When do we want it? Now!" It felt awkward and wrong. Once I stopped leading the chant and started participating vigorously in the response of the call-and-response, it felt right.
but you were able to lead the group into a chant in the first place so how would that have happened if you would have instead favored being in the background from the beginning?
Maybe your sentiment can be enhanced by not gatekeeping participation - but by promoing a handover of leadership to more symbolic choices once the work of buuilding momentum is done. This is a rule that could be applied to any demographic-based leadership that needs to organize its aesthetic as it grows
When and how to speak out is something that every ally is going to wrestle with, so everyone will have experience with it. Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted. If it hadn't been that night it would have been another.
But there is no substitute for the underrepresented assuming actual positions of real power and leadership — breaking through ceilings, becoming role models, making mistakes and overcoming them... and eventually becoming ordinary and routine.
