How to prove positivity of determinant for these matrices?

At first, we prove that the determinant is non-zero, in other words, the matrix is non-singular. Assume the contrary, then by the linear dependency of the columns there exist real numbers $\lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_n$, not all equal to 0, such that $F(x_i):=\sum_j \frac{\lambda_j}{g(x_i-b_j)}=0$ for all $i=1,2,\dots,n$. But the equation $F(x)=0$ is a polynomial equation with respect to $e^{2x}$ and the degree of a polynomial is less than $n$. So, it can not have $n$ distinct roots.

Now we note that the matrix is close to an identity when $x_i=b_i$ and $b_i$'s are very much distant from each other, and the phase space of parameters $\{(x_1,\dots,x_n,b_1,\dots,b_n):x_1<\dots<x_n,b_1<b_2<\dots <b_n\}$ is connected. Thus the sign of the determinant is always plus.


To complement Fedor's answer, here is more explicit proof.

Let the original matrix be $G$. Let $D_x :=\text{Diag}(e^{x_1},\ldots,e^{x_n})$. Then, we can write \begin{equation*} G = D_x C D_b,\quad\text{where}\ C = \left[ \frac{1}{e^{2x_i}+e^{2b_j}}\right]_{i,j=1}^n. \end{equation*} To prove that $\det(G)>0$ it thus suffices to prove that $\det(C)>0$. Notice now that $C$ is nothing but a Cauchy matrix, and by explicitly writing its determinant out (under the hypotheses on $x$ and $b$) we can easily conclude that $\det(C)>0$.


Remark. The above argument actually proves that $\text{sech}(x-y)$ is a Totally positive kernel (because the $k(x,y) := 1/(x+y)$ is known to be a TP kernel).