I defend that sentence as meaning "touch her with consent in ways that are different that what she is used to". In keeping with it being an analogy for config files, I would like to edit it to read "stumble a bit when I touch" but it seems that my post is locked to editing.
You are invited to edit that phrasing in, or if you can unlock the post I'll do it.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. I'll do my best to apply what I've learned.
It gets worse actually. If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches any highly-charged idea that people already have from elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that, even if your intention was in a different place entirely. It is comparable to a smaller mass getting pulled toward a much larger mass, even if its intention was to fly elsewhere.
On a forum like HN, where we'll all responsible for taking care of the commons, the burden is on the speaker to disambiguate. To do otherwise is effectively to troll the community, and it turns out not to matter much whether someone did that intentionally or not; what matters is the effects it has.
> If you word your comment in a way that pattern-matches
> any highly-charged idea that people already have from
> elsewhere, they are sure to interpret you as meaning that
I guess that to some extent this exchange is affected by being cross-cultural without the participants being aware of it. The fine-pointed contemporary standards that currently apply in—for example—the major cities of the U.S. are not in circulation worldwide. This leads to misunderstanding and excessive harshness. People read comments as if they were written by their next-cubicle neighbor instead of someone on the other side of the world. Does that matter? I think it does; we instinctively make allowances for who the other person is and where they're coming from, in the interests of getting along. Alas, on a text-based internet forum that information isn't available, making tolerance harder. This can easily make the difference between thinking "god, what an asshole" and thinking, "wow, what a pleasant and articulate person". Unfortunately for us all here, the bias is always toward the asshole bit, not the pleasant bit.
Because this bias is so strong and so poorly understood, as moderators we normally urge tolerance and ask readers to stretch a bit to understand each other. In fact I was just writing a defense of your original post in that spirit. But then I figured I'd better read it thoroughly, and noticed this:
> I might stumble a bit and touch her in ways she doesn't like, but overall we get the job done and nothing is broken afterwards
That one sentence is in a different category from the rest of what you wrote. It's one thing to use gendered relationship analogies in a technical discussion. In many places where HN readers reside, that now feels anachronistic and crude—a bit like "take my wife, please" jokes—but is easy enough to give the benefit of the doubt to. But when you take it as far as a sexual analogy that toys with ambiguity around consent, that's crossing into a different zone altogether.