I'm starting to think everyone involved with node.js should probably start speaking through a PR person. I can't even remotely imagine the logic behind this comment.

I'm not sure if you're American or not, but it's a fairly common meme of sorts in U.S. discourse. "But what about 9/11" is shorthand for "I'm bringing up some random political point that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because I hope I can outrage people."

For a period absolutely everything, whether at all even distantly related or not, was somehow tied to "because 9/11" or "what about 9/11". Not because people actually thought it was relevant, but because politicians can't pass up a chance to grandstand by invoking something that people have strong opinions on.

I thought it was a succinct way of conveying the point here. "But what about the node.js gender incident??" isn't as widespread and not as big a problem as the "but what about 9/11???" crowd, but suffers from a sort of isomorphic logic.

Hi, American here. I think the problem here is that memes are actually not common in public U.S. discourse. One may use it in private discourse with friends, etc. but when they represent a large software organization the onus is on them to be diplomatic and take care not to offend their public.

izs' ignorance to this principle is on par with, say, someone refusing to change a gendered pronoun because of its perceived triviality.

On 4chan, "Jews did 9/11" is also a meme. Should I not consider that a horrible comment simply because it has some meme qualities?

Bend over backwards to forgive and explain all you want, I guess.

If someone were to mock a conspiracy theorist by saying he was like the "Jews did 9/11" people, I wouldn't have any problem with that comparison.

The popular example of this being skewered is Family Guy's take on Rudy Guliani:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YOh-rpvjYg

Things Hacker News cares about:

    - Keeping women out of tech.
    - 9/11.

Since I lack the ability to downvote I felt compelled to write that this response is quite distasteful. This exacerbates the gendered-pronoun incident and serves to divide the community. I expect better from a community leader.

How is it divisive? Pointless questions deserve pointless answers.

Invoking the deaths of 3,000 people and one of the darkest moments in United States history to make a point about being asked an undesirable question comes to mind. There's also a first blush interpretation that reads as comparing Ben's departure to said events.

I got to the original comment and rolled my eyes that I halfway knew someone would bring it up today. Rather than dismiss it, though, somehow Isaac found a way to make it worse. I should start invoking the holocaust when discussions aren't going the way I want, apparently.

While invoking 9/11 isn't exactly the best way to illustrate the point I agree with Isaac that this doesn't have anything to do with npm, and is just an attempt at digging up old drama.

And yes, the sitation with regards to that commit is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what any of us can do about it beyond wait for someone to get over themselves and start contributing again.

From IsaacSchlueter's HN profile:

>I don't look at this site much, because it turns people into jerks. Contact me somewhere else.

It's like he's throwing stones in a glass house and then complaining of all the vandals...

That's beyond distasteful. Node.js seems to be the new Rails/Ruby community, from a couple of years ago, drama-wise.

And, ironically, this is on his profile: "I don't look at this site much, because it turns people into jerks."

It surprises me that there seems to be quite a few people who have genuine contempt for the Hacker News forum. I think that people here are for the most part reasonable, even though we don't always give out our viewpoints in a straightforward, snark-free manner (but few Web communities are free of that kind of stuff). Posts that are very unreasonable seems to tend to be downvoted. But then I think that maybe I've become too coloured by this forum to really have the outside view of this place.

A comment like this makes me question node/npm's future...

Being in high school in Northern VA when the Pentagon was hit that day really does color my perception of when people bring up this event.

This is coming from someone who remembers Rudy Giuliani's brain being replaced by a broken record player during his presidential campaign. It took way too long for me to get what you were trying to convey.

I can understand if you don't want to talk of that anymore, no need to be agressive.

[I don't know either of you but I think that's a sad story.]

I agree. 9/11 was indeed very sad.

And it had about as much to do with this announcement as Ben's departure from Node last year.

Yeah, whole different level of sadness I hope though.

Again, no need to be agressive, it's not that idiotic to ping the past when we talk about the futur.

"Last year" is a funny way to frame 2 months ago.

Really, what happened 2 months ago was just the tail end of what had taken many months to build up. I say "last year", because it started much earlier, as Ben alluded to in his parting message.

People outside a team rarely have much insight into the day to day relationships. That's just how it works. That's what a "team" is.

Won't someone please think of the children!

How offensive. Aren't you aware that empathy is a core engineering value?