vikasg

reply, smug, just like that.

Commenting on HN is settled. Quarterback, armchair, they call it that.

-- Have you talked to a human? One of the action steps is to not be a know-it-all.

Alas, sentences with two commas, is what you have.

How is this comment that adds zero value considered "civil"?

Oh, right. Because it fits right in with the bullshit reflexive contrarianism around here.

They don't know. Like half of all HN comments it's just speculation disguised as a fact.

+1

In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.

The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.

Sour grapes, more like. If simply asking how they'd work with people from diverse backgrounds was triggering enough for this person, the process worked perfectly in rejecting them.

Andy Grove talks about this in "High Output Management". He says there are two kinds of managers, "know-how" managers and "position" managers. Both have a certain amount of authority, and a successful technology company needs both.

If you're a senior enough person who doesn't want to manage people, you should think of yourself as a "know-how" (knowledge, experience) manager and find a role that allows for that.

This is the most thoughtful comment I've ever read on HN.

The site was made by an ex-twitter engineer, so lots of the entires come from other Twitter engineers.

It's because HN prides itself on "civility". So you can "innocently", "just to be fair", "playing the devil's advocate", "but what about" say any offensive thing you like, and when someone who's sick of hearing that bullshit uses a naughty word they get downvoted for being "uncivil".

The rest of the internet figured out long ago that such behavior is actually pretty toxic, and is called "sealioning" [0][1]

[0] http://wondermark.com/1k62/

[1] footnotes. It's all civil if you have footnotes.

No one is disputing that a better system cannot be devised. This is true for many problems in the world. If you could start from the zero state, you can do it much better.

So let me say this: _coming up with the ideal system is not hard_. But how will you transition the world from its current state to this ideal state? Consider that the metric system (or SI), which is much better than the US system of measures, has still not been adopted in the US. Why? Because the problem of transitioning between systems is called politics.

Software is built for humans to use in the real world. While reshaping the entire world might make the code simpler, it's not a practical solution.

It would be more honest --- still inappropriate --- for a company to take everyone out to a strip club where the rules of interaction are well-known.

It's gross that a company would hire women and have them pretend to be employees solely for the gratification of the men. And no, it doesn't matter if there were a few male models. That's not appropriate either, but it's very clear that this is a practice aimed at men at male-dominated companies.

The employer is not in the business of getting you off. Practices that try to do that inherently create an exclusionary environment.

And if your defense against the blatant objectification of women described in this article is some variant of "oh but look at both sides" then I suggest that you look at human interaction in the context of history and not as a blank Jupyter notebook that you put numbers into.

What if someone drove you out of your house, sold that house, gave that money to 10 starving families in India, set them up for life?

That would be an overall good.

(despite the misdeed).

I don't dispute that moderation exists on HN. I just think MeFi makes better trade-offs.

While MeFi has its own blind spots, it is definitely one of the nicest communities online because of:

(1) $5 fee to sign up. (2) It doesn't believe in absolute "free speech" like Reddit or HN. The moderators will tell you to cut it out.

Thank you for saying this. For a community that prides itself on rationality, it's insane that every single issue needs to be relitigated from a position of absolute ignorance. Every "prior" needs to be set at 0.5, right?

While I enjoy the technical expertise that I often find on HN, I'd be more inclined to actually talk about issues like sexism, politics, etc. if I didn't have to start by answering questions like, "is sexism even real?", "was slavery so bad?", "H1Bs are indentured servants", etc.

He doesn't understand because he's a complete _tablua rasa_ --- ignorant of all history and society. Not realizing that sex comes with a lot of baggage and that consequences of sex are dramatically different for a man than a woman.

There's a whole lot of difference between two colleagues consensually sneaking off to have sex and having a fucking designated sex room in the office for everyone to see.

You clearly never understood the phrase 'hostile work environment'.

Daemon.

The use of the word 'fuck' doesn't mean it's uncivil. I'm merely making a point as forcefully as the subject demands.

> Sure but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

You seem to think you're a professor we're all dying to listen to. Make a point or get the fuck out.

Congratulations on burying the lede. Nowhere in the article's phrasing is an intent to mislead. It clearly states that some organizations were not allowed to attend --- which is the real story here --- and some were allowed to attend.

Now I wonder, if my aunt had balls, would she be my uncle?

I would go much farther than that. The attitude being exhibited here is "mind so open your brains fall out".

The "prior probability" of human nature is called history. You can't look at every event as if it's happening in isolation. This fetishization of the middle ground is intellectually lazy.