I may be tilted, but I don't intend to intentionally break the site rules just to force a ban. It'd just undermine the point I'm trying to make about wanting to have a fair and reasonable discussion.
Every time I get flagged for saying something reasonable but unpopular, I get so frustrated I just put my HN account away for weeks or months.
I want to participate in tolerant, reasoned, actionable, fair discussions, especially when they're regarding the industry I'm trying to make a career in. HN is not the place for that discussion. Sure, the discussion will happen here. Things will happen. But it won't be tolerant, reasonable, or fair. That scares me. It scares me to think that the people in this thread are the ones that will be leading those discussions.
Just ban me now. This is my third request, and I'm 100% certain. Until the knee-jerk flag censoring feature is removed, I never want to participate in a discussion on this site again, and I want to remove any further temptation to think that fact will change.
These are entirely reasonable statements, and they're flagged. Not just downvoted, flagged. Censored. Removed from the discussion.
That's my only problem right now. I understand user comment flagging is useful in lieu of moderation, but I'm personally seeing myself silenced persistently in this discussion and it's extremely discouraging.
In at least one instance, I've even been told that directly challenging a sexist call to action is "off-topic" and "insensitive".
This is all happening on an article that is a direct result of sexism being repressed in the industry. Should I just wait a few years for the sexism to fester, then make a blog post of my own once the damage has already been done? Because that seems to be the only acceptable way to express myself here.
Maybe the flagging/downvoting system should be revisited, then. It seems like dissenting opinions are simply downvoted rather than challenged out in the open, as they should be. This means that discussions turn into a single-sided affair, as the other side simply flag kills their dissenters until only one opinion is visible.
I don't mind downvotes much, but it's hard to feel like I'm contributing to a worthwhile discussion if my responses are hidden and my ability to reply is removed.
We're being bludgeoned by the hammer of sexism, in a discussion about the perils of sexism in the industry, on the foremost discussion board in the industry.
The irony.
I've submitted a formal request to have my account banned. I'll not be part of this ineffectual echo chamber any longer.
The author's article ended with concrete suggestions for improving the industry. The people going into those suggestions are emotionally charged, and more willing to accept them blindly.
I do not think that is appropriate, and I think a mild suggestion to change the wording so as not to be sexist while not denying the author's experiences is perfectly acceptable.
I have respect and sympathy for the author, and I believe that she offers a valid yet one-sided perspective on the situation in the industry. All I ask is that as we learn from her experience and move towards resolving it for all such victims, we do not do so in a manner that would unfairly disadvantage or place undue burden or harm on innocent men, just for lack of sufficiently scoped wording.
Please review my recent comments on this post, which have been flag killed. If you believe they were fairly downvoted and deserve to be flagged, then please delete or permanently ban my account.
That's exactly what I'm proposing, just change the wording to "Generalized sexist statements and behavior that convey insulting or degrading attitudes", removing the "about women" part.
Yet here I sit at -3 points for suggesting I deserve the same protections.
> Generalized sexist statements and behavior that convey insulting or degrading attitudes about women (e.g. Insulting remarks, obscene jokes or humor about sex or women in general)
This should be generalized to include both sexes. I often see insulting or degrading comments about men by people in the tech world, especially with terms like "mansplaining".
I look forward to these selling out before I've had a chance to buy them at MSRP, then finding them resold by the dozen on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
That's good to hear, I have some Swedish friends that are looking to move to Calgary in the next few years and were worried about tech job availability.
I don't understand how Python's popularity in relation to Go has anything to do with whether or not Python has good concurrency support.
As I understand it, Python's Global Interpreter Lock means that no matter how many threads and processors there are, only one thread is going to be executed at one time.
Certainly it can be hugely popular in spite of that shortcoming, just like Go can be popular in spite of the lack of generics.
One new technique that's notably missing, and egregiously abusable, is browser notifications. Several times a day now I'll go to a web site that immediately pops up a browser-native non-modal notification asking for permission to use the browser's built-in notifications system.
If I were somehow offended by your statement that wouldn't automatically put me in the right and you in the wrong. You can't control how I feel about what you say, but I also can't use my feelings to claim an unassailable moral high ground.
You don't get to imply I'm about to break the site rules and then ignore that.