I'm not dumb enough to try to change the stripes on a proudly bigoted jerk like Meritt.
I just want anybody who sees his spew to know that his opinion is not the only one. I want any human who is harassed to know that if they share their story after the fact, that's good.
And they shouldn't worry about the fact that some utterly worthless assholes like Meritt will try to shame them for speaking out. They shouldn't be ashamed if they were too afraid, too shy, or too confused to respond in the moment.
It is GOOD that we share these stories. It is GOOD that we move towards a world where these things happen less often.
And the utterly worthless assholes like Meritt who want to shame people for sharing their stories... they might be well represented in HN, but they're a minority of normal humans.
And I'd like other potential Meritt's to realize how utterly disgusting it is that he tried to shame the victim into silence.
I think it's absolutely disgusting that you criticize the victim for documenting what happened to her.
It's despicable and downright fucking evil that you basically accuse her of sharing her story solely because she wants attention.
The worst part of your god-awful post is that it's currently pinned to the top of this board.
The fact that your disgusting, insensitive post is at the top is why women don't work in tech. They don't want to have to deal with assholes like you who have nothing better to do than say "she should do X instead of sharing her story", or whatever else you want to do to silence her, and shame her for sharing her story.
She is brave for doing anything, because she knew the world is full of assholes like you: cowardly bigots who will criticize ANY action she takes.
I'm sorry she had a problem. And I'm more sorry that HN has degraded to the point where a cowardly attack from a piece of shit like you is pinned to the top.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you lack empathy for the challenges faced by women in Silicon Valley because you're a white male whose local culture is globally famous for being tolerant and inclusive?
You haven't experienced the problems personally, and you probably haven't even seen them locally. But they're real.
why don't you move to a more reliable hosting, like AWS?
As a fairly heavy ($x00,000/month) user of AWS, this is the funnniest and most-misguided thing I've read in a long time. AWS is horrible. It's extraordinarily bad, with all sorts of insanely complex failure modes to account for. There are some reasons to consider using it, but reliability is most definitely NOT amongst them.
I've heard of other scenarios where the government prevented competition, but they nearly all boil down to the same core: the constituents want X, but some sort of market failure is occurring (or likely to occur) and a temporary market intervention was able to resolve it.
"Is anybody else genuinely annoyed that sites such as angel.co use these as legitimising signals of worthiness?"
Absolutely. AngelList is all about institutional brands, and that's kind of sad. Teams are summarized by where they studied and worked, not what they accomplished, or what people think of them.
It always struck me as a lazy 'old boys club' method of filtering people and ideas.
The government regulations aren't there to create or protect monopolies. They're there to control monopolies that were likely to occur anyway, so that the monopolists can't use their position in an overly extractive manner.
Since these regulations occur at a local level, some of the rules are more effective than others, and some of them are straight-up corrupt. But the common case is not government creating monopolies, but rather government restraining them by regulating them.
I strongly suggest that if you're going to espouse these opinions, you do some math first.
In this case, I suggest you model rural America's density, and the cost to lay down a wire, or fiber, or whatever in a town, along with all the needed infrastructure.
Then I suggest you model the financial returns of that investment under conditions where there are multiple players.
If you do this well, you'll find that as you add competition, you add marketing cost, and you're also forced to amortize the fixed infrastructure costs over smaller and smaller numbers of consumers. And you'll also find that whoever was first to market in that area has a dominant position from a game theoretical perspective, and can make moves that would make it essentially impossible for any competitor to enter the marketplace profitably.
No way. Meritt clearly attempted to shame her for writing about something that, for whatever reason, she didn't confront immediately.
He's a censor. He's shaming her for protesting outside his designated free-speech zone. Fuck him.