> This entire discussion is unbelievable - Rachel By The Bay ought to be a respected member of this community based on her blog - instead she is being attacked in a bizarre way.
She's being "attacked" purely on the merits of what she wrote, which is exactly the way any man would be treated, exactly the way in which we treat each other in the comments, and exactly the way in which you are "attacking" us.
I actually find your comment far more "unbelievable"--though it doesn't come out and say it, and though it doesn't actually address any of the criticisms you cite, it has the strong implication that any accusation of sexism, baseless and flawed as it may be, is immune to criticism, implicitly because any such criticism is itself sexist. Which is the moral and rhetorical equivalent of suspecting any person who defends a suspected witch of themselves being a witch.
Comments like "I'm pretty sure the author reached an entirely fallacious and baseless conclusion"? In four years, you have never heard anyone say the author of an article is wrong? I'm pretty sure you can find people saying much harsher things in response to any post by Michael Arrington or John Gruber. And if you only want to include bloggers who are also HN members, its seems like Sebastian Marshall (lionhearted) is verbally eviscerated almost every time a post of his makes the front page.
Choice comment about one of those people: "I would go even further and say that 'The Idiocy and Tragedy of XX' is that he thinks earnings are some measure of a human being's self worth." (Name censored because I don't want to bring up an old mean discussion.)
Here's a bonus one I found on another of his posts: "Fuck guys like this". (Neither of these comments was downvoted, bTW.)
By contrast, the commenters on Rachel's post mostly said things which amounted to "This doesn't establish what it set out to" and "It sounds like the boss you're complaining about here is a jerk." Now, you can say they're blind to the truth in front of them, but for the most part, I wouldn't describe them as harsh.
Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.
Are you kidding me?
Just about every post that touches on any remotely controversial issue engenders dozens of negative responses.
Post something about how Git's the shit? You'll get a bunch of responses about how crummy Git's error messages are, or about how user-hostile the interface is.
Post something about how Jave programmers suck balls? You'll get a bunch of comments about how bad Lisp-lifers perform when they're thrust into situations where they have to code Java.
Post about NoSQL, and you'll get a bunch of people telling you that you're an idiot for even considering MongoDB when PostgreSQL would do just fine.
Hell, post something about how some obscure paper about brane theory resolves the OPERA experiment and FTL neutrinos, and I'll probably personally tell you a tale about what an idiot the author of the paper is, and why his PhD should be stripped from him for publishing such drivel.
People here are hostile. They criticize by default, and that's the strength of the community. We never accept articles that don't offer evidence for their points, whether it's politically correct or not.
I've seen far nastier responses to most anti-Apple and anti-Google blog posts than to this one...
> Post something about how Git's the shit? You'll get a bunch of responses about how crummy Git's error messages are, or about how user-hostile the interface is.
Critical comments about Git, indeed.
> Post something about how Jave programmers suck balls? You'll get a bunch of comments about how bad Lisp-lifers perform when they're thrust into situations where they have to code Java.
Critical comments about Java, indeed.
> Post about NoSQL, and you'll get a bunch of people telling you that you're an idiot for even considering MongoDB when PostgreSQL would do just fine.
Finally critical comments about you the poster.
I return to my original question:
Kindly find me on Hacker News a single discussion thread which contains comments like this about a male writer of a blog post.
A respected technical author writes a blog post and the response is a stream of ad hominem attacks on them with no supporting evidence.
I tend to not bookmark such comments, in fact they tend to get flagged and buried. There is no easy way to search for them either.
Except for this thread (not saying it qualifies, but it probably does in your estimation), can you point to other posts were women were being "monstered" for no reason? Although candidates for those are easier to search for because they have the word "female" in the title. Incidentally all the posts I remember that deal with women in IT are written by women.
The single most negative reaction I've seen to a blog post on HN was directed at Jason Calacanis (with #2 going to Michael Arrington), though I agree only a minority get strong negative comments.
She's being "attacked" purely on the merits of what she wrote, which is exactly the way any man would be treated, exactly the way in which we treat each other in the comments, and exactly the way in which you are "attacking" us.
I actually find your comment far more "unbelievable"--though it doesn't come out and say it, and though it doesn't actually address any of the criticisms you cite, it has the strong implication that any accusation of sexism, baseless and flawed as it may be, is immune to criticism, implicitly because any such criticism is itself sexist. Which is the moral and rhetorical equivalent of suspecting any person who defends a suspected witch of themselves being a witch.