Don't pretend you're not fighting fire with fire with this article. You're mad and you're showing it. When you say stuff like...

>>To sum up, I love that you brought up these concerns in an article.

I don't believe you! Disingenuous.

(You should also think about whether or not the Riot.js author is worth responding to. Just because he's a framework author doesn't mean that framework has ever been held in high regard.)

on the other hand, I am arguing in a thread that contains that complete altrightgarbletwat banned below.

on the other other hand, your aggrieved-on-behalf-of-my-lady-friends stance is just so freaking overwrought and gross.

you're attacking a position that no one has advocated for, with the exception of the altrightgarbletwat. go bug him.

and final edit: by the way, the moral imperative I advocate for is to burn these companies to the ground and to scald capitalists with their own failures. it wouldn't matter to me if Uber managed a PR save here because Uber's shitty heart will not change and nothing of value will be lost when it dies.

do you get it? a system will do the bare minimum to exonerate itself and continue perpetuating the SV failures of greed and misplaced tech idealism: there's no story here because it doesn't fucking surprise anyone clued when someone comes out with yet another harassment story in tech and it doesn't fucking mean anything when some token firings take place over the next few weeks.

Uber will still be a piece of shit unsustainable company in a tech world coopted by greedy would-be visionaries, hopefully destined for the scrap heap in the near future.

my lady friends don't need you here. read up on performative allyship and then check a mirror.

pointing out that we're an audience without legal standing, playing with pitchforks, is not harassment or condoning harassment.

not that you asked, but both as a clearer moderation policy than we've seen before and as an experiment, I think this is a good move. there is some regret that you're lagging well behind Reddit's knowledgebase, as this sort of thing has been done many times there, and there's not much new information to be found.

That said, it does exacerbate the filter bubble of this place: based on how subreddits' experiments have gone, expect the moderate center to support you and press to make it permanent, expect a little bit of grumbling that might make you think that you've made your point and don't need to make it permanent, and expect... a few more people to leave silently.

You're a prop for the VC establishment, but damn if you aren't an earnest human, too.

But as to the rest of it, yeah, the HN hivemind is insane in exactly the same way Startup Culture is a sick, greedy mess.

Its failures point to the difficulty of the problem more than anything.

The problem is that psychiatry as practiced is an attempt to solve people, and people can't be solved; or if they can, it is unique (as you say) to the individual.

And really you're no different: you're giving out advice to people on how to manage their mental health. Your advice is harmless from a societal perspective in that it's literally what psychiatrists want you to be saying.

That doesn't mean you're not one of the misinformed internet commenters. It's not universally applicable. Most people don't have the time and money to shop around, even if the actual problems of their mental state allow them to seek help.

You can't come up with the words that are going to make people better. Nor should you be expected to!

Recognizing that psychiatrists are the ones we pay to be expected to act to make people better and they are themselves human and subject to human failures: this, I think, is why criticism of psychiatry emerges in topics like these.

I'm not disagreeing with your general advice, just criticizing your smugness and certainty in your opening lines. You're not better at this than we are just because you're giving the generic safe advice.

All of this will be prefaced with "I'm no fan of the TPP, but..."

Here's how you write as an establishment equivocator:

---

There are certainly parts of the TPP which overreach. But the EFF is well known for taking things out of proportion [ignoring the absurd proportions of the actual situation]. Here we see another example: [point out something from the current EFF statement that is alarmist or not quite relevant to the TPP specifically, for instance...] a lot of what the EFF describes about copyright is specific to US law and copyright. The EFF is really just hitting its usual talking points and very little of this relates to the TPP; the TPP is just an excuse to talk about what they always talk about.

There isn't any perfect way, in the eyes of the state, to deal with a police state because it's a police state.

Touching mission critical things always has risk and those risks have to be mitigated at a political level. If the programmer is this bad at respecting political ownership of responsibility, he has no business touching production this way.

Even if it ends up being worth something, you should assume that your employer will do everything they legally can to dilute or otherwise devalue your financial reward from equity.

Getting employee equity will always be, at best, a few crumbs from the loaf you're helping to build.

Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse.

Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity.

That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism.

I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."

>What do you find offensive about being reasonable with those you disagree with?

To start, here it feels like you're trying to put words in my mouth. I didn't say it was offensive to be reasonable with those you disagree with.

Now I can see, on closer reading, that you're just extending what I said about finding a middle ground. And it's a good way to detect where a miscommunication is by saying what you think I meant (that is, you're telling me how you received it).

But it causes a miscommunication in that I receive it as an uncharitable reading: the tone of "I'm lightly incredulous that this is what you mean, please clarify" becomes "You believe something utterly and obviously ridiculous."

But that's not really what this has been about. More to the point, I think the problem you're having is that you assume someone has to want to meet you in the middle. There isn't any rule that says this about discussion, even if it's generally assumed and often true.

mreiland made his point and then he didn't want to spend any more time with you.

>Your post perfectly shows part of the problem, which is... you can give it, but you can't take it. If you're not prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt, why would you expect something different in return?

>>You missed my point, have a good day.

In some ways it's unfair of him to do this, but at least he did it directly and honestly. And you still had, in my opinion, a chance to re-engage him. You tried:

>>>Then let's discuss what I missed, perhaps I did misunderstand you. Let's start again from this, do you agree with the golden rule? What does it mean to you? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule

Why did this fail? I think it's at least partly true that you weren't being fair to him. You are trying to find middle ground, it's true, but it's middle ground you're beginning with conditions favorable to you.

And more importantly it's a bit absurd to ask him to move to a discussion on basic ethics terms. That's where I got the 'school exercise' bit: you're asking him to jump through hoops to satisfy your desire for a peaceful resolution, or a 'further understanding,' or whatever it is your goal was.

Rereading your comments more closely, I'm starting to think maybe the problem is that you're charmingly naive (and I mean that well): you're a genuinely positive person with thick skin and an earnest desire to communicate. Maybe today that reacted badly with a gruff and grumbling persona; maybe in communicating with friends you can successfully get people to sit down with introspective and meditative discussion questions like this one:

> I know I've made mistakes in the past. If I make a mistake in something I've said, does that exclude me from being able to learn from it? How will you know who is capable of learning without exploring their reasoning?

"Let's go around the circle and share an experience, shall we?" -- Fun in some situations, but not really appropriate to mreiland.

I think that's most of what I can think of to say about your tactics.

I'd like to broaden something out to make a meta-point, though, because none of that explains why mreiland was so deliberate about ignoring you. In some sense, the conversation is about the right to write someone off. It's a right mreiland exercised gleefully in your case; perhaps even a touch too gleefully, but even that's part of the point: it's his right to do so if he chooses, because you can't force him into a conversation.

There's also a sense in which that was a necessary part of his strategy: refuse to muddle that point and stick solely to the right to discontinue conversation. I don't know how well he managed that in the end, but the main event is still: mreiland made a level-headed comment saying "I'm inclined to write people off," and got written off by the community.