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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This article was flagged unfairly. It's substantive and grounded in personal experience. Those are good qualities for an HN piece whether one agrees or disagrees, so I've turned off flags and rolled back the clock on this submission to give it a second shot.

If you want to comment here, please (re-)familiarize yourself with the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, including this one: Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Edit: I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN, so if any of you know her, could you give a heads-up? When people submit an article, it doesn't get attention, and then we re-boost it, we always email them if we can.

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Users flagged this...? Really HN? :/ It's difficult enough to have a conversation about this stuff already. Thanks for unflagging it, dang.

Now, serious question: Are there women here who have a counter to this article? I do know a few who got into tech through specialized programs such as "<Project> Girls", but I also know many (possibly more) who have been turned off by the constant.. uhm, patronizing feel to them.

I'm not a woman, nor am I a minority (not in tech at any rate), so I can't confirm or deny whether it actually is patronizing when in that position. It sure feels to me like it is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQ3iqzTVoAANW7X.jpg:large

No offense to React.js Girls, I've not actually heard anything negative about it in particular. But ... am I crazy to think it's incredibly rude to put so much emphasis on gender (or really, anything)? Like, if these events were about skin color, sexual orientation or religion in place of gender, who here would find this appropriate?

I should also say, I was invited to help volunteer at a local Django Girls event a few years back. I turned it down because it sounded a little creepy to me to have an event be run only by men, that invites only women. (Note: this is obviously not the case all the time; it was in the instance I was invited to.)

So, what am I missing here? Obviously I'm missing something because, whenever I see this opinion getting expressed, it gets downvoted or, in this case, flagged.

I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN

Her twitter account is linked at the bottom of her page - https://twitter.com/iyermallika

> I feel bad about not being able to find a way to let the author know that her article is currently being discussed on HN

Her Twitter is in the site's footer, FYI.

I'm a tweetotaller. Perhaps one of you twitterers can take it up.

Love that word! Did you coin it? Just now?

It just popped into my head. No doubt others have had it too.

Wonder if the flagging system can be enhanced by having the flagger provide a reason. Maybe having to explain would reduce the incidence of drive-by flagging.

I doubt it; my guess is that people would just make up reasons and flag much the same as they do now. The way that upvoting and flagging work seems to be rooted in human nature somehow. What's interesting is how different the two mechanisms are.

Would be better to de-anonymise flagging so that we could interrogate flaggers. Show 'flagging's as actions that appear like comments on the page.

There can be few things HN users would like worse than being interrogated.

Perhaps 'interrogated' is the wrong word? How about 'discuss'. Since HN is a discussion forum, presumably users are open to discussing their flags and reasons for flagging. If not, just like any other type of discussion, we don't have to give their flag any credence.

I would like this. Often I want to flag an article because I feel it's of poor quality, but refrain from it because the mods might think I flagged it because of some partisan reason and my flagging rights will be taken away.

All I get is a "Loading ..." spinner; maybe people flagged it for that. Can someone post a direct URL to the actual content?

I’m guessing by the domain and HN username that the author and OP are the same person.

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