Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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"Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here."

Yeah, that was funny to think about. I've only seen so many articles. Her write-ups were mostly technical dodging politics a lot. The back and forth, downvote mobs, or whatever kick in with politics on certain topics or views due to community's biases. If she stays away from that, then she can still be really popular.

Whereas, she just now admitted something that could be in the red zone for some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS. It's simultaneously a response that's understandable or folks might sympathize with for the portion that is concerned about toxic behavior in general FOSS and/or toward minority members in particular. Still a grey area in potential reaction here.

I find it fascinating to watch how these things play out. Regardless, her posts about spotting problems, solving them, and keeping them from recurring were pretty awesome. Most of us will probably still respect her regardless of how much she's embracing or dodging online communities.

I don't care one iota if she does or does not participate on HN or in any other community.

The only other post of hers I recall reading boiled down to her refusing to fix a thing at work that it was her responsibility to fix and wouldn't have taken very long, like a few minutes, and leaving it that way for six months, calling it "an experiment" to see if anyone else would fix it and then talking trash about everyone else at work when her boss finally told her to fix it already. It struck me as very unprofessional, childish and toxic.

She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming. I'm not a programmer, so that might just be my ignorance showing. But my guess is that's the primary reason her writing shows up here so often, because it doesn't strike me as great writing overall and her attitude seems to be pretty toxic generally while she blames that on everyone else.

She could make a lot of the same points she makes without pissing all over everyone in the process. She could very reasonably say "I'm a woman in tech, so I deal with brogrammers 40+ hours a week and I have no patience left to do more of that in my off hours." She could say "Eh, different strokes for different folks. I share my stuff with people I enjoy talking with and I'm okay with that meaning it isn't out there in the ether for the whole world to access. We can't all be Linux."

She could make all the same choices she is currently making and describe them in her blog without gratuitously pissing all over a community that very likely accounts for a large share, perhaps even the vast majority, of her blog traffic.

> She is the only woman that I'm aware of who blogs about programming

While I cannot speak to your awareness, I can say for a fact that there are many women who blog about programming.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=women+w...

Maybe programming blogs aren't that interesting to you so you don't have much exposure to them? I'm struggling to understand how you would not be aware that there are more such blogs beyond Rachel's.

I'm not a programmer. I already said that.

If there are many more women who actually blog about programming per se, rather than blogging about the problem of being a woman in tech, then I am even more mystified as to why her writing seems to be so popular here.

Because this is not site about programming, this is site about culture around programming.

This isn't a site about programming, nor about programming culture. It is a site for discussing things that are intellectually engaging and it is open to anyone who wishes to join.

My point is that programming per se articles are minority and often end up burried. And when they are here, they tend to be limited to few topics popular also among those who don't use them. That is not sort of content one goes for here, whether by men or women (which is not complaint) so it should not be used against anyone.

I will add that it is and should be ok to write your thoughts about communities and processes and culture and pop tech etc even if you don't write technically technical articles. Such blogs are pretty normal in programming communities. These things actually matter for those who deal with those communities daily. Moreover, Linux community prides itself on being tough and not caring and pissed off all the time on each other, so really, demanding that whover is commenting on it is nice to them and not pissed them off is odd. As far as linux community standards go, this article is remarkably nice - the only way to make it less nice is to keep opinions for yourself.

She can write anything she wants. My bafflement at why it is popular here isn't some kind of censorship.

There is a thing that happens a lot where people nominally argue for free speech in a manner that suggests that asking X question or saying X thing should not be allowed. If one genuinely believes in free speech, then that doesn't work.

As best I can tell, it seems to frequently be rooted in an assumption that asking such questions is really some passive-aggressive agenda to prevent someone else from expressing themselves.

I happen to have a deep and longstanding interest in social phenomenon. I find it fascinating to puzzle out the details of why X flies when it seems like it shouldn't, but Y doesn't when it seems like it should. This is frequently interpreted as nefarious behavior with some preconceived agenda. It really isn't, anymore than wondering at some edge case programming bug is inherently nefarious.

On a technical level her skills/knowledge are world-class and her most successful posts[1] have been tech-focused.

[1]:https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

Thank you.

"It struck me as very unprofessional, childish and toxic."

Just reword it as an article with the headline "Don't Be a Hero". Suddenly it's valuable career advice.

Hi! I've written open-source and Free Software for a decade. I don't see anything wrong with Rachel's behavior, her opinions, or her desire to not get involved when there's stupid toxic shit to deal with, and I don't understand why you've written four posts over three hours complaining about her. It sounds like this is a case of women policing women.

By my count, it's more like six comments, so you missed a few, possibly including this one where I make it clear I'm not policing anyone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18182668

You, on the other hand, appear to be trying to police my behavior, though you aren't a moderator on the forum.

> something that could be in the red zone for some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS.

I admit, I'm in this camp where my gut reaction is fairly negative. Truthfully, I'm trying to sit on this info a bit and come to terms with how I feel with it (with respect to a personal strategy), because my reaction was pretty visceral. I mean, it's okay, it's not disallowed by most licenses, but if I wanted could I do this and feel okay about it?

There's a wide spectrum between doing work and fighting to get it included and doing work and actively keeping it limited to a few individuals. At a minimum, just throwing what you have out to the public and saying "here, do what you may with this, it worked for me but I wash my hands of it if you want help" seems a sane middle ground to explore.

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