Why are the comments here so hostile? Seems awfully critical, even for hn.
At least, I'm guilty of that, I skim articles and read comments. But this post is not skim-able(?) and thus feels a lot more dense than usual.
However, I went back and read the whole thing and it's certainly worth the read.
Also the time of day/day of week.
But mostly the domain name.
I always click on the article when I see it's from you.
Those intelligent and unbiased enough to learn something useful will do so. I agree with and/or have learned from almost everything you've posted. Some of those things mirror my own experiences.
I also didn't see any problem with tone, you were polite and helpful. It seems quite obvious the only problem with your "tone" is your gender. Not that you didn't know this already.
Thanks for your contributions. At least some of us appreciate them and find them valuable.
HN is always very critical, you'll see it on every article.
HN (and more broadly the tech industry at large) likes to believe that it is an egalitarian meritocracy but it is unfortunately not true.
Besides aside from the name it's not like she puts her sexuality front and center, the reader has to notice it as part of the domain. Her name isn't even in the article.
What I'm suggesting is that opinionated women tend to draw more ire and negative reactions than opinionated men, for reasons too complex to address in an HN comment.
I'm willing to bet that if the same post had been made on a medium.com blog that didn't include a gendered name ("Rachel") then the comments would be less caustic.
(Regarding everything the author does/says/thinks in the article)
Everything she does in the article is exactly what any sane sysadmin would do, it's institutional awareness.
My point exactly.
Misogyny is pretty common in tech. It's not an absurd conclusion to jump to.
Given the up-votes of the thread and the down-votes of the negative comments (even ones only tangentially negative) that seems an odd conclusion to draw about the whole HN community.