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For those not familiar with RobotRollCall (the author of the linked comment) check out his profile and other answers. He is one of the best contributors to AskScience and can explain almost any theoretical physics topic in understandable terms. People joke that he is actually Neil deGrasse Tyson and that he should really get this own column / talk show.

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She is one of the best contributors to AskScience

Meta-comment: I often see the above pattern on HN. Someone writes a very informative comment with a minor inaccuracy. Someone replies to it only to correct that inaccuracy. The reply then gets way more upvotes than the original comment.

I don't particularly care about "karma", so what bothers me is not that the original commenter didn't get enough points, but rather what people in the community think it's important in a conversation.

This is called anal-retentiveness and is very frequent amongst geeks. Just ignore it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentive

Or as Futurama put it: "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct."

Actually, it is called pedantry.

There's a joke there somewhere.

Wait... this whole thread wasn't a running meta-gag?

Or for more recent catchy term, it's the well, actually crowd: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

I think the point that it was a she and not he is particularly important. I also think the point that the original commenter missed this point is particularly important. Knowing the HN community, that is the reason why the comment got voted up.

I think the point that it was a she and not he is particularly important

Why? I don't see why it should be relevant at all!

It shouldn't be relevant but given the state of female involvement in many traditionally male fields it is always important to highlight women making a contribution. The idea is it will both change perceptions without and within the field and attract more women.

What it really highlights is how English desperately lacks a gender independent way of saying he/she. I can't tell if you are a guy or girl based on your name, I bet most people don't know if the K in my name is Kevin, Kyle, Kris (guy or girl!), Kathy, Katrina etc. (for the record, it's Kevin). But most people when talking about me will just assume I'm a guy and use he.

I'm not offended by people incorrectly using gender pronouns, it is just really awkward to write something without knowing the gender of the person you are talking about.

No, we have two. A kludge: "he/she" (which I personally despise and refuse to use), and something which people have used for a long time, but educational-America refuses to accept: "they".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Historic...

In particular:

>The singular "they" is widely used and accepted in Britain, Australia, and North America in conversation and, often, in at least informal writing as well. It is important to note that this is not recognized by the SATs and other standardized tests.

'They' can't really refer to a person whose identity is known, though. At least, not for me. It feels wrong.

It's also less efficient for anyone who's listening to you. Gender-specific pronouns help ensure you're talking about the same person. Personally though, I find myself saying "that's what they said" (or similar, in a non-joke-related context) pretty often. Usually past-tense, for some reason. * shrug * to each their own.

I do boggle that "they" isn't technically acceptable for cases where gender isn't known, though. "He/she" seems like insanity, both in writing and in speaking, when "they" sits there waiting to be used. It's extremely rare that context isn't sufficient to determine if it's plural or not. Heck, Japanese essentially does without plurals entirely, and that's a functioning language.

It may not be important by itself, but it is important to be right. Her nationality may also not be relevant but if someone writes that she is Chinese and she is actually Russian (example), it is important that it gets corrected.

Fortunately this is not a common scenario, because the nature of the English language doesn't make it easy to inadvertently imply that someone is Chinese, Russian, or indeed any nationality at all.

(I am aware that singular 'they' is grammatical. Doesn't stop it from sounding really awkward when the referent is a specific individual.)

is she Russian? :)

Or, maybe just maybe, the community is signalling that it appreciates members making the effort to correct errors. For the life of me, I can't think why you would have a problem with that.

Often it isn't even that. It is just that someone has made a generalization, and there is an obvious exception that everyone knows about and normal people would just take as given, and then someone writes a one line 'toss off' reply, and rakes in the free karma. This is the utmost BS.

Giving someone that puts thought, time and effort into a response a tiny bit of karma - and then having the 'correction' which involves neither time, nor effort, nor thought 10x the amount of karma indicates a couple of things:

(1) Hacker News will rapidly descend into one line reply chaos where it is nigh impossible to have an interesting discussion

(2) Hacker news does not value time effort and thought

(3) Hacker news greatly rewards the absence of time, effort and thought

How can any of those be good? (#2) is the antithesis of reasoned debate, (#3) is actively rewarding anti-intellectualism. (#1) indicates that HN is either just a poorly implemented version of Slashdot (which would be sad) or it is going to descend into diggery (which is horrifying).

Put some thought into it and you might see why we have a problem with that.

I regret that my comment came off as being snippy -- indeed I was in a hurry to get to my sleep and chose not to remark on additional things.

> [...] and then someone writes a one line 'toss off' reply, and rakes in the free karma. This is the utmost BS.

I should hope that the HN community doesn't impulsively ascribe so much value and pride into winning some system of karmic points. I don't. I think it's a non-issue. And because of the HN interface being so sleek and minimal, we can at least afford to have a few one-liners here and there without wasting a significant amount of screen space.

Lastly, I would like to point out that my comment at least was not a derisive or snide one but one of an observation/correction which I thought was worth the trouble pointing out. But, again, I do regret not supplementing my comment with more substance.

Since it was my meta-comment that spawned this sub-thread, I'd like to clarify that I don't think your comment was derisive or snide or bad. My point was that the original comment was more informative than your reply, and at that point your reply was more upvoted than the original comment.

Whilst your three points would indeed be bad, they really don't seem to be born out by reality - this is not what we see happening on HN. Slashdot style one-liners are not common, and generally speaking fare poorly in the karma stakes.

You also seem to be labouring under the misconception that the quality of a reply is proportional to its length. However, a short, pithy remark that cuts to the heart of an issue is far more valuable than a long-winded argument that makes the same point.

Don't forget the reverse sexism always at play on HN.

Oh meh a new website someone wrote. Nothing new... Holy cow it says it was written by a woman upvote! Well done her! Amazing!

There's no reverse sexism at play here, just good old fashioned regular sexism, where a commenter assumed that the author of something insightful was a man.

This attitude (and your response to it) goes a long way to explaining why computerland is such a sausage party.

If you were reading a relationship advice column, you'd assume it was written by a woman. That's not sexism.

And do we need more men in 'relationship advice'? Only if they want to be there.

I really wish this ridiculous and unhelpful "There's no women in tech because of evil men" meme would die.

> If you were reading a relationship advice column, you'd assume it was written by a woman. That's not sexism.

Um... in what way is it not a sexist assumption?

> I really wish this ridiculous and unhelpful "There's no women in tech because of evil men" meme would die.

Evil? No. Sexist: a thousand times yes. The culture of technology, and especially startups, is quite frankly vile in this regard.

Is it the sole cause of "no women in tech"? Almost certainly not -- but I find the rampant sexism plenty objectionable in its own right, regardless of (speculated) effects on diversity.

> Um... in what way is it not a sexist assumption?

Because it's statistics. 99%+ of relationship advice columns are by females.

Is it sexist to give women lower rates for car insurance? Is it sexist to give men different rates for life insurance? I would say absolutely not. Women are safer in cars, and men die younger. Those are facts. (FWIW The interfering EU are due to vote on 'sexism' within insurance shortly)

It doesn't matter whether something is 51-49% or 90-10%. There is no excuse for allowing 'statistical' assumptions to translate into a burden or punishment upon the minority.

(If a culture or community does allow this to happen, then any slight tendencies will be artificially magnified and reinforced into an unnaturally lopsided distribution.)

Side notes: I put 'statistical' in scare quotes above, as it's all to easy to pull self-justifying statistics out of your ass, as you did.

Everyone is a minority depending on what criteria you use.

People should grow the hell up and stop being offended by everything.

Everything means anything depending on what definition you use. That's not supporting your viewpoint, it's an excuse to avoid having to do so.

It's an adult's place to speak up when they think something is wrong. And I'm sorry, but some things are worth being offended over.

  > There's no reverse sexism at play here, just good old
  > fashioned regular sexism, where a commenter assumed that
  > the author of something insightful was a man.

No sexism there. Given the number of men in science vs. that of women it is pretty safe bet probability-wise.

  >  This attitude (and your response to it) goes a long way 
  >  to explaining why computerland is such a sausage party.

It explains absolutely nothing. Girls not going to some field because of the attitude of people they don't know because they are not in the field yet? And "sausage party" deserves a flag, imho.

And "sausage party" deserves a flag, imho.

I honestly cannot wait for the many articles explaining how to make one in pure CSS.

> And "sausage party" deserves a flag, imho.

Why would you say that? We're all adults here.

It's generally a safe assumption that someone writing about physics is a man. You will be right about 80-90% of the time, if not more [1].

http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/women3/faculty...

[1] It was noted by many, while discussing demographics of Wikipedia, that women are less willing than men to contribute to the intellectual commons, particularly on sites which are not walled gardens. If this fact generalizes, we would expect women Physics PhD's to be underrepresented among people writing about physics.

There's a degree of sexism built into the English language, you can try to change it by creating a gender neutral grammatical personified ("it" usually doesn't work), but unless it's more useful than alternatives, I doubt it'll gain traction. Nouns are almost always assumed to be masculine if assigned gender and it's very easy to slip into saying "he" by default when describing anything you're not certain of. Anonymous internet aliases fall under that "default male" noun rule IMO. In the absence of knowledge, it's equally invalid to assume the author was female.

Technical communities in general are more devoid of women. There's nothing wrong in a little upvote encouragement.

It's condescending, belittling and sarcastic IMHO.

Judge things on their merit. Seeing posts upvoted simply because they're made by females is sad.

Automatically attributing all the high quality posts to men is enormously much worse.

And it will only perpetuate the problem or even make it worse, because it makes it harder for women to get the recognition they deserve.

You might say that the recognition they deserve is equal recognition. I would agree. IFF they were currently getting equal recognition, then everything you say about giving them extra recognition would be true. It would be condescending, belittling and sarcastic.

The problem is though that they don't get equal recognition. So until the day they do, you can put that "condescending, belittling and sarcastic" attitude right back where you found it.

If you're going into 'tech' to get recognition, you're probably going into it for the wrong reasons.

This debate reminds me of the failed 'Women only shortlists" debacle in the UK under the Labour government, where they put forward only Women candidates, in order to get more women MPs. Regardless of their merit to actually do the job.

From Wikipedia: In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away". Members of the Linux community often speak of their community as a gift economy.

Hence in my opinion; recognition is the currency of hackers, and thus while it is the unfortunate case that in many areas women are under-recognised... it is particularly egregious when this happens in the technology arena.

I'd say if you're going into it for any currency (actual or ersatz) you're going in for the wrong reasons.

Anything can be a currency. You can trade in self-fulfillment futures.

Sweet. I've accumulated several decades of self-fulfillment. What exchange rate are you offering?

I think another thing that plays into this is how the longer a comment is, the high the chance it will be disagreed with because there are more things to disagree with. The short and simple comment may 100% of the time be appreciated but the points inside a longer comment may mostly be 100% appreciated but a couple disliked. This leads to the larger comment getting less upvotes even though it contains much more agreeable points than the shorter comment.

Or, on the flip side, if a comment holistically seem strong, the weak points within (which, otherwise as isolates may have been viciously voted down) stand to get leverage by the strength of the comment's whole worth. And perhaps thereby granted earnest consideration and a chance to discussion (which arguably they may not have gotten a chance to otherwise as a one-liner).

Curiosity: the trend (in this case) has reversed itself with time. Quite possibly due to your reply, but that's impossible to tell from a single instance. How many maintain that reversed-upvoting trend after a full day or two?

"Someone replies to it only to correct that inaccuracy."

Correction:

"Someone replies to it only to nitpick"

/humour

"but rather what people in the community think it's important in a conversation"

should be

"but rather that people..."

"...think is important in a conversation"

For the record, I agree, but enjoy irony.

Why ? Someone states its Brian Greene in the comments => http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp... because that passage is actually in there somewhere.

How do we know whether RobotRollCall is a woman or a man?

Who is she?

As far as I could tell from that conversation, she is anonymous and wants to stay that way. So RRC could be somebody massively well-known in the science world using this as a non-tenure approved outlet, or is masquerading as knowledgeable but is a patent clerk with no scientific credibility.

or is masquerading as knowledgeable but is a patent clerk with no scientific credibility.

It appears that these patent clerks with no scientific credibility are some of the few great things the patent office has bestowed upon us.

I don't think anyone could claim she's "masquerading" as knowledgeable, regardless of what (if any) formal education she's had.

It's a joke. Einstein was a patent clerk.

He is Brian Greene http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp... (Cf. Index: 'speed of light', p.564), at least in this context:)

How do you know?

I mean, maybe it is a dog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_y... who is paraphrasing Greene:) But who cares? It is Greene "at least in this context".

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10943

This is the person who jumped to mind first.

This is also a great one:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/flzut/i_have_som...

More of her best-of comments would be most welcome. And, MORE THREADS LIKE THIS PLEASE.

Very understandable explanations -- unfortunately sometimes misleading explanations.

Sometimes? Judging by the number of bewildered comments here I would say everytime!

I would really like to see RobotRollCall in the Khan Academy.

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