Pure speculation, though.
(edited to correct a typo)
I'm merely explaining what informs my point of view to someone whose handle was about 30 minutes old when I replied to it on the assumption that they have no idea what my background is.
It would make it speculation by someone with a stronger bias towards a specific explanation due to their personal experiences.
It's frustrating but not exactly surprising that this is rapidly turning into a dismissive pile on.
or maybe the sex/gender of the user is not relevant to the reason for the downvotes?
and maybe even refraining from downvoting a post b/c that user is a woman is itself sexist?
You're not supposed to say that, or treat women as equals -- in that you equally troll them / equally openly disagree / become equally aggresive / or equally "well actually" them as you'd do for any fellow nerd...
Equality somehow means "treat women equal, but different".
For example "well actually" it's something a nerd does to another nerd all the time. If you do it to woman though, it's "mansplaining" and its sexist...
Without knowing all the details, the respectful thing to do is keep your (dismissive) speculation about my life to yourself.
What?
My previous handle is Mz. It hit the leader board in October 2017. About six weeks later, I changed my handle to this one.
As far as I know, I am the only member who posts as openly female who has spent time on the leader board.
I can empathize with her because I was one of the top three students of my graduating class and had the highest SAT scores of my class. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner.
I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta, a college-level math honor society, at age 16 in eleventh grade, the earliest you can be inducted. At age 15, I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors Program, a residential gifted summer enrichment program. That means only two other people outperformed me in the entire state of Georgia on a topic I sort of picked randomly out of a hat because I was a well-rounded student and didn't have any particular area of obvious strength like most candidates.
But more to the point, I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I have been getting myself well for nearly two decades while the entire world calls me crazy and a teller of tall tales and a liar and throws me off of one forum after another which is why I don't cite it more often as a reason I can empathize with someone like Mileva Einstein. I much more often compare myself to Semmelweis and talk about trying hard to not end up locked up in an insane asylum and beaten to death for the crime of thinking I know something medically useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
What I know really ought to qualify me for something like the Nobel Prize in Medicine. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm not likely to ever get any recognition for my accomplishments. The dismissive nonsense in this thread is very much the norm, unfortunately.
Sure, whenever anything you say is dismissed, it must be because you are a woman. Not because you didn't provide any evidence at all to make your case. Also, women don't have to provide evidence, I guess, they just know things and have to be believed.
Example: it’s is less difficult to prove: “there are no purple antenna sprouting aliens in farmer bob’s field”
Vs
“There are no aliens”
Can you give an example of that, b/c I for one would see anyone boasting about that as not getting a positive reaction.
I'm trying to walk away from this discussion at this point. I haven't had enough sleep and I've been on HN over eleven years and the degree to which I still get treated like "Shut up woman, there is no sexism here!" is a point of personal aggravation and there is no good means to combat it.
Ideally, someone else should be telling people "She's probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board and a respected and valued member of the community" or someone else should be telling people "She kicks ass. This is a list of her accomplishments." That's generally how respected men get treated.
But that's not happening and I end up feeling like I have no real choice but to defend myself at times, knowing that will also go badly and be used against me as evidence that I'm not actually important or respectable or smart and so on.
That's the essence of sexism. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There simply are no good answers for me. They don't exist and trying to find them gets a lot of abuse heaped upon me.
I was openly homeless on HN for nearly six years. I remain dirt poor. I continue to get treated like I'm a loon who has no basis to claim any kind of competence at all.
And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
Anyway, I haven't had enough sleep. I have had more than I care to have of this type of conversation for today. I'm trying to walk away.
May I offer some context for what appears to be general push-back to your argument.
There are some incredible contributors to this forum who are women that I respect a lot, despite that they actually have quite low HN karma, devaboone for example. The only thing that causes respect in most eyes is the actual quality of discourse, the content itself. When I see a high karma, the only conclusion anyone draws is that this is someone who spends a lot of time on this site, which is just fine. But anyone here can have a high karma if they want to spend that time, and merely spending that time is not in and of itself a source of interest. What is definitely not interesting is talking about the karma score itself and whether or not someone is on some list of frequent users.
Repeating parent... Do you have an example? Like a link.
You rarely would say "He has accumulated lot of good karma by doing good, I better see what he has to say". On HN, its a different story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1068454
Karma is used as part of the YC-applicant vetting process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=454022
Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback. Now I understand why you have 40k karma ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758794
Most high-karma people on HN (like, 5k+) get there by being thoughtful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1757388
Those are all old comments. Probably not a coincidence because as stated previously when I began pointing out the double standard -- that men would praise each other for having high karma here but nothing I do is ever good enough and I get attacked for trying to assert that I deserve to be treated better -- then people began saying that less rather than, you know, decide to treat me better.
> And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
You claimed in the thread that you were deserving of the Nobel prize in medicine. If people are treating you like a crank and you are making claims like that, that is pretty far from "no basis to claim any kind of competence at all." That one seems to be a claim of supreme competence.
These days I use throwaway accounts because of the increasing censorship and to force myself to ignore the karma system.
I think karma does affect the algorithm that decides if you get flagged or banned, or at least alerts the mods. May just be the short time votes on specific comments, though.
Is there a meta hackernews where this kind of thing is discussed? I’ve been here for years and this is the strangest conversation I’ve seen, like other people are stepping out in front to let people know you’re legit because you mention your gender identity and have lots of upvotes on a leaderboard and I’m like wwwhat? Have I been using hackernews wrong?
I would be interested to know why you feel you are entitled to a 'two-career' lifestyle. That you are not is a choice you made, unless you can give the name of the person who pointed a gun to your head to prove otherwise. If you are unhappy with your choices, take responsibility and make amends.
> possibly because he was treating a woman like his equal
This for example is complete speculation. Him being Jew and him being undisciplined (his bad grades in math were totally due to that) had likely to do with it a lot more.
Einstein never had bad grades in math, that’s a myth.
Fwiw, the [hacker news guidelines](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ask that you avoid commenting on voting (like this one).
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This pattern - posting something controversial and breaking the rules - and then blaming it on people not liking the controversial thing you said - is not uncommon. Indeed, I frequently see comments to the effect of "See Trump was right about the tech companies being monopolies but people here will downvote me because they hate Trump" sitting at the bottom of every thread when I enable "showdead".
In sum - if you want to get more votes (as you apparently care about votes) and for people to give your ideas more consideration - consider not self-sabotaging by pairing your ideas with a rule breaking comment.
Fwiw, this is the third time I've seen you bring up your rank on the HN leaderboard. It's also the third time I've heard of the HN leaderboard. I'm not sure if somebody being ranked on HN makes me more or less likely to consider their argument - probably less, because it means they spend too much time on social media - but it's not a strong effect in any case. Simply put - does literally anybody care about that leaderboard besides you?