Edit: To add more to this, feeds train our brain to consume content which we don't even need. Search on other hand is inherently required when we are working on something cool.
Having said that, cussing is a rite of passage in our house. We all cuss like sailors.
I'd suggest that if you don't want kids to read the word "shit" you keep them off the Internet entirely for life rather than running around trying to impose your morality on everyone else.
Does it make our whole environment less professional? Does it influence us to be unprofessional in other parts of our craft? Do outside observers view us as less a profession because of it?
I don’t know the answers but I certainly worry about it. Though perhaps I’m just aging out of this audience.
This is a post on someone's personal blog with some reflections on something they saw at work. I'm not sure why we should expect him to write professionally (leaving aside the question of whether swearing is acceptable in professional writing or not).
I also wouldn't necessarily expect HN to only carry professional content - although some of what's shared here might be interesting from a professional viewpoint, it's not a portal for professionals (what even is 'hacker' as a profession? What percentage of the HN community are amateur hackers rather than professional hackers?).
Ultimately, it's a discussion forum on the internet, where self-proclaimed hackers share things they think are cool, and if others think it's cool too, then it gets shown to more and more 'hackers' until not enough new people think it's cool enough, at which point it gets shown to fewer and fewer people.
That said, we're all adults here, mostly liberal leaning, and we all grew up with the internet; a bit of potty mouth won't hurt anyone. I mean you can take the moral high ground and consider anyone using swear words as immature and move on, I guess.
I wouldn't consider the word "shit" to be inappropriate for a reader that I felt mature enough to expose to HN content and conversations.
There are existing software and methods to get around this problem of accidental censorship. Someone mentioned maintaining a professional vocabulary, and I am inclined to agree: The more you read people writing with crude language, the more likely you are to accidentally let it slip around your parents, or someone like a small child.
Anyway, on the subject of the actual post, comments are you and your future self's mutual friends.
Whether we spell "shit" or "s**t", you say the same word in your head.