Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.
So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are.
Edit: just for clarity:
I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world.
I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.)
In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.
For example, HN quite clearly has more male commenters than female commenters. If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
I wish GP hadn't made their point the way they made it (if at all), but I do believe they're reacting to something real.
> I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups.
I agree, but I do think a solution is to include more subgroups. I have no advice on how to do that. But, this is in fact why I'd like to see more women in technology.
I know I'm getting finicky here, but I am careful not to say that. What I say is that any view which is sufficiently represented in society as a whole is going to appear here as well. That doesn't mean it will appear in the same proportions.
> If we had an equal number of men and women, I suspect comments like the ones GP is referencing would be less frequent.
The point is that their frequency isn't the issue. The issue is their existence, and they will continue to exist here no matter how many more women or members of other underrepresented groups join HN (which I certainly hope they will!)
100% fair. That doesn't annoy me, that's the internet in general. What annoys me is the general air of arrogance from the HN community about how things are so great here and it doesn't have the problems of (whatever site you don't like), especially when I routinely have more intelligent discussions in Discord servers nowadays.
These "airs" may not be as opposed as they appear. I think it has to do with how people identify. If you identify with HN (or whatever $object), you'll be more likely to say things about it that come across as triumphalist or arrogant. Someone who identifies against HN (or $object) will be more likely to say things about it that come across as supercilious or putdowns. Since that's just a mechanical consequence of identification, it's not that interesting—which explains why such comments (on both sides) tend to be generic and lack information—they're really not about $object, they're really about oneself. The interesting question is what drives the identification in the first place. That's not so easy to figure out from internet comments!
Re more intelligent discussions in Discord servers—I don't disbelieve you. The sad thing is that group size is one of the biggest variables affecting online discussion quality. Maybe the biggest. I say sad because it's sad to me—it means there's a cap on how good HN can ever get, and mostly all we can do is try to stave off decline. Or—to be superoptimistic—maybe it can slowly get a little better, if we spend a lot of energy.