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Comment by jplewicke | Hacker News Reader

I know it's an easy analogy to reach for, but I wish that writers would think twice before comparing some trivial inconvenience to being raped. You may have just ruined the morning of a survivor of sexual assault.

There are dozens of other things you could say that would have the same rhetorical effect without trivializing a severe problem, and it's beyond impolite not to. All you have to do is write "Nonstartups are just horrible to work with, like standing in front of an automatic baseball pitching machine."

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You are right. That was insensitive of me; editing right now.

Thank you.

I'm the victim of a terrible accident resulting from an automatic baseball pitching machine; you insensitive asshole.

I'm about 99% confident you're being facetious even after you've said that. Whereas somewhere around 1 out of 4 women in the United States actually have been raped.

Closer to 1/10. The 1/4 figure comes from a study where only 1/14 women self-identified as being raped.

Regardless, too many, and the reference to rape in the original article was unnecessary. But, repeating nice round inaccurate statistics to exaggerate a problem is also dangerous.

Fair point.

I empathize with the intent, but it makes me wonder: are war metaphors insensitive?

This should not be the top comment. It should be somewhere near the bottom of this page in light gray. It has nothing to do with the article and is completely off-topic. We should not pussy-foot around worrying about whether someone may be reminded of something that was traumatic in their lives because you mentioned a word.

HN has determined that this is the most insightful thing you need to know about the article: That the guy used the word rape.

Clearly, since it IS the top comment, HN as a whole disagrees with you.

I believe that discussion about appropriate language and communication styles is very applicable to HN. We're trying to be a better, more insightful discussion board with higher quality than other sites. Better writing is one way to do that, so it seem like a perfect discussion point.

Nope. Some portion of HN disagrees with me, sure. There are also people who use "this." and who make pun threads. Just because there's some people doing it that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, that it's right for HN, that it adds to the discussion, or that I'm wrong for not liking it.

Discussion about appropriate language and communication styles is indeed applicable to HN. And when an article about that gets up-voted we're all free to discuss our feelings on the topic.

HN community standards treat meta-commentary of this sort as almost always on topic and appropriate.

Since the top comment was insightful and correct, and may be even more valuable than the original article, it's been upvoted.

Frankly, this article is the usual kind of frothy pro-startup blog post that is seen on an extremely regular basis here on hacker news. It's good for drawing conversation about how HN users feel about startups and that is about it. The feedback provided by the parent to the author of the post - and to the community as a whole - might very well be the most valuable thing posted here.

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