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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I can't and won't defend these guys, but I remember my teenage years, and I remember being pretty shallow when it came to women. Looking around, I suspect many other males were the same way.

I got over this by slowly growing up, not by having a crowd tell me I was an ass. I think if the crowd had pressured me back then, I'd tell them to go jump in a lake.

These guys were wrong, no two ways about it. My concern is that we've created a system where kids can't go out and get drunk, make racy comments about girls -- basically act like kids -- without the entire world coming down on their head. Everything you do online lasts forever. That doesn't sound like a good thing at all.

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Five hundred years ago, "kids being kids" would have described setting cats on fire. We can do better than that, and we can do better than this.

There are many places in our society where kids can do stupid and immature things but I don't think the adults in our engineering profession need to support or sponsor them. I respect Heroku etc for pulling their sponsorship dollars. I'm a huge fan of supporting adult standards of behavior to participate in adult society and I have no patience for sexism in our field.

Perhaps I should have been clearer. You are correct. We can and should encourage adult behavior. Heroku and the rest did the right thing -- from an adult, socially-responsible position. There is nothing new about this, it's the way professional groups have conducted themselves since forever.

From a longer-term view, this incident will still be around 50 years from now when these guys are grandfathers. This is completely new and has never existed before in the history of humanity.

I don't think it's an either-or situation. The immediate response could be exactly correct and the long-term impact could be entirely out-of-whack.

This story won't be around in 50 years. We think it will because when we grew up, our social flubs simply disappeared. Now they're around forever, but the important thing is they don't exist in isolation.

This story, like all the embarrassing comments I have personally published in forums across the internet, can for all intents and purposes be just as lost to time in a deluge of data as it can in a drought.

A year from now, when one searches the names of one of these founders, or the name of their company, this episode will not even appear in the first few pages of Google search results. Perhaps for a person with a sufficiently strong memory that he/she was specifically searching for this exact story, the incident could be dredged up. But for the vast majority of humanity, probably even those looking for some vague form of dirt on sqoot, the episode will have vanished.

That doesn't sound like a good thing at all.

Sounds to me like we can perhaps finally just admit that kids go out and get drunk, and haven't quite expanded their reality bubbles past their own nose, and have all us "grown-ups" stop pretending we didn't (except for where we didn't). And we can perhaps finally admit it because it's punching you in the face all the time with minimal research.

The stigma against having "inappropriate" behavior in youth known about that turned out to be part of a growing up process for a pretty alright person is ridiculous. All I know is that if someone ever brings up to me that they can find an angsty Xanga from my teen years, I won't deny it, but it'll be a huge red flag for me if they judge me, now, on its contents.

I'll agree strongly that it probably won't be the most pleasant transitory phase.

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