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Comment by brennenHN | Hacker News Reader

Headlines like this are the casual references that makes tech a boys club. You don't think you're doing any harm, but by distorting an important argument about rape, you're undermining the sentiment behind "No means no" even as you use it in a different context.

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And of course the HN boys club doesn't see anything wrong with the headline. I expected nothing less :(

Seriously, people: "No means yes" is a clear reference to "No means no". It's a really bad choice of headline, because it communicates "I don't care about issues that women are facing, if it gets me a catchy headline".

I'd be inclined to be ambivalent on this, except that in the OP there is no literal "yes" or "no" involved (i.e., something like, "I set the MONGO_UNSAFE_DATA_COMMIT flag to 'No'") so I'm not even sure what the headline means, except that it gets a little edge parodying the anti-rape saying.

At least you can't blame the OP for thinking too much about SEO.

"No means Yes" has many meanings [1], many having no rape related sentiment at all.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoMeansYes

I clicked on the comments just to see if anyone noticed this shit; thank goodness you did.

I did the same thing and no one had yet

Agreed, that headline is totally rapey.

Hair-trigger, there.

You're absolutely right. I have zero tolerance when it comes to cultural acceptance, denial, or apologizing for rape.

We all know what the title is referencing, and it's implying that there are circumstances when "no means no" isn't true. The content of the article may be unrelated, but the title is still problematic.

This post is basically the same thing as complaining about the existence of hot dogs. We all know they're just a device to institutionalize the act of fellatio.

The title is not problematic because he's describing a false negative. Context matters, you can't call "rape" every time someone puts these three words together because they are normal words that can be used to describe non-rape concepts. If your comment dealt with anything but a refusal to engage the words on their own terms I might be a bit more supportive of your stance here, but there simply isn't any "there" there.

Congrats on invoking Godwins law on a topic not related to the thread.

Where did brennenHN invoke Hitler or Nazis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

Uh, technically, you did.

Trigger warning for data corruption and poor public relations.

Could we please stop with the intellectual terrorism on HN?

People can't write a blog entry anymore without being labelled either homophobic or sexist.

What's your take on humor btw? You know, like stand-up comedians making fun of white people or making fun of black people?

My take on humor is that if you need to make racist jokes to be "funny", you're pretty bad at your job as a comedian.

There's nothing funny about racism, sexism, or other discrimination. And if calling out people for being utterly insensitive and dismissive of minorities makes me an "intellectual terrorist", I'm happy to accept that label.

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