What 4chan thinks of HN
rbt.asia
rbt.asia
Some of my favorites:
>Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]
>Why I have decided to stop using [ Tried and true web dev environment] and start using Meteor
>Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry standard framework].
>Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?
>[Actually interesting topic] - 0 comments
>Can the NSA blow up your PC remotely?
>Why you shouldn't store your files locally, but in the cloud
>Why it's impossible to use PHP even though millions of people are doing great things with it
>Some blog post about scalability... blog crashes after posting link to HN and /r/programming
>Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product and added Bootstrap to it
>Pay me $50 to teach you decades old vim features in screencast form
>Reasons Why A Basic Income Guarantee Might Just Be A Bad Idea
And this is the best:
>38090087
so the password is password?
>Disrupt Disruption
Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product and added Bootstrap to it
So true. Health Sherpa comes to mind as one recent example...
HN beats any other news site out there hands down and the comments although having declined in quality slightly it's still better than most out there.
tldr; you people are awesomely sickening.
Oh yeah, and they forgot to add "How I quit my job and traveled the third world on just a 'few dollars a day'"
"How I quit my job and went into consulting" "How I quit consulting and went into freelancing" "How I quit consulting and went into your mom's vagina" "How I quit my consulting job for a month and learned to program and am now making 80k a year writing Ruby apps" "How I quit my contractor Ruby dev gig and joined the Node.js behemoth (and why you should too)"
brilliant
>>>Some blog post about scalability... blog crashes after posting link to HN and /r/programming
But who says I can't talk about a rocket while riding a bike:-)
Also I will add these to the list
> why [angular/backbone/ember] [rocks|sucks]
> XYZ in pure CSS.
> How I got [in/out] of YC
I have to admit I enjoy many of these. Just taking cheap shots here:-) But I would really like a few more posts about
1. The thought process a new founder goes through before approaching a VC.
2. How to save your ass while talking to VC's who know the game far better than you do.
3. The mistakes founders have made in past w.r.t to starting, abandoning, funding their startups.
Or the ridiculous intentional mispellings in names...somehow skipping all the vowels & resemble some vaguely phonetic spelling. Twitter > twtr etc.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/silicon-valleys-stupid-name-prob...
> Why we should have an honest discussion about sexism in tech [dead]
>[Service that no one has heard of] is shutting down.
(and yes, references must be 0-based [5])
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia
This whole post is depressing. Far from lighthearted fun, these comments all have an undercurrent of hostility ("wannabe-academic"). The mosaic formed by these comments imply pg has harmed the world by creating HN. But that couldn't be further from the truth.
Imagine where you'd be forced to go if HN didn't exist, for example.
If the reference took some non-trivial research to find, it is of course welcome and useful. The too-obvious Wikipedia link is an attempt to imitate references of the useful variety with the intent of appearing sophisticated.
> Imagine where you'd be forced to go if HN didn't exist, for example.
A better HN. It is possible: HN was such a place a couple years ago. And it can only get worse if the community keeps taking itself too seriously to allow even light-hearted criticism.
Outside, maybe?
If you're saying that, I think you're actually part of the problem. Don't get your news and discussions from only one place on the web. There are lots more and it doesn't cost you anything visiting other places and reading comments from other people. The only risk is reading elsewhere something that didn't get to HN's frontpage.
Initially, I thought you were referring to the
"Submission is a link to a wikipedia article"
References would be unnecessary if HN comments supported such complex and over-the-top formatting as links (or escapable asterisks, for that matter, but then again who ever heard about using asterisks in a programming context?), which definitely haven't been a feature of all forum softwares since time immemorial.
It does not, and posting links inline often makes for unreadable garbage, hence pseudo-references, exactly as in mailing lists.
That said, I've come to like the footnotes.
--
[0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism.
- The layman counts from one
- The uptight programmer counts from zero, because he thinks Dijkstra said so [1].
- The meta-contrarian (which I used to be) says fuck it, ordinals start at one [0].
- The meta-meta-contrarian reads Von Neumann[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0].
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number_%28linguistics%2...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number#Von_Neumann_defi...
[0] Help! I'm trapped in a Boolean algebra[1][0]!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de....
[0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...
That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab...
Don't you think some of the commenters might actually be academic, not wannabes?
[231 points] Show /hn/: I ripped off an existing product
and added Bootstrap to it.
"[some program/service] in Javascript" - 6075 comments
Why [obscure framework] is the next [industry
standard framework].
Hacker, entrepreneur, genius, lifestyle blogger, CEO of
Whoof! Pastebin for dog owners and pixel.io image-resizing
service made entirely in Go.
*Silicon Valley startup culture.
It is very different in other places, really!
203 votes - How I learned my 6 year old daughter how to
do high algorithm trading in Haskell
1 hour later, 421 votes, Your children should be outside
playing, not coding
As I finished high school and started diving more deeply into GNU/Linux, reading /g/ slowly became less and less enjoyable. At one point, I became so jaded that I felt I understood rms's famous quote regarding /g/: "I tried to look at that page but saw online inane comments." I guess I wasn't as much of a fan of the battlestations, rms memes, desktops, and riced-out GNU/Linux desktops as I previously was.
However, /g/'s influence on me will never be lost. Even after reading more and more hacker news, I still prefer the anonymous style of posting. I say GNU/Linux instead of Linux. (It may be a bit ironic that I learned about rms through a forum where he is a meme that is usually portrayed negatively.) And, to be be honest, I still kind of like battlestation threads (though I may read more usesthis.com instead of /g/). I will also probably never buy any apple products.
Thank you to whomever posted this on /g/, as it really opened my eyes as to how large the intersection of these two communities really is. Perhaps I'll drop by again sometime.
-"Things I've learned from coding for a month"
-"Ten ways to become a better programmer" - by the guy who's been coding for a month
Makes me wonder about the quality of submissions from the fields I understand much less (sciences, humanities, politics, etc.).
Huumm... Except the fact that, arguably, I don't normally conjecture outside HN [1].
[1] I actually want to see what pg has got to essay about this. Just wait until the Arcstar is ready...
Please hold your downvotes I kid, I kid. Most of this (rather funny) criticism is geared towards SV culture in general, I guess, as HN is just a reflection of that plus common nerd/hacker/engineer/smart-kid-outcast behavior. Apart from the idiosyncrasies of large communities that HN is not invulnerable to, I actually have found great content here. And yes, I'm a white college kid in his early twenties with big ambitions, pg is my hero and I don't feel like getting a job at IBM -- that doesn't mean I'm going to chase a $1B exit with Instagram for Squirrels+social+toilets alongside my other rich friends, replacing cancer research with tweets and fucking up the economy while at it. I'm broke and from another country like many people here, and despite the stupid media frenzy, snarky HN comments, bubble or not and so on, I still want to be part of all this. Why? Because I'm young, stupid and want to see what it's like.
I guess this is what the world's greatest engine of innovation looks like: a bunch of young and stupid nerds from another country.
the Reddit/HN system is hunting the most valuable comments through democracy, but it throws that work out because of its visible tree structure. People can ride the top post.
Also the auto updates are nice to stay current on an active conversation.
Gotta give it to 4chan, nice system. Shame about the captcha.
you were never on 4chan before captchas, were you?
That was hilarious.
I still have an archive of those files somewhere.
I think this was my "We've made it!" moment with 4chan. When people are writing viruses tailored to your service, you've clearly done something right.
...Or wrong.
You'll also be supporting the site.
Red squares. Red squares everywhere.
Then again, I'm biased.
That's an understatement.
But seriously, I agree with everything you stand for in regards to how internet discussion should work. Flat discussion is vastly superior, even when weighing the negatives
But threading the text as well just makes long discussions difficult to follow and unreadable as the margin starts to get cramped.
Which on HN is apparently part of the reason they do it the way they do.
But this is of course one of those cases where they decided to make a choice, and they clearly favor the "top" structure.
Honestly I think they could have meshed the two better, though.
(check the user)
It's definitely a shame about the captcha, but like a couple of people have already said, it's necessary.
I've personally found myself deleting some comments not worth being said, usually at the captchas. I can only imagine this goes for others and in other situations.
Here, the quality check is rather the wish to actually contribute.
Other people have since made sites that, as I understand them, boil down to "4chan for people that speak language X" (eg Krautchan (German), Ylilauta (Finnish)) which are themselves fairly popular and influential.
Beyond that, there are many small and interesting English-language boards that aren't "just for porn," but as krapp said, most aren't very popular, but tend to have tightly knit communities (as strange as that sounds, talking about an anonymous board) that I'd feel wrong drawing unwanted attention to.
I can also assure you that no one in that thread started with the idea to rile HN up.
Once that thread got bigger, I wasn't surprised it was posted here though. I can also say that despite it being totally illogical and pointless, there is a bit of showboating that happens on 4chan. So... take from it what you will, I doubt the intention of the thread is to make anyone on HN mad.
I don't get the impression anyone on HN is mad. Much of the commentary in the thread is entirely accurate, and many folks here at HN are pointing out the really funny and really accurate ones...and I've seen some of the same jokes here at HN in the past. And, I've had conversations with tons of folks about the Silicon Valley echo chamber; and there's serious discussion happening pretty regularly about what's broken about this culture we're in. A lot of it's actually quite funny.
But, even a thread about HN brought out some of the bigotry of 4chan. Not the bigots against the mostly middle class (or wealthy, or even filthy rich) white people on HN...that's irrelevant. It's not about people being mad, riled up, or outraged. It's just about calling people on their shit. I know it's senseless to do so on 4chan (I have more than passing familiarity with the place), but I can hope that HN is willing to consider the cost of continuing thousands of years of oppressive language and behavior and societal norms, and what that means for our community. I think we'd be better off with more women and people of color and LGBTQ people in our industry; people who casually make sexist, racist, and homophobic jokes do not agree with me, and they express that opinion freely...even here and on reddit, which are merely pseudonymous, casual use of oppressive language and support of oppressive behavior goes unnoticed or encouraged much of the time.
I see this kind of "shock" throughout the techy mainstreamy politcally correct communities. It seems to me that the people that take issue with bigotry are themselves somehow weak through some kind of insecurity manifesting itself as a desire to fix this perceived "injustice". Because, you know, muh feels.
4chan just doesn't care about your feels. It's funny to say this (see how I am distancing myself from 4chan to add validity to my argument?); but I do think more communities could learn something from 4chan in this aspect.
On a related note; I saw that outrage thread linking in the 4chan post about this black chick getting some dude fired and what not about a non-PC joke at a conference. Then, in the HN thread [1], to my pleasure, at least the top comments were mostly absent of the typical reddity/facebook etc. white knighting "This is why women arent in tech!" nonsense.
Being empathetic is a weakness?
Outrage is definitely a weakness.
I'm afraid I'm not following your logic. Care to explain further?
Basically, if I can get you to react with misogyny, I have a level of control over you.
"Trolling" is about power. People do it because being able to push somebodies emotions one direction or another lets them play with that person like a marionette. Making people upset is a power trip for trolls.
It would not suprise me if many (not most by any means, but many) trolls are in fact psychopaths who are 'practicing' in a way. Running low-risk experiments on how to control people.
The solution is not to innoculate yourself against emotional response. Trust, but verify. Be emotional and empathetic, but do your homework and don't be a sucker.
Such an approach would allow yourself to empathize with the targets of bigotry without exposing yourself to the hypothetical psychopathic affirmative action boogeyman. And I am far more afraid of decades of social justice being undone by the normalization of bigoted attitudes in society than I am of a few scheming manipulative social justice warriors.
Hey there, privilege.
"4chan just doesn't care about your feels."
Which is precisely why it's predominantly white males.
Gratuitous racial slurs are racist. But racial crime statistics are also racist. If a worldview is afraid of some facts, then it has some holes in it.
I think anonymity is awesome. But, 4chan is often on par with YouTube in terms of the quality of its comments. Sure, there's some smart kids there (some younger friends of mine are regularly channers), and a few not-as-smart oldtimers who ought to have grown out of it by now.
Notice several comments spend a lot of time talking about the people who call out sexism (as white knights, for instance). They're the kind of sexist who thinks that because they don't believe they are sexist, when they say sexist things, it's not actually sexist. The same kind of racist that says racist things, but because they have a black friend who's totally cool with it, it's all good. The kind of folks that do this are mostly young, mostly white, mostly middle class, and mostly assholes who should stop and think before they speak, whether it is an anonymous forum or not. Racist/sexist/misogynist/homophobic behavior is racist/sexist/misogynist/homophobic, and 4chan is full of it, on a scale that no non-anonymous forum would ever be.
It's there because it's constantly stopped, and it should be there.
It's not about political correctness. It's about not being a dick. I've said nothing about saying controversial things...I've called out intentional attacks by people with power on people with less power. White kids calling everybody nigger isn't an important discussion that needed to happen to further the discourse on race in America. It's a bunch of privileged white kids being little shits and perpetuating and endorsing centuries of oppression.
So, yeah, anonymity is great. But, the culture of 4chan is often racist, misogynist, sexist, and homophobic. That's privileged people having fun reveling in their privilege at the expense of those with less power. I just don't see the appeal.
Obviously, I'm not suggesting censorship (or maybe somebody has assumed I am, since I've been downvoted a bit). I'm suggesting that the casual culture of oppressive language as it is used by the mostly white, mostly middle class, people on 4chan is a negative for the world. And, I'm pointing it out for what it is. It always gets wrapped up in, "You just don't understand, it's funny!" But, minstrel shows were considered funny, too. It doesn't make it OK.
If the facts don't agree with my opinions, I change my mind. But that rapidly pushes you into thought-criminal territory in today's world.
For example, I don't buy that racism is the sole reason for the underrepresentation of some ethnic minority groups in tech because other ethnic minority groups that have been historically oppressed and discriminated against are overrepresented in tech. But if someone posted an article about how "tech is racist" and I said "I'm not sure that tech is racist", then someone could call me a racist and I could lose my job if someone got offended.
So anonymity is essential for exploring non-progressive ideas and, I think, for getting closer to truth. There are lots of non-progressive/anti-progressive ideas that are plausible given the available evidence, but nobody will discuss under their real name.
But, I also think 4chan revels in its privilege, and many of its participants are pretentious enough to believe they are above gender and race and identity, when they're really just reproducing the same patterns white men have practiced at every point in history when someone asked to be treated equally. It doesn't mean they should be censored. But, I think people should feel empowered to call it out for what it is...but calling it out gets shouted down pretty quick on 4chan (I can hear the cries of "white knight" from here).
It's only because these views so rarely get challenged that it causes such a fierce response.
Source: I was one of those white guys who thought tech was a super great place where anyone with the skills could get ahead and there was no glass ceiling for women and their was no reason black folks couldn't do great in the industry if they just had an interest in tech. I recognize all this because I was there. I just wish I had a better way to help other people understand how their privileged position makes it very difficult for them to see and understand why the tech industry has both an extremely sexist and white supremacist culture.
You think you're not being a dick, but your sensitivity is blinding you. I've called my friends things far worse than what nigger objectively means, but the social constructs around it are so bizarre as to make it taboo, but only taboo in my context. Just like sex is taboo. Just like drugs are taboo. Just like homosexuality was taboo (and remains taboo in some areas).
Further, there's an aspect to 4chan you're not seeing, and it's how much they hate and punish the kind of narcissism you accuse them of. A net good.
I've seen openly homosexual people posting on 4chan about their lifestyles with absolutely no condemnation. It is not an exception to a rule. You have mischaracterized this demographic. Badly.
And, yet, 4chan spawned this:
http://jezebel.com/what-happens-when-a-13-year-old-4chan-cam...
And, this:
http://www.dailydot.com/society/adria-richards-4chan-raid-se...
And, this:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-inte...
I'm speaking of the culture of the place. Every individual user has the ability to not participate in some of the really awful shit that goes down...but, groupthink and a culture that celebrates the worst of it ("none of us are as cruel as all of us"), leads to some truly awful behavior. And, it is so often white males targeting women (and, worse, young girls).
People with privilege are rarely aware of their privilege, and 4chan is a great exhibition of that. It's possibly useful as a tool for seeing just how much people don't see how awful their community can be, and how much oppressive behavior is tolerated and celebrated. We've got thousands of years of oppression to undo. I'm calling it out, not because I'm "sensitive", but because I've had some of this shit explained to me...I've had my own oppressive behavior called out to me. And, now that I see it, and have begun to understand it, it's my job as a white male ally in a centuries-old struggle to call it out when I see it.
It's not white knighting, and it's not sensitivity. 4chan isn't hurting my feelings or making me mad. 4chan is just doing what white men have done throughout history: Enjoying their position of privilege to make fun of those with less power. And, I recognize it for what it is because I've done it, too. The only surprising thing about it is how much most 4channers think they aren't acting like every prior generation of white men in the face of being asked to treat women and people of color like equals. They genuinely believe they are a different breed, above race, and gender, and identity; all the while promoting the same old shit.
since when?
since they make good headlines?
Most people who get ousted are narcissistic 16 year old's. They just arn't sympathetic to a news reel, and almost always the instigating factor for 4chan going to town on someone is narcissism. Adria and Anita being two fantastic examples of such.
My sympathies to Allie though. Definitely not a smart life choice posting pictures of yourself for 4chan's amusement, shame such a choice can be made before you're old enough to make it.
You've been to 4chan before, right? I just took at look. I could point to a half dozen deeply disturbing threads happening as we speak. They are conversations being held predominantly by young white males about even younger girls, some of whom have had their real identity revealed by the creepy stalking that 4chan is so well known for.
"Most people who get ousted are narcissistic 16 year old's."
So, all 16 year olds, then. Every teenager is self-involved. Their brain isn't finished yet. That's no excuse for a bunch of grown men to wage war on them.
"Adria and Anita being two fantastic examples of such."
So, you believe what happened in those cases was a sane, rational, and fair response to someone saying something that 4channers disagreed with? You call them "narcissists", one because she wanted to make some videos about sexism in video games and she asked some people to voluntarily give her a few bucks to do it, and the other because she thought it was inappropriate to make stupid dick jokes at a conference attended by women and young girls.
See, here's the thing...you could convince me that Adria Richards could have handled that situation with more subtlety. But, the response of 4chan? You believe that was justified? I honestly have a hard time wrapping my head around that kind of mindset.
And, Anita literally did nothing to anyone. She wanted to make some videos. Don't like the concept of videos about sexism in video games? Don't contribute, don't watch them. That's what I did, and the videos never bothered me one bit because I never saw them (didn't need to, as I already knew video games were sexist as hell). Huh. How hard was that? In what world is it OK to wage war on someone for expressing their opinion? In that world, anonymous forums become the only place one can express an opinion without fear, because their are vigilante gangs standing at the ready to try to destroy you at the first sign that they might disagree with you.
That it's considered justified by so many within that community because of, I guess, how strongly someone disagrees with the opinions being stated, is disturbing.
If 4chan only went after people with power, I would cheer them on. Politicians? Hell, yeah, go for it. Tom Cruise? Fuck, yeah. Bankers? Why not? Abusive cops? I'm OK with that too. But, they often don't. They go after easy targets; they're often bullies (while absurdly wearing the badge of "standing up for the little guy"). One of the easiest targets is young girls, and 4channers go after young girls daily.
Also... if you think you've called your friends worse than what the n-word means and symbolizes, you clearly don't know much about the history of it.
You're really trying to say "Nier is just a taboo."?
>Some folks probably should feel tied down by their reputation/ego.
I'm pretty sure that implies that you don't want the "bigots" in your worldview to be able to express themselves anonymously.
My implication was that I opt out of such discussions, and I think (much) less of those who participate in casual sexism, racism, and homophobia.
You can be anonymous on Hacker News very easily. Most people here are.
It's the lack of a karma system that is why people on 4chan post whatever they like.
You feel the same feeling even when contributing to 4chan, however, you know it wont matter for long thus it's far less mental weight to deal with.
edit:
lololol toasting in an epic thread.
edit2:
The actual thread is https://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38087806
[542 points] Why you should work for a startup:
Low pay, long hours, no equity, uninteresting dipshit problems and
privileged tools for bosses [224 comments]
[Posted by a VC, founder, or current employee/inmate]relevant to the first xkcd: http://xkcd.com/917/
New startup idea: Stallman-as-a-service.
Just make sure the backend is Affero GPL. ;)
If you're interested, please read our ToS here: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...
Written in either Go or JS, of course. Preferably both.
curl -s "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman" |grep "<li>" | grep -v -E "(Chapter|href|Source:)" | perl -MList::Util -e 'print List::Util::shuffle <>' | head -n1 | sed -E -e "s#</?(li|i|b)>##g""I'm the last survivor of a dead culture, and I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead."
The War on Drugs has continued for some 20 years, and we see little prospect of peace, despite the fact that it has totally failed and given the US an imprisonment rate almost equal to Russia. I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners. Today, one of the benefits the public wants is the use of computers to share copies.
The whole notion of "disruption" that is central to so many of the ideas floating on HN, is rooted in the arrogance necessary to make them work.
[foobar] in Pure CSS
Why you should never use [foobar]Even better, a decent number of those who are willing to speak out are also capable of doing it reasonably and coherently with an eye towards explaining the issues understandably. That doesn't mean the people they're talking with are convinced; people are almost never convinced like that.
And best of all, we aren't downvoted into oblivion when we take such stands. I've gotten some significant chunks of karma for being the feminist in a thread. If all of this labels us "anti-sexist", I'm cool with it.
A little over a year ago, there was a lot of third-wave feminist activism here after several "Atheism Plus" communities mentioned Hacker News. Gradually, people started standing up to them, and their activism is not nearly as prominent.
On a side note: If you're curious about "Atheism Plus", it's a set of communities that focus on its members vision of social justice. Interestingly, it's not really about atheism; it's almost never discussed. For example, here's a current snapshot of the front page of their subreddit: http://archive.is/CMcAy
Same's been happening with Russel Brand and opposition to the current political system here in the UK.
'Kissing your subordinate at work' is also a dumb idea, of course. But, from reading the reports of the other people there, this was an illegitimate accusation of sexual assault, and what amounted to a dumb guy who escalated an existing sexual situation doesn't deserve to have his life ruined.
The thread was shut down because it could cause a flamewar. That felt like a statement that the body shot girl's criminal accusations (yes, sexual assault is a crime) had merit but any discussion or counter argument did not.
The idea that saying both men and women should not create sexual situations in the workplace is not 'sexist'. Not is questioning an unmerited accusation of criminal behaviour.
And even if for some reason, you feel so strongly that the definition of sexual assault should not include the incident you're talking about, and you don't have any problem with taking away the power of survivors to define their experiences as sexual assault, then okay, fine, you can have your own private definition of sexual assault. But do you really think that's the most important thing here? You obviously have no empathy for the survivor at all. The “dumb guy” doesn't deserve to have his life ruined? Maybe, maybe not, but you shouldn't worry about it, because only 3% of rapes ever punished anyway.[1] But it's not about the perpetrator, it's about the survivor. Does she deserve to have her life ruined? Of course she doesn't, because she's done nothing wrong (fuck you for victim blaming). But this could have ruined her life, and maybe it did (I don't know her, I don't know).
And by the way, "escalat[ing] an existing sexual situation" are just your weasel words for "crossing boundaries without permission". You always have to ask permission, and it's not hard to do so, and it's nice as well. If you're not a rapist, then you don't want to cross people's boundaries, so you don't want to do something if the other person doesn't want to. You might want to read the definition of rape-mindedness.[2]
Thanks for proving my point.
[1]: http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-ra...
[2]: http://radtransfem.tumblr.com/post/30163502692/tw-what-rape-...
- Sexual boundaries were already crossed at the stage of people willingly doing body shots off each other.
- You are discussing rape. Nobody at any point has alleged rape. Rape is a serious criminal allegation you really shouldn't be bandying about lightly.
- She /survived/ an unwanted kiss? Are you sure that is an appropriate definition of 'survived'?
- "The 'dumb guy' doesn't deserve to have his life ruined? Maybe..." You're "maybe" sure someone doesn't deserve to have their life ruined?
- What defines one person as the victim and the other as the perpetrator? Who do you think came out worse for this interaction, the person blogging about their assault or the person who, when asked not to do sexual things, stopped, and then was accused of sexual assault across the entire internet?
- Please use grown up language. 'fuck you' is not grown up language. See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Me pointing out that two people did stupid things is not 'rape minded'. You are attempting to shame me for disagreeing with you, which is morally reprehensible.
> Sexual boundaries were already crossed at the stage of people willingly doing body shots off each other.
You completely misunderstand. I'm pretty sure you're doing it deliberately too, but let's assume you're not. If people were “willingly” doing body shots off each other, then in what way were “sexual boundaries” “crossed”? You just mean to say that something “sexual” was happening, therefore the “boundary” between “sexual” and “not sexual” was crossed? Okay, fine, that's trivially true. But given that this was apparently “willingly”, then nobody was being violated, nobody had their own personal boundaries crossed without permission. When the perpetrator kissed the woman without her permission, then he crossed her boundaries without her permission. Do you see the difference?
> You are discussing rape. Nobody at any point has alleged rape. Rape is a serious criminal allegation you really shouldn't be bandying about lightly.
I'm am not bandying it about lightly. Sexual assault and rape, if not synonymous, are obviously very related acts. I gave some statistics for how often rape is punished. I think it's reasonable to assume that the statistics for sexual assault are similar if not the same. My point was that you need not worry about “serious criminal allegations”, the justice system does not care about women who are sexually assaulted or raped.
> She /survived/ an unwanted kiss? Are you sure that is an appropriate definition of 'survived'?
The term “survivor” is preferred to the term “victim”. I'm not a huge fan of it but it's better than “victim”.[1]
> "The 'dumb guy' doesn't deserve to have his life ruined? Maybe..." You're "maybe" sure someone doesn't deserve to have their life ruined?
If you look at my comment history, you see I oppose prisons and the justice system in its entirety. But I don't feel like it's my place to say what this guy “deserves”. But anyway, you're still ignoring that this is an abstract, theoretical discussion: the fact is that this woman's life, in all likelihood has actually been ruined, for the time being at least. The perpetrator will never face any criminal repercussions. Yet, you're still empathising with the perpetrator, and not at all with the survivor.
> What defines one person as the victim and the other as the perpetrator? Who do you think came out worse for this interaction, the person blogging about their assault or the person who, when asked not to do sexual things, stopped, and then was accused of sexual assault across the entire internet?
The perpetrator is the person who kissed the woman (who didn't want to be kissed) without her permission. The “victim” is the one whose left the situation feeling sexually violated. It's pretty clear and you know it is.
I don't know who came out of it worse, but you're acting like this person was wrongly accused of sexual assault, but it's exactly what they did. If you don't want to be publicly accused of sexual assault then you shouldn't sexually assault people.
> Please use grown up language. 'fuck you' is not grown up language. See: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're using the tone argument.[2] This is pretty weak. In any case, I'd like to think I'd be able to say “fuck you for victim blaming” to your face in real life (in accordance with the guidelines), but realistically I would probably just hold it in.
> Me pointing out that two people did stupid things is not 'rape minded'. You are attempting to shame me for disagreeing with you, which is morally reprehensible.
I never said that you're rape-minded, that's a ridiculous misreading of my post. I'm saying that the perpetrator of this assault was rape-minded. The point of the definition of rape-mindedness is that there are lots of things like this which are “not rape”, but are still leave the survivor feeling sexually violated, and the concept of rape-mindedness captures what it is about the behaviour of the perpetrator that leaves the survivor with that feeling.
Also, you keep insisting that the survivor is as responsible for this as the perpetrator. You're completely ignoring the social power that the perpetrator had over the survivor.
[1]: http://akhilak.com/blog/2012/03/13/why-words-matter-victim-v...
If you assume all kissing is sexual in nature.
It's like an avuncular old gentleman responding to a lampooning by saying "haha, jolly good joke chaps, some of that was right on the money"
I particularly appreciate the maturity and humor demonstrated by hacker news's response in stark opposition to how a lot of Internet communities (4chan, reddit) get angry when 4chan mocks them.
I like a community that is self aware of its own ridiculousness.
Edit: I didn't see any framework battle posts...
▲ 200 points Why Angular is better than Ember
▲ 200 points Why Ember is better than AngularDon't even want to know what the thread would have turned out like on /b/.
A Startup Anecdote To Advertise My Unrelated Company
I went to the Apple Store and this guy was really nice to me
[315 points] You should work from Starbucks.
[262 points] Why working from home or Starbucks is a bad idea.I find the community here gives the most comprehensive and unbiased answer, while still being passionate about their opinions.
I like 4chan because its the standup comedy of the internet. Most of what you hear you wouldn't say to your mom, both are funnier if you're a bit drunk or whatever, some level of edginess and offensiveness is not just tolerated but expected... So I like 4chan and I like HN and unsurprisingly I like the intersection quite a bit. And I'm hardly alone. I subjectively think the overlap in the Venn diagram is huge, perhaps approaching majority.
Finally, in isolation from the obvious social and political issues, its a hilarious parody.
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
It's not just 4chan talking here, it's all of us. We can't reply because everything is true. The only difference is the guys posting on 4chan are free to post under anonymity. Here? Not so much, I don't want my 714 karma to stray too far from my 720 days here.
I still like you HN <3
I disagree of course, but it did make me lol.
>I am going to [country people think is still in the stone age even though it as Western as can be, Vietnam for example] for a year and will only bring my iPad Mini and a pair of trousers
Thanks for posting!
I went to the Apple Store and this guy was really nice to me -101 comments
Gold :)