Or it implies the writer is a straight male discussing his own experience, but who is incorrectly using the second person. That's the most natural reading.
I've observed that in my first drafts, I often (confusingly) switch between the first person, second person, and the mathematician's "we" ("we now integrate by parts to..."). I've also observed women will also sometimes use "you" when they mean "I", and I occasionally tease them by saying "I too think that dress will make my ass look great" (their reaction: [light punch] "you know what I mean you jerk").
Being consistent and correct takes effort that is incommensurate with the value of an HN comment.
It's a bit silly that we've now declared certain grammatical errors, tones and voices to be secretly sexist.
Anyway, we certainly have no right to expect total tense consistency in forum posts, though HN has historically had a higher writing-quality standard than most. But the second person in particular has the effect of assuming that the reader can empathize with a particular experience, and it's worth realizing that this can be off-putting when that experience excludes a sizeable fraction of your audience. It's not a criminal mistake. But it's worth avoiding, and easy to avoid as long as your mental picture of HN readership includes a few women.
Feeling unwelcome is a choice on the part of the listener. Sometimes my friends discuss their parents attempting to arrange a marriage for them, assorted ceremonies, ragging, dowries, and similar things which I've never experienced. I can treat this as an opportunity to feel unwelcome, or I can treat it as an unfamiliar part of my friend's life that he chooses to share with me. I choose to do the latter even when they make grammar mistakes.
And quite honestly, I think it would be a bit arrogant of me to demand that everyone in India change their behavior just to avoid reminders that I'm a minority. I guess the new maxim is "When in Rome, demand that Romans act like American tourists so we don't feel unwelcome."
Again, imagine you're speaking in person with a (straight) woman. You might tell a story about when you met a hot girl (assuming this is a personal conversation where that sort of story would be appropriate). But would you ever ask your friend if she had ever met a hot girl but then lost interest? It just doesn't make sense as a question in this context.
Yeah, and so? He perhaps wanted to address this part of HN, which is the most populous anyway.
Your comment, to whit address this part of HN, IS the problem. The OP could have addressed everyone - but failed to even bother wanting to try.
Take the extra effort to include all of us, regardless of our genes. Be kind - we'll think all the more of you.
The grandparent comment is that persons personal experience or perspective. Nothing offensive about that, or any need to iterate through every possible gender pairing needed to try and give everyone a warm fuzzy.
The comment is only offensive if you are trying to make it into something more than what it actually is when taken at face value.
I mean, women are perfectly capable to understand that the one who wrote the above happened to be a straight male and so talked from HIS viewpoint.
They can also adapt what he said for their circumstances, as can gay men etc, and e.g respond with "yeah, I know what you're talking about, had that happen with a great looking guy that turned out to be totally vacuous", etc.
Speaking like genderless objects addressing other genderless objects with genderless pronouns and genderless generalizations doesn't really help anyone.
If you're speaking in the first person, about your own experiences, it's totally cool to go wild with gender. Also if you're speaking to a person of a particular gender, or in the third person about people of a particular gender: great! No one's saying all speech should be genderless (well, I'm sure someone somewhere is, but that's nowhere near the position of anyone in this thread.)
The only issue is that if you're speaking in the second person, to a crowd of people that is in fact mixed-gender, but you speak as if they were all male, then this can have the effect of making women feel (very slightly) unwelcome. Yes, women are more than capable of performing the mental transformation into what you would have said if you were actually addressing them. But the experience of doing this is a constant, subtle reminder that they don't belong.
I second this. I think this exaggerated gender neutrality bullshit is more sexist than using genders. It all goes under the assumption that someone somewhere with skewed perception will get offended and call you out for being sexist (or, as is the case here, someone will tell you off how your lack of gender neutrality was potentially careless and might cause someone offence), when in fact, only a few loud dim-witted balloon-heads will get offended if someone used "he" or "she" in their writing.
Furthermore, I doubt anyone would've given two fucks. Alas, I'm sure someone will get offended by me saying this and comment to this how I'm wrong, even though they probably wouldn't, they just think they would have (but that's another issue).
Anyway, to conclude: I don't believe there's anything sexist about using "he" or "she" (or whatever other form of gender) in communication the way the author (christoph) used it. In my opinion, sexism is about bigotry, or misbelief that one gender is superior to others.
The comment of the parent was that second thing, if anything.
He talked from his experience, and that was the one he described. Nothing sexist in the bad sense about it, and no need to de-sexify it to some genderless form to make it "understood" by others. Women, gays, lesbians, etc are perfectly capable of understanding what he said, and applying it to their circumstances.