julianmarq

I saw some people saying that this makes them want to switch towards iphones next.

I'm not gonna lie, I considered it for a moment too, like a year ago... But apple is now engaging in its own share of dark patterns and is now collecting data too. There have been multiple articles on the matter shared here even.

Thinking that apple is better than google for privacy (or, even if it is right now, that it will remain so for any reasonable amount of time) is... overly optimistic, at best.

Unless it chances paths, of course, which I don't see likely.

Assuming this is true, all this tells me that this is a great time to apply at Basecamp. Not only they promise a politics-free environment—a huge bonus by itself for me—but they're likely to be laxer than usual in their standards, for a while anyhow.

I'll give it a try.

It's pretty worrying how large companies use social media and its excesses (among other things) to divert focus away from their more suspect practices, so it can be pointed at other specific people. Regardless of whatever one thinks of Stallman, more should be talked about these corporations strong arming foundations and other organizations.

The problem here lies in the word "sexism" and that, I think, you believe a solution should be to remove its baggage. The replies you get are, I think, because many people, with good reason, believe that such a goal isn't feasible. In fact, the baggage itself is probably why you perceive the replies to be "emotional".

So I go back to my first reply: to stop casting people into a binary like I think we both want, better not to throw such loaded words at people and instead analyze their behavior on a case by case basis. Fighting the word itself is prescriptive at best, and language tends to be descriptive, AFAIK.

> There is a nonzero risk in any social interaction that involves giving critical feedback.

Which leads me back to GP's point: there are only two choices. I take it that you're saying that the risk of the second choice can be ignored if taking some steps, but the consequences remain the same, and GP didn't speak about the thresholds or ways to improve the odds. He only mentioned that the risk exists and isn't worth it for him, and you disagree, but that's not much to go on.

> I’m not quite sure what to say to you. Living life involves risks. It sure seems like one of those risks is being deliberately amplified to be used as an excuse to “not even bother” with female founders.

Conversely, I'm not sure what's being implied here so I don't know how to reply.

For what it's worth, TFA isn't saying that investors aren't bothering with female founders. They are, but are being careful with the feedback they give.

ETA: Forgot to mention, the way you're suggesting investors to "manage" the risk not only doesn't remove the risk for investors, but it also leaves female founders at a disadvantage anyway: male founders can get critical feedback right away, female founders have to wait until a rapport is built.

> They know when what they’re seeing is sexism vs critical feedback.

One can't possibly guarantee that every founder (female or not) knows that, and in fact, TFA implies that many don't. So the possibility that at least one of them will think the investor sexist for giving feedback is unfortunately not zero. And, of course, this option doesn't seem to consider the possibility that even if the founder takes the criticism at face value, someone else might not.

In light of that, the third choice you present seems to be GP's second choice after all.

> It appeared to me as a low quality response that did not actually have anything to do with my comment.

I didn't think it was; it seemed to me a succinct summation of what calling the behavior in TFA "sexism" leads to: Ultimately, regardless of what he does, a man will be considered sexist by someone.

Or, to put it another way, calling the cautiousness we're discussing here "sexist" can itself be considered a bad faith position.

> But I honestly believe people making such claims are a minority, albeit with high visibility because of the sensational nature of their bad faith responses.

I'm not sure what to say to this: I agree, of course, but I don't think that's the point. That minority can and has killed people's careers and thus, we have the cautious behavior mentioned in TFA.

> in a way that can't be reasonably construed as sexist

"Reasonable" is the key word there. I think that one of the points in TFA is that the misconstruction doesn't need to reasonable to kill someone's career.

> if you’re actually kind, fair and decent to women [...] A tweet against you isn’t an inevitable destruction of your career.

I think we're never going to reach an agreement so I'm cutting out.

The last thing I'll say is that there's a difference between this particular situation and historical resistances to oppression: If you were to even call this situation "oppression", it would only lead to further ridicule and ostracism, perhaps would even get most of the few people who might have sided with you to turn on you as well.

Like I said earlier; jumping on a grenade gets you a medal, the people who protested during rights movements are heroes. The ones you're calling now to self-sacrifice would very likely be considered "some more toxic males who finally got their just desserts".

Of course, I hope I'm wrong. In fact, I hope a better solution is found.

I don't think GP is saying that your comment by itself can be reduced to "damned if you do, damned if you don't". I think the point is that your position might lead to a Morton's fork in general.

I interpret it like this: On the one hand, there are people (many of whom with good intentions) instantly assuming that any criticism a man might give to a woman is rooted in sexism, to wit, what TFA mentions that investors are cautious about. On the other hand, there are people, also with good intentions, saying that "men being cautious in what they say to women" is also sexism.

Now, I don't know the solution either, but I do believe that a good first step would be not saying that people who are merely cautious (precisely not to come across as sexist) are sexist anyway.

> If everyone is giving honest, straightforward feedback, then everyone has a rumor about them and it becomes powerless.

But this leads me back to my previous comment: this isn't a feasible solution because it means basically asking people to self-sacrifice until the "rumors" lose power.

> try harder? have more tact? [...] have a little more awareness?

But isn't the cautious behavior mentioned already an example of this?

> People can spread any rumors they want.

And those rumors kill careers, as TFA mentions.

> The risk is still there from the first contact to the last.

This is correct, and that's why this problem is very likely only going to get worse... And the people being cautious still won't be the ones to blame.

> But in any legal setting this will get shut down immediately

Outrage mobs don't need a legal setting to ruin someone's life (or livelihood).

I feel like we're probably not talking about the same thing.

> we won’t fix it by giving into the fear of being labeled.

But we can't fix it by doing otherwise—asking people to stop being "overly" cautious—either. Another comment put it best: that solution is akin to asking people to self-sacrifice, except that at the very least jumping on a grenade gets you a medal; in this case, it gets you vilification.

I don't know the solution to this problem, but I do think that turning it into a Morton's fork ("men are sexist regardless of whether they speak or not") is not it.

Instead of playing semantics by saying that "it is technically sexism" (and I'm not saying I agree with whether it actually is or not), we could choose to at least stop phrasing the situation like that.

The problem with this "solution" is that the risk is still too high to bother risking it. Even if the woman is unlikely to assume bad faith (and the likelihood is such, outrage mobs are a minority, even if one with too much weight for its size), nothing guarantees she won't change her mind later and assume that the criticism was because of sexism after all.

And even if one were to believe that that is unlikely too, nothing guarantees that someone else won't think it sexist. For example, I remember some panel with four scientists (three men and one woman) that was discussed in HN a while ago; at some point, someone in the audience (I think she was a journalist) yelled at the moderator to "let her speak"... Even though the scientist herself didn't think the moderator was doing anything wrong.

Agreed, I'm definitely not comfortable with her phrasing in several sections of the article, and it clearly has an impact since some people are saying that this behavior is also male sexism.

The author is, perhaps inadvertently, contributing to the problem.

BTW, yeah, this is one of my alt accounts.

> It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.

This is a great summation.

To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.

If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.

Even if one thought that this would help the people that need help on this matter, you can't really fork signal as it is today, I think. Or at least whatever it is that signal is using on its servers because that is very unlikely to be the software in its public repo, which hasn't been updated in almost a year. And even for a while before then, most of the commits were version bumps with no visible changes on the code.

If anything, that's another problem with signal that's not getting enough attention (that I've seen): It claims to be open source, but as of now, it doesn't seem to be. At least not in the servers.

I must have missed the statement in parentheses the first time I read it (I honestly don't remember it being there before, apologies), so I retract the part on what GP said about "should". However, I maintain that the comment doesn't say anything about whether women shouldn't do the things the other person said; there's no implication one way or the other in the original comment and most people do both.

On the matter of kids and "high quality", I made no comment on that earlier, and I make no comment now.

> No, women don't need to spend their 20's finding a husband. They can have also go to school, volunteer, have friends, start a career. You know - the things men can do.

Nothing in GP's comment suggests ~that women should spend their twenties finding a husband~ (EDIT: I missed that sentence in the original comment), nor that they shouldn't do the things you just mentioned.

I don't understand how this is in any way apropos.

> leaves me thinking of you what I initially assumed, but at least we're on the same page now.

Likewise. Have a good day.

I don't think you're asking those questions in good faith, but I'll try to answer hoping I'm wrong: "They" is the cancel culture mobs in twitter I mentioned in that same comment, and "cancel culture mentality" is the attitude that whenever someone made a mistake, they made it forever and using those past mistakes to destroy someone, under the belief that people cannot change.

The thing I find most notable here is the reason he's being forced out.

I mean, this guy probably does deserve to be fired... But Callimachi deserves to be fired right along with him, and she isn't. They were terrible at their jobs.

The reason here highlights two problems: First, that he might be being made the scapegoat, probably to distract from the huge failure of the organization as a whole that that podcast was. And second, that the twitter cancel culture mobs seemingly only want targets they find acceptable; they deliberately didn't target Callimachi but happily settled on him.

It highlights how hypocritical and toxic the cancel culture mentality is. And I don't think it will change if they keep on succeeding.

I apologize, dang. I understand how my phrasing can be taken as a generalization of everyone in HN, but that was not my intention.

I wasn't trying to say that everyone in HN was advocating for censorship (if anything, I always feel a little better when I read people defending free speech, they're what keep me coming back, at least to this type of posts); I was talking about what those in specific who speak in favor of censorship say.

I'll edit it to make it less ambiguous. Thanks.

> What do you call it when someone claims changes to the definition of "idiomatic" usage is the same as being not backwards compatible, incorrectly? I calmly corrected the incorrect statement.

A) I have a very different interpretation of the other person's comments• and I don't see anything factually incorrect in them, b) I would call what the other person said criticizing even if I vehemently disagreed, if just to keep the discussion productive, and c) there was no specific "correction" of anything in the comment I replied to; you only expressed that you think react is stable.

> understands the difference in power between HTML templates and JS components

Those HTML templates don't exist in a vacuum and are invoked by whatever language is being used in the backend. The only "advantage" javascript gives is that it saves you the blink of reload; beyond that, the logic of a web application doesn't change in the slightest regardless of where the html is being rendered.

> There are objective standards of user experience and for anything non-trivial a web application is clearly going to be more interactive and deliver the data and workflows in a more user-friendly way

The GCP console is a gigantic mostly angular based single page application. The AWS console is mostly a jsp based server side application. You know what they have in common beyond being dashboards for managing cloud platforms? They're both unwieldy giant hodgepodges of work by a multitude of different teams.

There's no silver bullet.

You have a preference for single page applications. That doesn't mean a user is going to like an unusable SPA more than a well architected server application more just because the SPA saves page reloads.

> Reporting, workflows, interactivity, visualizations, all are much better when they're done interactively with JavaScript than delivered as some static asset to the browser.

I originally asked for a source of your claims, and I would really like to see your data for this.

Let me turn your original claim on its head: With proper backend tooling (be it Rails, or Django, or whatever else) and a low-javascript, progressive enhancement library like htmx, I can "promise" you I can make a better web application than with just javascript, no matter how much JSX hacking one can muster.

But I don't actually believe that, because it's better to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes an SPA framework is the right tool, and in that case I'll go for vue or svelte. After all, they're vastly superior to react ( ;) ).

• For starters, most of them were about the javascript ecosystem in general; for that matter, you've been focusing on react more than anyone else in this exchange.

I made no attack in my comment and I don't appreciate the insinuation.

> People should be allowed to say

Well, you're not going to find disagreement on that area from me; everyone is, or should be, indeed allowed to say anything. As I understood it, you were arguing otherwise.

> We are allowed to say [...] even if we don't have the exact step by step plan on how to implement it that we can share on HN.

And other people are similarly allowed to argue with you on anything you might say if they so choose. That's the point of a free exchange of ideas, I think.

> And sacrificing my privacy doesn't have to mean that it's open to public

But... Something is either public or it's private....

Anyhow, not only you suggested that I was attacking you for no reason, but you also brought up "wars" and "hunger" and I don't particularly understand why, and this now seems like an attempt at equivocation. Hopefully I'm just misinterpreting, but I don't feel like you are trying to argue in good faith.

> for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?

You mean a society where the most charismatic/popular members get the attention of the masses, mostly by telling them what they want to hear? Yes, I think I'm prepared to live in such a society.

I think, in your attempt at making free speech look undesirable with your mention of "amplification", you forgot that this amplification is for everyone, including you and those who agree with you.

> You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other.

And yet today there was an article in the front page claiming that Signal is a problem because its end to end encryption can be used by anyone, even "bad actors", to communicate. That's an attack on both privacy and free speech, and I wouldn't be shocked if GP had that article (and others like it) in mind.

Mind you, most of the comments here rightfully called that article out for the absurd fear-mongering it was, and even the increasingly common censorship apologists were unusually silent. I was pleasantly surprised, even if it did still get a lot of upvotes and reached the front page.

With "GP" I meant the original comment, the one by sebmellen. The comment you linked is another misinterpretation of sebmellen's original point. My comment applies as much to that one as it does to the one I replied to.