npc

> communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government

It's really not. Socialism is about collective ownership of property, state socialism is only a subset of socialism. But perhaps you could explain why prominent anarchists like Bakunin aligned themselves with socialists when their ideals were so diametrically opposed? It seems like you're using rather ahistorical definitions of anarchism and socialism.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.

You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. Bakunin was in the first international with Marx, Russian anarchists participated in the 1917 revolutions, etc etc. Your idea that socialists are trying to "co-opt" anarchism is probably due to a misunderstanding of what socialism is both historically and currently. Socialists and anarchists had a similar goal, which was to create a society free from coercion, whether by force or by need. While socialism failed at this rather spectacularly in practice, the authoritarian states of Mao and Stalin were never the end goal of socialists.

Also, your offhand dismissal of a quite well cited wikipedia article was rather classless tbqh. We know wikipedia is crowd sourced and vulnerable to bias, but to ignore cited factual statements because of that just leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions of both anarchism and socialism.

I'm not much of a free-marketeer, but if enough people "in the neighborhoods" want to eat at a burger king such that it would be economically viable, why should other people be allowed to prevent them from doing that?

Even saying "HN's crowd" is deliberately flagging legitimate links that are critical of Google is cynical as well. I must ask though, if you think HN is filled with people who are so uninterested in legitimate discussion, then why are you posting here? I'm not trying to be accusatory, but to me, posting on a site where people are not interested in honest discussion would feel like a huge waste of time.

I've witnessed plenty of Google apologism on HN, but to be fair I've also witnessed a significant amount of anti-Google bias as well. Either way, saying that HN is deliberately blocking anti-Google sites strikes me as paranoid and needlessly cynical.

I'm sure everybody knows by now, but this is certainly not the first time paypal has done this kind of thing:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/paypal-fiasco-summary.p... (slightly nsfw)

Am I the only one who thinks it's terrible that companies are apparently defining engineers based on languages? I know Python AND Ruby, would that make their heads explode?

Okay, you do realize that:

- the point of the post was not to prove that there is sexism in technology, but rather to show how sexism can drive away women

- that the existence of sexism in tech is one of the assumptions of the article, which is pretty reasonable given:

   - sexism exists everywhere and there's no reason to think tech would be excluded

   - the small number of women in tech

   - the numerous other women who work in tech who have /said/ they've experienced sexism

- that she worked with these people for however long, and there's obviously numerous other encounters she's had with them that aren't relayed here because that wasn't the point of the article

- that just because men have a problem as well as women doesn't mean women cannot have that problem worse

- that there is definitely a range of social responses that are culturally permissible for men and not women, and that tech workers are not some sort of hyper-enlightened übermenschen who have utterly cast off the shackles of their culture and now see everything with perfect clarity

I'm not saying that we can know for sure that there was sexism involved here, but to call thinking that, "entirely fallacious and baseless" is complete and utter bullshit.

edit: gosh darn markdown

However, 'lay' does (half) rhyme with 'bathe', which provides a much needed connection between the 2nd and 3rd lines, I feel.