> The fact that this and my own comments are getting downvoted on this is sad.
It's because you have added nothing other that your own faked outrage at the legitimate use of scoring as a way to describe attainment of a sought after goal.
Actually my genuine concern (not outrage) is primarily that someone on HN feels that the use of the word 'something' to describe a woman is remotely appropriate. I'm calling the poster out on that because I feel like if they don't have it pointed out to them that that is inappropriate they'll continue to think it's okay. It is not okay.
This is an extremely common expression, I thought. Google seems to indicate similarly with 847,000 results for the exact expression "out of (my OR your OR their) league".
> The chauvinism in this comment is insane. Women aren't points on a scoreboard
This commenter, the type that is OUTRAGED by speech that hasn't been mangled to be politically correct, is responsible for muffling open and honest communication among people. Specific to this example, there is nothing wrong with the OP's use of scoring - the outraged expressed by the commenter above is basically trolling for a response by feigning outrage.
Well, I wasn't outraged before, but I have to admit that I may be feeling a touch of outrage now.
The "mangling" of speech to be politically correct and the "muffling" of open and honest communications that some of us are asking for is just this: changing "score something 'out of your league'" to, e.g., "meet someone 'out of your league.'" I'm not sure why people see this as so hard to swallow.
There may be someone "trolling for a response by feigning outrage" in this conversation, but I don't think it's GP.
> changing "score something 'out of your league'" to, e.g., "meet someone 'out of your league.'" I'm not sure why people see this as so hard to swallow.
The use case for language is this: You have a picture or idea in your brain that needs to be transmitted over ASCII into my brain. The conventional symbol set for this use case are English words. A priori we received a dictionary of words and their meanings that we assume is identical to all parties. Trouble is that it isn't. IF and only IF the goal of BOTH parties is to reproduce the original message with highest possible fidelity, then the receiver will obtain a copy of the transmitter's dictionary, and use the updated definitions to reproduce the transmitter's message.
However if the goal of the receiver is to discredit the transmitter or distract from the point being made, then a great tactic, akin to DNS hijack, is to push onto all receivers an alternative dictionary to the one used by the transmitter. In this case the alterative dictionary elicits outrage, discrediting the transmitter, and hijacking the original discussion.
CNN, for example, their goal is NOT to reproduce with high fidelity what congressman X said, rather, their goal is ___ (insert: make it more entertaining, make it more newsworthy, make it click-bait suitable, keep viewers watching, attract ad dollars, curry political favor, drive their own agenda, etc). In addition to pushing an alternative dictionary, they can reinforce with cutting phrases out of context, using selective historical imagery and video, bringing 'experts' to present their views.
In summary I feel that HG was using an alternative dictionary attack (akin to DNS hijack), to distract from the substantive content in the OP.
That's an interesting explanation, and it's an astute way of describing tactics that are sometimes employed in political debates. But as applied to this case, I think it fails to address some key issues.
1. What reason would HG have to distract from the substantive content in the OP's comment?
2. HG was not the only person who found OP's comment objectionable. Do we all have ulterior motivess?
3. There are, I think, objective reasons for finding parts of OP's comment objectionable, which HG, myself, and others, have thoroughly expressed elsewhere in this thread. Do you have a response to these substantive points, or are you merely concerned about HG's reasons for raising them (and, perhaps, his./her tone in doing so)?
I for one think that OP's comment is interesting, and I have no interest in distracting from its substance. But I do hope to point out how some unfortunate, casual choice of words may have inadvertently caused harm to other members of our community.
I'd also point out that, like the dictionary attack that you describe, baselessly impugning an opponent's motivations is also a tried and true tactic for distracting others from the substance of what they have to say, without meaningfully engaging with it.
I don't suspect users here have conscious ulterior motives. I think that ____ (insert one of {media, communists, political elites, liberals, aliens, etc}) have conditioned knee-jerk language-policing. This has the side-effect of taking the current thread off topic while muting substantive discourse in this and future posts.
The dictionary attack has been practiced in media for a long time. Watch a famous 50s news anchor interview an atheist author (I can think of specifics, but I don't want to bias you). Back then it was obvious they were distorting what the interviewee was saying. The viewing audience wasn't stupid, they were complicit because they didn't agree with the atheist. Today this goes on, and occurs so regularly that no one cares if someone deliberately misunderstands something in order to be outraged. Actually whats even more telling is that this technique is a standard way to "communicate" political messages - just watch the campaigners.
I learned this dictionary problem while managing a startup with some employees who used a different dictionary than I. I'd say 80% of the conflict at work was due I say X while the other understood X'
Really if I had a way to efficiently and reliably transfer images in my head into theirs we would have saved countless hours and dollars
Wow. You've gone from accusing people of faking outrage, to accusing people of executing a CNN-style 'dictionary attack'(?), to suggesting an alien communist liberal conspiracy...
... and you think that OTHER people are taking the thread off-topic and muting substantive discourse?
Do you really not see the humor in political elites & aliens? Or are you just providing the readership with a textbook example of becoming outraged by deliberately interpreting things wrongly?
I strongly agree with this criticism of the language (I winced reading it), but I also agree that the way it was criticised here was unnecessarily inflammatory.
There are many people who are not sympathetic to calls for PC language, and including accusations of "insane chauvinism" isn't going to make them any more palatable.
And that's the important issue, after all. We need to make sure that people who enjoy sexist language feel welcome in the technology industry and on forums like this, because otherwise we would so rarely get to hear their perspective.
Fair enough. I agree that the comment could have been more carefully worded. Note, though, that this does not (I hope!) explain the cool reception (to put it mildly) to my own comments in the same vein.
That said, generalizing correlations of ANYTHING to gender and then trying to ACT on that, is, generally, a bad idea (just as it is to correlate with race or ethnicity or age or pretty much any other physical attribute).
I'm not outraged, just surprised that people would so heartily upvote such a comment.
People should be conscious of the language they use, and create a welcoming community for everyone.
If "scoring" women wasn't intended in the context it is usually used in, "scoring" shouldn't be the choice of words and people shouldn't encourage it by upvoting a comment that uses words so poorly.
Perhaps people find the content of the comment sufficiently high-quality that it overrides concerns about language.
It's also possible that voters don't share your opinions about what sort of language is "okay" or "not okay". Which wouldn't surprise me in a community with diverse opinions.
"Score" is a term for successfully attracting a mate. It is not a power struggle per se but dating is a negotiation of sorts in order to reach a consensus about the nature of an interpersonal relationship between two individuals.
In that sense, a girl can "score" a guy too, it isn't sexist per se.
"Score" is one thing. "Score something" is, to me, much worse. I don't mind if guys want to speak casually among friends about women as conquests. But it strikes me as disconcerting that there are people who find this way of speaking so unobjectionable that they'd use it on a public forum like hacker news where, I had thought, the general expectation is that the discourse will maintain a certain level of quality and, needless to say, women are supposed to feel welcome and appreciated for their intellectual contributions.
What's even more disconcerting is that the comment that used this expression has been voted to the top (though it is otherwise a very good comment), and comments taking issue with the sexist language are voted into oblivion (so far).
I took it to mean that the 'something' being scored was a relationship. Maybe this is some kind of sexist dog whistle I'm not hearing but I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt instead of trying to language police a substantive comment.
Hmm. Possibly. Obviously that's not how I read it, but I don't claim that my way is the only way it could have been read.
I can't say I agree with the choice you've assumed, though, between "language policing" a comment, and appreciating it for its substantive contribution. I think we're all sophisticated enough that we can recognize the substantive value of a comment, as I've tried to do, while also trying to suggest ways to build a more respectful community for everyone. In its best form, "language policing" will usually not be unconditional and vociferous condemnation, but rather a thoughtful sharing of perspectives and suggestion for incremental improvement.
This is the very ethos of this forum in so many other arenas--tech, business, often politics--but I'm often disappointed that the prevailing attitude here is so closed when it comes to issues of gender politics (for lack of a better term). Part of the issue may be that these issues are not always thoughtfully raised, and there can sometimes be an unwelcome tendency towards outrage (in both directions). But I think it would be a shame if we didn't keep trying to improve ourselves, and the tech community at large to make for a more welcoming community.
Edit: As others have pointed out elsewhere, one does not normally describe a relationship as "out of your league." That's a description typically bestowed upon people. I suspect this is why I and others have interpreted the comment they way we have. I don't think this entirely rules out the possibility you raised about the original commenter's intent, but I do think it means that my interpretation is probably correct--or at least eminently defensible.
I'd also add that the original commenter's intent does not matter much to me. I was never here to impugn his or her character in the first place. My point has only ever been that the comment, regardless of its precise intended meaning, reasonably communicates a certain disrespect for women.
Then again, you used the term "insane" inappropriately. To a certain extent, you have to accept some slang during discussion. And, in addition to the fact that power is a core concept in sociology, what dating dynamics are "meant to be" (whatever that means) doesn't really matter.
No, the scary thing here is that s/he does NOT have to accept ANY slang during discussion AND can declare my entire comment invalid (while using public shame) based on what was (to him/her) a poor choice of wording (which, perhaps it was, but disgust is not an argument)
Ideally, no. But men often use sports analogies when discussing getting a woman to actually date them, which is a quite difficult goal. I apologize for any offense.
> dating dynamics aren't meant to be a power struggle
Here you lost me. If you don't think there's often a power struggle in the early stages of dating, I don't know what reality you're living, because it's not mine.
A couple of people hating on this. Despite the obvious fact that you can in fact get lost on a trail, the progress of autonomous rescue drones doesn't just end at following trails.
Once they're able to detect trails and follow them looking for people, the next step would be detecting signs of where they might have wandered off trail, or (especially in snowy conditions) detecting and following where they have started their own trail.
You can also be injured, left behind, faint, stop to help someone, etc.
A drone that can follow a trail that changes quite a bit over the year and is trained to recognize obvious trail signals (jacket on tree, reflectors) or human voices offtrail as it passes ("help! over here!") would be excellent. A drone pass at closing time might become a standard precaution and CYA thing for parks, plus they can give trail notes like where it's poorly marked, blockage and collapses, and so on.
Except that in your example, the trees are influencing by environmental factors throughout their life, whereas the first sentence of this article says it's environmental factors in utero that influences fingerprints.
It isn't a perfect analogy, but it still works. The only reason the other option, "development is completely random" isn't the right answer is because of the word "completely."
Honestly, the survey question is poorly asked, and doesn't produce a particularly interesting discussion. Maybe something was lost in translation.
Fingerprints form while in the uterus. The location of a tree's first leaf will be influenced by the factors up until that time. It's still the same thing. Leaves won't move around from branch to branch.
And it uses Axolotl (which is an improved version of OTR) which has much better security properties for informal messages (the recipient of a message can be convinced the sender sent it but could not prove this to anyone else). PGP should only be used in cases where you are willing to have your signature be made public.
It's been two hours this has been posted and no one has yet self congratulatingly posted a wikipedia link to a certain law about title's ending in question marks. I'm proud of you guys.
It's not the difficulty of the lock but just the fact that it's there as a deterrent. If someone really wants to get into your home they'd break a window or kick down the door. The lock is mostly for crimes of opportunity and personal reassurance.
My main issue with the article is that despite only using pseudonyms, the author easily revealed the real life name of one of the individuals by quoting her Twitter account.
Maybe the author doesn't understand technology, but this shouldn't have slipped by editing. Which really leads me to believe there was none.
There's nothing wrong with authors submitting their own articles to HN. On the contrary, authors honor HN by sharing their work here and engaging with the community about it.
As for the Amazon links, if it's actually true that they were just links, not referrals, then you owe him an apology for more than just being rude.
I find it to be garbage self promotion when an article with little and/or poor content is submitted by the author and immediately gets 10+ upvotes without any comments, sending it straight to the front page.
In this case, straight to the front page despite many negative comments about the content.
If the article is not an Amazon link farm, it sure as hell reads exactly like one. So much so that my assumption is that the author intended to add in referral codes at a later date when reaching peak audience.
As author has since removed links, this should address your concern. Being wary of Amazon links is probably smart, but referring to something as "garbage" just makes you a jerk.
I've looked at the data and there is zero evidence that the author gamed HN.
You need to stop slinging accusations at people. Gaming HN is bad. We greatly appreciate your and other users' concern about that, and believe me we share it. But undermining civility on HN is also bad, and that's the bad thing that actually is happening here. Please don't do it anymore, regardless of how weak you think an article is.
Yes, and it's ok. (I'm a moderator here, btw, so it really is ok.)
The 'gaming' in question was about getting people to upvote one's stuff. That's against the rules, but we saw no evidence you did it. This is why I chided the user who made that accusation. It's corrosive of the civility we strive for here when people make accusations without real grounds for them.
I have a great idea, since my content is so terrible, lets see what content you can produce and see what the feedback is on it. I bet there will be plenty of people who will say your content is 'terrible'.
The amazon links did not have 'tag=' which is what the referral program uses. They just had 'ref=' which is what amazon uses to track how you got around the site.
Regardless, the author has since removed the links.
That's assuming a technological civilization's natural progression is towards space travel, which may or may not be true. The Aztecs were way "behind" when explorers first discovered them, but were doing pretty fine.
Indeed and wouldn't they have been "interrupted" they very well might have developed further towards space travel or is there anything to suggest that they wouldn't have progressed further technologically?
