I don't think anyone here is trying to tear Davis down. It's just that his writings can reflect poorly on our community as a whole to those who aren't familiar with his circumstances. In the current climate of hit-piece, shoot-first-ask-questions-never outrage journalism, for which the straw man of the out-of-touch privileged techie is a favorite punching bag, you can't be too careful.
Suffocating levels of political correctness alongside a self-obsessed victim culture have made a lot of people sympathetic to the trope of the outrageous, out of touch savant.
At the same time his approach to others, would make him an extremly difficult person to work with. I enjoy looking at some of his work, but I could never actually work with him, which is quite sad.
As someone stridently critical of this community, the way people like you approach Davis reflects more poorly on the community than the presence of an individual with religious mania--especially if you contrast religious mania and greedy mania.
Reputation, reputation, reputation--often that's all this place seems to think about.
Obviously I'm broadly generalizing from what you might have intended to be a considerate comment.
But the masses of homeless in San Francisco are mostly ignored by the tech community, perhaps because it's easier on the mind to squelch with a hellban.
I've been seeing a lot of these types of articles lately, trying to convince how bad off the American worker is and how those fat cats in the 1% are siphoning all of the wealth away. I've also noticed a recent uptick in socialist-populist activity. I'm not sure which is the cart and which is the horse but it seems like articles like this have a specific political agenda in mind.
In Australia, there was a separate company called Osborne that indeed marketed the Osborne I -- but continued to live on and sell PC clones after the American Osborne went out of business.
I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.
"In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this."
Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a society, we're fighting over where the line is between "bad prejudice" and "good prejudice", and the tech gender gap is just one of many battlegrounds in that fight.
Does anyone else find it strange that the author uses an article that uncritically repeats the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax as an example of dispelling myths? Doublethink indeed.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think you can discount dubfan's comment somewhat. That account, for example, recently participated in one of the many recent Watson Nobel prize threads and last year submitted 'New York Soon to Trail Florida in Population'. There's no clear reason why those threads are any more on topic than your submission. ... and now the submission's been flagkilled.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
At the cost of a further tangent, strictly speaking, the guidelines don't say anything about not posting comments complaining that comments are inappropriate, only about not posting comments saying submissions are inappropriate.
