I sort of want to engage with this. I understand that people have good-faith qualms about the fairness of hiring practices intended (implicitly or explicitly) to increase diversity and access. There are problems to wrestle with here, and it's inevitable that some bad actors will take advantage of attitudes like Pike's (or mine).

And yet: I don't have the sense that I'm going to get anywhere by acknowledging the problematics of the thing. There's just too much committed misogyny embedded in this community as a whole. It feels like a safe bet that "I don't need to listen to women" may as well be the entirety of this particular comment, and many of the others in this thread.

I've been feeling conflicted about participating in comment threads on HN. This one is enough to convince me that I should stop investing the energy.