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Comment by Helianthus | Hacker News Reader

HN has elitism problems: it's excessively worried about quality (something it can't really control as the site grows) to the extent that its group action violently downvotes certain posts--such as your rather innocent question.

I guess everyone thinks you should have googled it, but we didn't have the decency to politely request that you google such information in the future?

I feel you.

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It's an irrelevant question and if a discussion were to spawn from it, it would detract from the actual content. This is a perfectly valid comment downvote.

It's a question about the author. It's a stupid question about the author that could easily be answered with five seconds on Google, but that doesn't make it irrelevant, except in the eyes of an indifferent, exclusionary mindset that prizes signal-to-noise-ratio above simple politeness. I ain't asking for people to _upvote_ it, just to ease off on the downvotes and maybe provide a courteous explanation.

The question was a sexist double whammy (given both the assumption that "the author of a technical document can't possibly be a woman" and that "the author's gender is at all germane to this piece") that has no place anywhere, let alone HN. If anything should be downvoted, that is the perfect example of one such thing.

Or maybe the speaker is from a culture that doesn't know that Tali is a Hebrew name for both boys and girls, or from a culture where Tali is only a dude's name, or... the hypothetical exceptions to your interpretation go on and on. [Ninja-edit] Your ninja-editted assumptions as to what the person meant by his question are an over-reaction: you don't _know_ that's what he meant, you're only seeing hints of it.[end ninja-edit]

It could _well_ be an innocent question, and there's no sense in generating righteous indignation over two sentences.

Given that female pronouns were used several times in the opening paragraph, even if one didn't scroll down to the bio at the bottom, to assume that she must be a he, even on the basis of something such as a name (cf. George Eliot) is entirely unwarranted without further reason to back it up. But, you're right, it could have been a case of bad assumptions and only single-whammy sexism (the author's gender is still not germane to the article in any way). And it's still a downvote-worthy comment.

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