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Comment by throwaway_yy2Di | Hacker News Reader

If you reflect for a moment, obviously a minority of HN will be made alienated and uncomfortable by this sexualized humor. Do you really want this?

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Well another minority might view strip teases as an act of empowerment and self expression, and be made alienated and uncomfortable by your sex-negative viewpoint. How would you balance the interests of these two minorities?

Obviously the professional way! By inviting them to the center of the office to discuss frankly their viewpoints on sex until everyone quits from misery. I'd also scatter conservative religious pamphlets and dildos around the office to encourage everyone to participate.

Because obviously it would deprive a reader to explain how to remove GUI widgets from an emacs frame [window], without making a metaphor of the window as a naked female, and the widgets as clothing, and the process as a striptease. This is exactly how a mature team of mixed-sex professionals discuses emacs widgets. An HN thread on removing emacs widgets without overt sexual analogies [0] would be a unnatural, stilted place full of repressed sad people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983088

Mind explaining where it was implied that the window represents a nude female? Just because the post uses some racy humor with the striptease metaphor, doesn't mean it implies any particular sex.

This could just as easily be a man, woman, android or RMS himself stripping (and considering that the whole post is at the backdrop of an RMS quote taken deliberately out of context, I wouldn't be surprised if it was meant to evoke the latter).

RMS himself stripping

When I started reading, I was worried that this is what the article was going to be about.

> Mind explaining where it was implied that the window represents a nude female?

This is actually a great feature in online debates when you want to find something to argue about. In particular, this feature doesn't force the first party to explicitly state offensive things in order for the third party readership to take offence. I call it, offence inference. Can a sentence be interpreted in an offensive light, by anyone? The offence inferer will find the implicit offence!

Evidently, by changing the title.

Personally I thought "striptease" was a much richer metaphor for what the linked article showed - the removal of "dressing", piece by piece. But then I'm not a prude with a stick up my ass.

Seriously, what the fuck with the title change this time? Is the term "strip tease" offending, really? There used to be a Belgian-French television show called just like that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip-Tease_%28TV_series%29

I'm guessing it was a belated attempt to stifle the inevitable social justice flame war.

Thank heavens, I was hanging by the edge of my seat waiting for someone to make the inevitable comment.

It's a joke. For grown-up people with a sense of humor. This is the internet. If you don't like it, vote with your mouse and don't click on it.

If THAT makes you uncomfortable, then obviously you haven't seen THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

It's the ASCII art social commentary about the cultures surrounding various popular programming languages that I hope people will find the most offensive about that video. Well worth pausing and zooming in when he mentions your pet programming language.

I cackled! Thank you for pointing that out.

Alas, I must confess that I have written Visual Basic (VBscript) code in Emacs.

A while back I was screwing around with a project which attempted to generate, via the Windows speech synthesis API, output vaguely resembling SHODAN from the System Shock games (example: [1]). The most I can say for it is that I didn't entirely fail; despite having access to a quite good female voice (NeoSpeech "Kate"), and despite SAPI 5 offering what I found a surprising degree of flexibility, there's only so much you can do with it; I got closer than I expected, but not close enough to think it worth releasing. [a]

In any case, VBScript is the handiest way I could find to screw around with SAPI, and it turns out there is a Visual Basic mode for Emacs [2]; I found it to be remarkably not bad. Nothing could make working with Visual Basic other than painful, but Emacs comes as close as anything else I've ever used.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZMD_eCpEo

[2] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/visual-basic-mode.el

[a] I've just unearthed it, and it hasn't yet succumbed to bit rot; maybe I'll throw it up on my Github account just for the hell of it.

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