275 karma · joined August 20, 2013
1. I don't maintain a Facebook account because it's either family bickering and arguing, spam I don't give a shit about, arguments I don't give a shit about, or trolling. What some guy says on Facebook concerns me absolutely zero and it is completely not worth my time. So no, I won't be reading his timeline. Because I can't log in.
I'm good friends with someone who is an absolutely face-blistering troll on Stormfront; everything he says online has to be part of his "act," if you will, so it would surprise me very little if this guy's entire Facebook schtick is keeping up his act. Welcome to the Internet.
2. I hope you read my other comment and stop treating women like they need to be protected from everything, because you perpetuate exactly what you hope to destroy with a blog post like this.
3. You got the pants trolled off you and want to argue about it with someone, and no, it's not going to be me. And now that your thread's been deleted from HN, it's not going to be anybody else here, either. Seriously, your reaction to the guy's post is absolutely comical given that you were being trolled, and is exactly what he wants you to do. Plus, now you've given him an excuse to ban you.
I'm going to add a fourth thing:
4. You've spent more of your life talking to that guy, me, HN, and your blog's readers about this topic than you should have, by a mile. Focus on things that can actually make a difference, like listening to what women want to see change in the industry instead of projecting your penis onto the industry from a position of male authority.
The definition of trolling is pretty nebulous, by the way; one could make that case that you attempted to troll me by calling me pre-pubescent, and hoped for me to lower myself to your level.
Smoked a cigarette with the woman in question later that day and she basically rolled her eyes about it.
Given that Elad's reaction was to run here and post it, I'd say it worked. Most successful and subtle troll I've seen in a long time.
Or rather than a bunch of dudes blogging about how to fix the problem, we listen to the women for once and not treat them like a tiny snowflake, ready to melt if they read the word fuck. Christ almighty. Nothing perpetuates this sort of shit more than male voices of authority saying "women can't handle a gem named 'bj'! We're assholes if we let it stand!"
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5H5r4_CoJo
Edit: Good, this pile of shit got flagged off HN.
Yes, it is, and good for you for doing something. Minus the piss-filled elevator part, which is an irrelevant detail.
> And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease?
No, it isn't. The difference between these two was pointed out to you elsewhere, and now you're just being obtuse. Take the stairs. They're good for you. There are foldable strollers. I have a toddler and we love the stairs. He makes a game out of them.
I feel like I'm teaching second grade here, but an emergent situation is when someone is in immediate danger. Someone having a seizure is in danger. You using an elevator with contaminants in it is not an emergent situation. You probably need some education about when it's appropriate to call 911, as well.
> You're deluded.
Sigh.
Call someone a pretentious jerk but get it back and suddenly that person's an ass. Got it.
> This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent.
That button contacts BART police dispatch in some cases because stations do not always have operators. Particularly in my old home station, I've seen people use it and communicate with someone while the station agent was not in the kiosk. That's the expectation around something labeled "emergency." Give me your pager number so I can page you at 2am to complain about reading your comment.
Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.
Do you have any idea what would happen if you pulled this stunt on the New York subway? NYPD would probably paralyze you with a night stick for abusing resources while New Yorkers recorded it with their cell phones. And I've stepped around human shit in the stairwell in New York. And you know what? I don't care! I didn't rage! I didn't vent on HN! I accepted that bad things happen in the world and who gives a flying fuck, and went on my day without sparing two brain cycles except laughing about it later. Who cares? Keep on clenching and frothing at the mouth over every little inconvenience and you're going to die by 50. Relax.
It's public transportation. It's going to be bad. Universally. That's the rule. Wake up into reality, carry hand sanitizer, and focus on things that actually matter. If you're worried about your kids seeing a homeless person because oh no think of their precious beliefs and ideals, drive them where they need to go. Come on. You're better than this.
Those of us that ride BART daily are smart enough to understand that BART has culturally drifted into a transportation service that is inappropriate for children. Particularly during rush hour, BART is an extremely unsafe place for children, and the reason you are disgusted by bringing your children onto BART is because you are taking an unnecessary risk by doing so. You are correct that it shouldn't be this way, but you are a terrible human being for abusing BART employees for the situation in the manner that you do.
We get it. BART is disgusting in some places. You know what? It still beats the hell out of traffic for me every day that I rode it, and I don't walk around making my problems everyone else's problems because I expect perfection out of everything I do. It's a public transportation service, not your personal train. Hop off your horse, get in line with the rest of us and shut up, or go on Craigslist and buy a car, for crying out loud. You're a technologist. You can afford one.
God, I hated people like you when I commuted daily on BART. People like you are too self-absorbed to realize that they make everybody else's commute suck by broadcasting and/or protesting how much the commute sucks. If I had a dollar for every time someone tried to sneak a bike on during rush hour and then had a standoff with the train operator, making the rest of us miss our transfers, I could buy a car.
The only person broken in this situation is you. You wouldn't last a second in New York. I'd think twice about letting these comments stand attached to your name, because they make you look really bad. Like, I hope I never interview you bad.
Everybody has an opinion. By spending hours of your time shooting down every opinion that differs from your own, you are working toward an environment where yours is the lone voice. Silencing dissent, basically.
As I said though, your actions are the most tame of the three I mentioned. In these threads, people who disagree with the "burn him!" mentality end up aflame themselves; victim blamer! rape apologist! silence the victim! asshole! It's all part of the same push against disagreement on this unique, taboo topic.
Tell me, are you refreshing this thread constantly?
At multiple points while reading this thread, I've come across your/their username again and said to myself, Jesus, take a break, let other people speak. I really rolled my eyes when you brought up the woman whose feelings you hurt on Twitter and subsequent witch hunt, as well. Trust me, the "witch hunt" you experienced after that suffocates in comparison to what Joe has in store.
To your credit, you are at least the most civil and coherent of the three. As a victim of false accusation, it was really swell to be dismissed out of hand by sneak.
Rather than worrying about the effects of shaming people publicly, conferences are basically putting up "no glass in pool area" and announcing their triumph at conquering this problem.
In particular, I lamented that I was aware of this incident at all and pivoted into my larger point.
Look, it's your prerogative to dismiss victims of false accusation. It's even your prerogative to condescendingly dismiss me from the discussion as you are doing here. It's my prerogative to care about the things you don't, and by dismissing a problem due to frequency, you are no better than the people that dismiss rape in the industry. Can you really not see that?
I already made clear that I do not want to argue about this. I'm simply uninterested in your opinion on false accusation victimhood because based on how dismissive you are of it, you haven't been paying attention and you haven't had it hit close to home. I've been in a similar situation that resulted in my life being threatened at a conference. I know how victims of rape feel, having to sit on HN and keep reminding people that rape really is a problem and shouldn't be dismissed, because here I am debating false accusation victimhood with some random on HN.
So, knowing that and knowing how difficult of a topic false accusations are to study and how little we know about the bad side of human beings, I would hope that anybody who is reasonable would read "rape is a bigger deal than false accusations of rape" and say whoa, nelly, partner, do you know something that the rest of us don't or are you acting on your gut feeling? Or are rape victims just the team you happen to root for in the "victims I need to give a shit about" World Series?
The fact that you don't think it's bold reinforces my entire point about concluding things too soon. And I'm intentionally discussing this on a deliberate action that demonstrates that false accusations are easier than ever, given the Internet's (a) reach, (b) accessibility, and (c) slow erosion of doubt in most folks, who make up their minds rather readily on the first thing they see.
To explain: the media cannot report on an accusation until the accused is convicted, as I understand it, though I'm not British and not familiar with the very probable nuances that exist.
Let's introduce Bob (not his real name). Bob is a mid-level engineering manager. Single, handsome, mid-30s. Bob is a friend of mine from school and I've known him for 17 years. At work, he has a handful of direct reports, all developers. One of these reports is Ashley (not her real name). The entire time Ashley has reported to Bob, she never made any display of personal affectation, never so much as having a cigarette with Bob on a break.
Early this year, Ashley and Bob represented the company at a conference. Bob was having a drink at the hotel bar when Ashley materialized and asked to join him. Bob agreed, and they were alone in a dark corner of the bar for more than a couple hours. Bob tells me that the conversation was light, cheerful, and fun. At the end of the evening, Bob walked Ashley back to her room, said good night, and went back to his room. That's what Bob told me happened. I pressed him; "are you being truthful with me?" He indicated that he was, and I believe him because I've known him for the better part of my adult life. If he needed to maintain a lie publicly, he would have confided it to me. He has no reason to lie to me and I can safely say that he never has.
Ashley isn't the best employee and knew it. Bob was, in fact, preparing to hit Ashley with negative performance, which would have prevented transfer and a bunch of whole other terrible things. It just so happens that this conference was two weeks before her annual review, which is salient because Ashley attempted to blackmail Bob. She showed him a Tumblr draft that claimed that Bob had attempted to rape her when he walked her back to her hotel room, in enough detail to sell the story. The implication was clear: be good to me on my review or I publish this.
Bob confided this to me because he had no fucking idea of what to do. He had no proof either way, and as the alleged victim would be a report, things would look bad if he attempted to terminate her. And then, if he did, she'd potentially revise the draft to make it look like Bob fired her to cover up his alleged misdeeds. This happened in the last six months, and I am legally prohibited from knowing how it resolved. Bob cannot tell me, but he still has his job and a career, so the shoe hasn't dropped yet.
Clearly, Ashley is quite aware that when stories like this are published on Hacker News or other media, a sweeping majority of the audience will immediately interpret what is presented as hard fact. In this case, there are two witnesses, but in others there have not been. Bob's ordeal gave me a thought exercise and made me think of all the times I've been alone with people at conferences: if someone wrote this exact post and substituted all the details for me, instead, what recourse would I have as the accused? The answer is none. Even walking away with the lesson of "don't be alone with someone" doesn't really help, because by the time witnesses step forward to defend you and say a blog post is completely fabricated, it's already bounced off the moon and come back.
And yes, I realize sociopaths like Ashley are rare. But given how demonstrably effective blogging like this is, do you really think they will remain rare in the long-term?
The only solution to this is to be suspicious of everything you read that is one-sided. Be suspicious of my anecdote, even; I could be making it up, for all you know. The thought underlying it, that the Internet's talent for rushing to conclusions on one side of a story is extremely dangerous (Sunil Tripathi, anyone?), is the important part of the story that I want to convey. Imagine if this blog post appeared on the Internet with your name and a conference you've been to substituted in. As Twain said, how long would it take you to get your boots on? Would you ever recover from that kind of damage?
We can't foster this environment in our industry, and I'm saddened that it just continues to get worse. It's going to get worse because time after time after time, the Internet makes clear that understanding both sides of a story is a historical artifact, and events of the future will be determined by who blogs about them first. Scary shit. Imagine sharing a name with the accused, even! My mom just got denied an apartment because a woman of a different race shares her name and has a felony conviction. And that's a government system, not a social network.
A pile of folks have made clear, too, especially some well-known names in the industry that are already all over this thread, that if you express the opinion that I just did you are enabling rapists to completely gut our industry, blaming and/or silencing victims, and so forth. I made the mistake once of sharing this opinion in another high-visibility disclosure similar to this one, the thrust of which was "let's not blog about someone's guilt or innocence on any topic until they've been convicted of something regardless of gender or offense," and I was directly accused of being a rape apologist because of the context. The only reason I'm even sharing this opinion is because I'm on a throwaway, but my identity is fairly deducible if you follow my history. Another commenter was right: there is really no talking about this. It really chills me on the industry, to be entirely honest, and I've had exiting the industry on my mind since the PyCon incident involving dongles.
Address something smaller and bite-sized, like preempting MelbourneIT's statement with your own and speculating on their behalf. Can you at least defend that inappropriateness? Can we start there?
Your company provided guidance and connections, which makes this statement inappropriate. Or did CloudFlare do something that has been left out of all statements?
I am not annoyed by your "good deed". I'm annoyed by how hard and how inappropriately you are capitalizing upon it as a PR coup, before the ashes have even settled. The victim tone is discouraging for this conversation, I have to say, and it's quite unbecoming.
Can you point to what you feel makes this statement appropriate on behalf of your company? I can't identify what annoys me most about it, because there are many things: the "it's who you know in ops" attitude that I've been fighting for my entire career, the creation of a Batman-esque hero at a startup CDN provider who assembles a team to guide the lesser ops teams through a crisis, the overdramatizing of a DNS hijack that happens countless times daily (just with an interesting vector this time, but certainly not the first of ITS kind, either), speculating on another company's statements, preempting an official response with your own "postmortem" to score some traffic...
It's particularly frustrating because I've been in this exact scenario, to the T and including a registrar compromise, before. But because my personal side project doesn't have name pull, I didn't get a CloudFlare Crack Squad on speakerphone calling in a dozen courtesy phone favors to score my contract. And I had to wait for tickets and TTLs like everyone else. That sounds bitter -- and I hate bringing it up for that reason -- but that's why this is ethically shitty. Either you're playing favorites or capitalizing on something for sales. There is no third option, not even an altruistic one.
Next time a startup goes down, ask yourself: if I were on a bridge call with their ops team, could I use this to sell my company's reliability product? Clearly, the answer is yes.
Classy, too, jumping out in front of MelbourneIT's response then speculating on it. I would be furious about Cloudflare writing a details-thin "postmortem," headlining it as a postmortem, analyzing my initial statement to customers in it, then getting it on HN before DNS caches are even cold from the incident itself. It's not even subtle.
This is the sort of thing I remember in discussions about using Cloudflare. There's lots of choices for CDNs, a market growing surprisingly full of ambulance chasers: one CDN startup had the fucking courage to email me directly after a hellish multi-hour outage and say "want to set up a call to discuss how our product could have prevented this outage?" I was still awake from fixing the problem overnight and no, your CDN is not going to fix my catastrophic DB failure. Get bent.
This is a disgusting move by Cloudflare. The little human network signoff made me gag; don't forget, small ops teams, you will only get things done if you know people. Notice HuffPo wasn't on the call? Exactly.