It's a good article overall, but it would be nice, just for once, to read something in a mainstream "arts and culture" outlet that wasn't absolutely dripping with fear and contempt for anything related to tech culture.
Consider these quotes (I posted some above too):
A recent comment thread ... yielded a response likening journalism and propaganda
users combed through her code on GitHub in an effort to undermine the weight of her contributions
The site’s now characteristic tone ... masks a deeper recklessness
Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational.
Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.
(the last part of this quote seems to contradict the other accusations, but we can't check what she means by the veracity of data being an ancillary concern because ironically she provides no data)
Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs
In the span of just one paragraph the journalist has:
- Dehumanized us (we sound like bots)
- Cast us as a weird outgroup (learn how they talk)
- Dismissed logic and thought experiments as legitimate
- Argued we aren't interested in "humane" arguments
- Accused the community of ignoring the truth of data
- Called us reckless
If you really think all that stuff is accurate, why post here at all?