[Mz]

I have been at this eight years. I appear to be the only woman on the leaderboard. I got there shortly after getting myself off the street.

A piece of mine was flagged off the front page in the last couple of hours after two people characterized it as SEO spam because I was talking about the service I worked for while homeless, a service recommended to me by patio11 who then dragged my name through the mud a few months later for repeating his advice on HN. No, no one is vouching for me and saying "she spent nearly six years homeless and was quite open about it. She is the real deal." Whenever I comment on the lack of that kind of support, a thing the respected male members of the community get, I get pissed all over. When I express my opinion that my intractable poverty is partly due to being treated different from the guys on HN, I get pissed on some more.

I have been diplomatic. I have been patient. I have been LNG suffering. I still have to put up with disrespectful snark like your comment here.

As usual, I don't know how I will early this week. As usual, I am failing to do paid work this weekend due to fever. As usual, there is no point in complaining about how hard my life is. It gets me zero sympathy or compassion, even when the callousness I face makes me suicidal. That is the wrong thing to say. It makes other people uncomfortable and a poor person and woman should not do that.

I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. We are getting well. I get no credit for that. When I talk about it, I get called crazy and a liar. (Pick one: either I am crazy and deluded but believe what I am saying, or I am lying. You can't actually have it both ways.)

So I am kind of at the end of my rope, not because of some stupid discussion on HN, but because of many years of enormous mountains of bullshit that would have broken most other people years ago. In fact, I am literally supposed to be dead from my condition.

But let's go with your theory that I'm just a sissy. The men here are far more comfortable with that idea.

"But we aren't sexist."

[candiodari]

I would strongly advise against caring about any leaderboard position. Besides, you get banned here for having meltdowns or showing your true policital opinion. I feel it likely this is going to happen to you (and me) sooner or later. So ... just don't care about it. Care about the real world. Even money is a better thing to care about.

The leaderboard here is internet points. That and a sac of crap is worth significantly less than a sac. Keep that in mind.

[Mz]

There is contact information in my profile. If this advice were genuinely being given in good faith out of some kind of concern for my welfare, it could have been done privately.

Since it wasn't, I see no reason to take any of it at all seriously. Posting it publicly like this amounts to mudslinging. Publically announcing that me being upset over people repeatedly making personal attacks against me is, in your opinion, a banworthy offense amounts to planting ideas with ill intent. That in no way looks like any kind of good faith effort to be helpful to me personally. (Their personal attacks are a violation of the rules. If you want to crab at someone, it should be them, not me.)

I will add that "my true political opinion" is an incredibly specious characterization of my remarks. There is zero political opinion expressed here. I am one person who just happens to be female by accident of birth who is trying to figure out how to make my life work. That is it. There is zero political anything to my participation here. Getting fed up once in a while by the uphill battle I face for simply being female is not some political position.