[farout]

People wonder why "women" find certain fields distasteful. came to HN: Number one topic for comments - about a "Woman".

Why say she is a woman? Depressing. Is it required? No it is just to stress the fact that women are stupid and perhaps deceitful than men. Yet my empirical suggests otherwise. So sad HN.

Edit: Downvote all you want.

[nickolai]

He said "woman" because it is the most frequently used term for "female human". [1]

Maybe it's just my poor english skills, but I see nothing implying that the woman was stupid in the title, not even some kind of subtle feminist-troll-bait. If anything, the title was suggesting that charging 200k for any amount of data one person could download with conventional hardware is ridiculous.

So could you kindly explain in simple words for the poor brain-atrophied male human I am[2], what in this title could be read as "women are stupid" and not as "a poor soul got screwed by a greedy telecom operator and an uninformed judge" ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman

[2] Feel free to use this confession for a generalization about all men being stupid, I am sure we will all find it very amusing and some sarcasm-fu masters might even generalize in response that all feminists are paranoid.

[kiiski]

How is it worse than "Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad"? "Woman" just happens to be a word used for female human beings.

[kschua]

"Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad"

When I first saw this headline, I thought "Guy" referred to "Guy Kawasaki" :)

[mambodog]

I'll be honest, my title was adapted from the one I saw on reddit, as the original article title was not sufficiently informative.

This interpretation never occurred to me. Little did I realise that I was subconsciously trying to imply that women are stupid and deceitful!

How would you have phrased it?

[farout]

It does not matter that the person who did this was a woman.

Use of stolen SIM lands person in jail.

[glhaynes]

I agree that it doesn't matter, but it's entirely conventional for "Man" / "Woman" to be used in news story headlines, so your charges of sexism are silly.

On this topic, a fantastic satirical article by Hofstadter about uses of gendered pronouns: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

[Psyonic]

That Hofstadter piece felt a bit like being repeatedly hit over the head with a mallet.

[joelhooks]

Doesn't really matter that it was a person either.

"Use of stolen 3g card lands organism in jail" /scrubbed

[m_myers]

It's probably important that this was a conscious organism. Although the shock factor would be higher if a tree had been jailed.

And "stolen" is much too strong a word. Let's say "illicitly obtained".

And it wasn't the "use", it was the excessive use.

And there was a fine also, so you can't just leave it at "jail". That sounds judgmental, anyway. Call it "corrective action".

OK, now what have we got?

"Excessive use of illicitly obtained 3G card by conscious organism garners heavy corrective actions"

Ahh, much better. No one can possibly be offended by that. Right?