[benatkin]

Certainly less likely to join (unless it made me want to get in and change things, which I hope is what women reading this will do). What that gets me is the criticism of her writing, which seems harsher and less constructive than the average on HN. The thing is that it isn't completely false, and the people who post it think we won't notice they're being mean, because there's some truth to what they're saying. But it's only bad writing if you raise the bar of what makes good writing much higher than it normally is for a blog post on HN.

[raganwald]

John Gruber calls this "Grading on a curve." For example, if we make a big fuss over her throwing a water bottle in private but celebrate Steve Jobs for throwing temper tantrums over software quality, we're grading on a curve.

(Not that anybody is doing that, it's just an example).