Hacker News

It's a discussion forum on the Internet. If you have an email address and speak English, you can join. 

It's also the funnel for a venture capital firm, Y Combinator. You need to be a member of Hacker News to apply at all and your participation in discussion can be used to help them decide whether or not to fund you.

This helps keep discussion there uncommonly civil and serious because for some members it can potentially help put money in their pocket and opportunity that can lead to great wealth.

It attracts very educated people and a lot of movers and shakers, but anyone can join. There's no fee to join, no gatekeeping. If you don't behave, you get banned, but it's just a place where people talk. People all over the world. 

At one time, I was unusually respected there and influential and I believe my participation increased non-male participation and positively impacted the multi-billion dollar business running it.

I was looking to TALK to wealthy, powerful people SOCIALLY and get taken seriously. And not be treated like just a whore.

That's all.

It's both nothing and a huge power play at the same time IF you can pull off the part where they take you seriously. 

Women mostly don't have serious careers on par with men.

I was curious how MEN with power interact socially, what women are missing. 

Most women seem to think men have power because they have an important job and a big paycheck. 

I think they have an important job and a big paycheck because they have power.

Other women are clamoring to get a promotion and in many cases are willing to have sex to get it, then are baffled that it doesn't lead to real power or money on par with what men make.

I think power is about being competent at things women aren't typically taught and it's about trust.

Power leads to money. Money doesn't really give you power. 

I got to sit at the same table so to speak, engage in the same conversation, observe an almost entirely male space. It was 98 percent male when I joined.

In the American military, women do modified exercises. Because we're women.

My ex-husband was a small guy in the military. He lifted weights because he needed to be able to do the job. No excuses.

I wondered what it would look like to "do the job, no excuses" as a woman knowing I simply can't handle things exactly the same way.

The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good. 

I wanted to know IF women can do the thing in question and if so HOW?

Because most women clearly have no idea. 

A mental image for that is me in my twenties and high pregnant with my second child getting on my mountain bike with a toddler seat. Because it was a mountain bike, it was a "man's" bike with the bar in front.

My second child was a big baby and I was big as a house and couldn't get my leg over the bar. But I did gymnastics in my youth and I was very limber at one time.

So I bent forward and lifted my leg behind me and over the toddler seat to bicycle high pregnant with a two-year-old behind me in a toddler seat. 

I once wrote a piece called "Bicycles on the Information Super Highway." It was about one-person shops like me being a blogger and not part of a larger organization. 

I'm a woman who made it to the leaderboard of Hacker News without asking for "girly push-ups." I asked what the standard was for the men and figured out how to meet that standard in spite of my gender, no excuses.

So you're saying you agree with me: The world works different for women than men, so telling a woman "If you're sweating while working hard in the heat, take your top off." would be actively bad advice that assumes she's merely stupid for not doing so?