The rumors of my ambitions are exaggerated

I joined Hacker News because my son read an article by Paul Graham and talked at me and sent me the link.

I joined HOPING to learn to code and I can prove that.

Download lisp to my brain is my very first post the day I joined. You can check the date of the post against the date on the handle that posted it.

I was extremely ill, going through a divorce and working a corporate job that looked large in my mind as taking all my time because going to work and tending to my health was ALL I could do. I had no life.

I played games, like Master of Magic, and blogged a little and hung out in various online forums like I had done for years.

Other people on Hacker News began saying things to me that suggested they viewed me as "prominent for a woman" on Hacker News. I had something like 2000 karma and the bottom of the leader board was around 10,000 karma.

And I wasin insurance. I didn't have a tech job and wasn't trying to impress people with how mathy I am because Hacker News is the only place I've ever spent time where I'm NOT the most mathy person in the room. 

And I wasn't chatting up how I had a Certificate in GIS from the world's foremost GIS program because I didn't have a job in GIS and I was failing to create a GIS project on my laptop every time I got some wild hair of an idea and took another stab at trying to figure out the hacker solution for that where you use Linux and open source code.

I'm socially observant and was weirded out by "Why would you speak to me that way? Why would you make a comment to ME of all people like you seem to think I'm important in the social landscape called Hacker News?"

You don't get answers to a question like that by sticking a mic in someone's face on stage and ASKING while your mutual 20,000 closest friends listen in to this conversation. So I began to quietly track gender data on Hacker News.

I was keeping a list of female members and their karma score to try to figure out if I had a lot of karma for a woman on this overwhelmingly male forum. And to my shock I was like number three or something. 

And then one day I realized the highest ranked hsndle on that list was male and I had just imagined the handle that meant "expert in something" was feminine in nature. It's actually not. It's a gender neutral term that I invented "sounds GIRLY to me!" as some quirk of my brain.

So now I'm like number two. And I'm shocked.

And then the psycho bitch who was now at the top of my list got herself banned for blatantly being a psycho bitch in blatant violation of the RULES under circumstances that had me going "I would have banned her if I was moderator. This is NOT sexism, no."

So that made me defacto the highest ranked woman member that I could identify. I found myself realizing I had rank for a woman having previously had absolutely no ambition with regards to ranking on HN or something like that..

So then I made it my hobby to figure out how to MAKE the leaderboard. Which was disturbing behavior freaking everyone out even though it's completely meaningless as an accomplishment because, no, it didn't open doors for me like it did for that turd and con artist Patrick McKenzie.

I'm just trying to make MY LIFE work. And it's unfortunate you people are so screwed in the head and have a big problem with a woman trying to make her life work.

Like that's a strident feminist agenda to want to earn enough money to keep a roof over my head without getting married to do so.

I don't even identify as a feminist and I'm quite open about that.