DUH!

Ask HN: I need help with some math is a post I completely forgot I made that asks about how to run calculations on wetlands loss and carbon sequestration that derails into people pissing on me while acting like it's not my gender, it's just that I'm a BITCH. I no longer participate there and shit like this is part of why.

There is exactly ONE good faith respectful meaningful reply there and a second seemingly well-meaning reply that tells an environmental studies major on the leaderboard who posted an article about beavers and climate change roughly six weeks earlier that there's an excellent book on how important beavers are.

That's a little like if someone suggested to Patrick McKenzie who was on the leaderboard and well known for living in Japan that maybe he should think about visiting Japan some time.

I appear to be the ONLY woman who has ever made the leaderboard and I began keeping data on women on HN years earlier because at around 2000 karma to my name -- which was about a fifth of the bottom of the leaderboard -- I was getting weird replies that suggested people remembered my handle and details about me and viewed me as prominent for a woman on Hacker News when I'm nobody and intentionally positioned myself at first as nobody, so please pay me no mind because I didn't want drama and just wanted to TALK to smart people 

You would think after I made the leaderboard FOR the SECOND time, people would have some awareness that I'm an environmental studies major and see me as ACTUALLY like SMART. 

But, NO!!!!!

Instead, I'm being schooled like the IDIOT I CLEARLY am on making sure I get quality data as a starting point. To which I remarked I'm a woman. Rest assured, everything I do is somehow "wrong", even if I did exactly what some guy did.

And THEN some ASSHOLE that wasn't EVEN the person I was replying to engages with that to ASSURE me HE has respect for women BITCH and school me some more on how fucking STUPID I am. Plus my reply was down voted to hell and a THIRD person joins the discussion to piss on me about how the chronic mistreatment I get on HN is ENTIRELY my fault because I'm such an offensive little c*nt but has nothing whatsoever to do with my gender.

Weirdly, I landed in that discussion by looking up how many times I said on HN something like Friendly reminder: UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, not Suspected Alien Aircraft From Another Planet.

That was the FIRST instance seven years ago and it has 26 karma and two replies agreeing with me. To my surprise, there are only eight comments by me total that come up, three of which are from a single discussion and that was the second to the last time I left such a reminder and then stopped entirely.

That's also kind of a dumpster fire where nothing anyone ever does regardless of gender can ever go like you hoped in terms of public relations. I didn't really want to get into my reasons for thinking probably aliens really do visit Earth because my mother was still alive at that time and I didn't want to talk about her publicly in a way that could go weird and problematic places for her and me both if it got any traction.

I just mentioned it because I felt like people were beginning to see me as someone in the "ONLY nutters believe in aliens!" camp. And I kind of regretted saying ANYTHING.

I did eventually write about my reasons in a blog post in early 2025, a few months after my mother died, which I began planning to do at the time of that discussion in 2021 or sometime before that.

That post currently has 73 views, which is more than some posts on that particular blog, but it's not THOUSANDS. I used to get thousands or tens of thousands of page views on Hacker News when I self posted my own writing, even though that's not considered to be a best practice for how to get taken seriously there (or anywhere, generally speaking).

Watch THIS be the ONLY thing of mine anyone EVER posts to HN AGAIN so everyone can piss on the "nutter" who believes in aliens and insist "That BITCH is so OVER SENSITIVE about misinterpreting random BS as about her GENDER when it's NOT! HYUCK HYUCK!"

That would be par for the course.

And then you wonder why so many man-hating bitches with a misandrist agenda want to join HN to piss and moan about what misogynists y'all are. 

Anyway, I now find myself wondering why I felt so self conscious about saying "UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object" just three previous times when I know there are men on HN who routinely and habitually post "Reminder: Blah blah blah" on various topics.

I don't know why. 

1st instance: May 4, 2019 with 26 karma 

2nd instance: April 28, 2021 with 9 karma 

3rd instance: June 25, 2021 and down voted to zero

And that's actually part of the same HN discussion, so really four of my eight comments containing "UFO" occurred in a single discussion and then there's one more instance:

June 14, 2023 with 2 karma (in other words: just one upvote)

And I last mentioned it to kind of joke in the discussion above "You wouldn't use UFO to mean aliens if you respected me."

The moderating staff changed it to UAP in the title of the one piece where I commented four times, making my reminder less relevant and I have never known whether to feel like that's me being taken seriously as having a reasonable point or a smooth move to make me irrelevant, like the silly girl I clearly am.

That's not a slam on the moderator. He probably wants me back and was always good to me. But whatever he intended, I ended up feeling like "I didn't need to say this at all if it had said UAP to start with and I don't know if my comments had anything to do with why it was changed AND I WISH I HAD NOT COMMENTED."

I don't know why I was feeling that day like "Someday, I shall want to explain why I think aliens are probably real and I am just CERTAIN that will be met with people acting like I've done an about face when I don't think I've EVER commented anywhere publicly about whether or not I believe in aliens.", but the voting patterns and types of replies I was given don't make it nutso for me to feel like this isn't going well.

And WHEN you misogynistic fuckers drag me, please note that I'm not some psycho obsessed person who harps incessantly on ALIENS and I used reasonable language like probably.

No, never mind, you won't do that. You will just carry on with a behavioral equivalent of calling me gendered slurs while insisting my gender isn't the problem and you and your attitudes towards women isn't the problem and my BITCH self just needs to STFU about my paranoid delusions, DUH!

Footnote 

I did, in fact, check if I was doing this under my previous handle. A search for comments by Mz containing UFO gets zero hits.