Sabrina

I absolutely love this scene from the 1995 remake of Sabrina. It's probably terribly unrealistic in terms of a previously awkward young girl spending a mere year in Paris and returning home polished and gorgeous and confident, but most movies seem to reimagine our teens or twenties through the eye of what we maybe wished we had been once we are more like thirty or forty.

In reality, she probably would have fairly promptly admitted to being Sabrina, the chaffeur's daughter, and that would have gone very differently. I think it has lessons to teach, so long as you view it as something like "How we WISHED we had handled it twenty years later after running it through our minds a few thousand times."

I'm 61 years old. I originally joined Hacker News July 19, 2009, a little over seventeen years ago. I actually have several Hacker News handles, though I probably don't remember all of them. 

I created one for Eclogiselle that I NEVER used for posting on Hacker News, though that's probably the handle I used for going through some startup school thing they did -- watching videos online during the pandemic -- and applying to YC and then redacted my application before it got a response. I'm medically handicapped and virtual startup school seemed like an opportunity for me and I considered trying to do that, because I don't really want to travel to San Francisco in person given my medical situation.

I changed my handle to DoreenMichele on November 27, 2017 because I finally made the leaderboard a few weeks earlier and I had signed up originally under Mz, which can be misinterpreted as a feminist handle, like Ms Magazine, though it's not. I was tired of basically arguing "I'm NOT a Feminazi!" while wearing a feminist swastika.

For a couple of weeks, I was given shit repeatedly, as if moving from being called my actual middle name of Michele with one L to my first and middle names of Doreen Michele was me trying to pull a fast one and hide my identity. Then people calmed down and I was better received as DoreenMichele than I ever had been as Mz.

It took me over eight years to make the leaderboard the first time and a not quite three abd and a half years to repeat that feat, though the bottom of the leaderboard is a moving target and it required more karma to do it again. On 15 April 2021, I became the first and second female member to make the leaderboard as best as I can tell.

Then on 29 November 2025, I got fed up and wrote a piece titled Bye and removed everything else from my profile and posted the link. On 8 October 2026, I edited it to record that it had 335 page views and left it in my profile. It's currently got 348 page views.

I have no idea why. I essentially stopped participating in March of 2025. There's one submission by me after that.

And the content of the goodbye was written in good faith and sincere when I wrote it, but I looked at it earlier this month and cringed and didn't want that to be the last thing linking me to Hacker News, a place I was fond of at one time, but where I was never really respected and where I was treated with callous disregard while they fell all over themselves to help cretins like Patrick McKenzie because he has the right bits between his legs to con people into helping him figure out how to succeed and I don't.

And I'm not a con artist. I was never interested in doing the SHIT Patrick McKenzie did of playing games to see how much I could milk people for without really meriting it.

I was able to get some degree of benefit out of Hacker News because some influential man took a romantic interest in me and then didn't run me off when he couldn't immediately seal the deal because I was sick and CELIBATE for medical reasons. But I don't want to be viewed by Hacker News or him as "That piece of ass he failed to get." much less "She's STILL HOPING desperately to WHORE herself out to a rich man as the solution to her money problems."

I removed the contents of my Bye because I felt that's how most people would interpret it, and that's not what I'm trying to say. Like Sabrina, the happy ending of my story doesn't include getting the guy I once thought was so wonderful when I was younger.

It doesn't, I don't want it to and I don't want to inadvertently fuel the warped fantasies of other people who are probably more inclined to cling to a fantasy about TRUE LOVE than I am.

I feel like Sabrina, looking all grown up, but more than seventeen years later and way older than the probably nineteen years old she's supposed to be. I blog in hopes that other women might get there quicker than I did by some metric or other.