Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

yifanxing.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 779 posts

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#331

Post by tiew9Vii »

> in the Scala community

The allegations are serious. If the author believes she was drunk and did not consent to unprotected sex and taken advantage of that should be reported to the police and the courts due to the seriousness, it’s rape.

The title is damaging “in the Scala community” it tarnishes a programming language and individuals who use the language due to the act of one person. The language is dieing with dramas among 1-2 specific people out of thousands.

No one in the right mind would condone the allegations or the perpetrator and sounds like at least one incident a matter for the police.

The allegations are against an individual and the ScalaCenter handling, not the community. The blog post lists individual people in the community who supported the author. I do wish the title wasn’t as click bait or more specific to the perpetrators as it is damaging, killing a really interesting industry and technology.

I hope the author finds the peace and justice they deserve from sharing this. The public naming and shaming will have serious repercussions for the accused.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#332

Post by baobabKoodaa »

btilly wrote: post #124
JPKab wrote: post #27

Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator. That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author?…

I only kind of agree. In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city. What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report? I hate the court…

> raped

I agree with everything else in your post except for the description of events as "rape". According to the story she wrote, they had sex when she was drunk, and she thought for months after the fact that the sex had been consensual. To me it sounds like sexual abuse / exploitation, not rape. (Unless you're making the pedantic argument that having sex with an intoxicated person is always rape, in which case 2 intoxicated persons having sex would mean that both persons rape each other.)

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#333

Post by throwaway0a5e »

lukasb wrote: post #180
chmod600 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted." How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?

Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than... Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.

>Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions

Car break-ins outnumber car thefts by several orders of magnitude. Assaults outnumber murders by probably a similiar amount.

I'd be very suspicious if there was a class of crime where any large fraction of instances result in higher level charges being brought. Especially with how plea deals work.

>between 2-8% worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.

If 2% of the time cops fired their weapons it blew up in their hand or 2% of car crashes resulted in a fatality it would be an outrage.

2-8% is huge when you're talking about people's lives being permanently altered for the worse.

If anything the worries are under-blown. But then again, when compared to the rest of the court system (not that long ago they were framing random minorities in order to close cases) and prosecution process 2-8% might not be that bad.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#334

Post by orwin »

epicureanideal wrote: post #240
jfengel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming. You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the othe…

> the courts are stacked against the victims Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of our 100% conviction rate. /s

The first sentence is literally:

"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.".

First, its a poor place and topic for sarcasm (it just an observation, i'm not against it, i do have good friends like that) but more than that, GP actually adressed the point you're trying to highlight in his first sentence.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#336

Post by nawgz »

suifbwish wrote: post #327
nawgz wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet you express no concern at the amount of unprosecuted cases...

The cases would be prosecuted if there was evidence to support them. You can’t just punish people without proof. Contrary to popular belief the purpose of the legal system is not to make wronged people feel better.

So you think a crime as endemic as rape which is punished at vanishingly low rates indicates innocence of the perps instead of a fundamentally flawed justice system, starting at the point of evidence collection? Even after seeing those very evidence collectors, the police, flaunt their duties and the law repeatedly?

Interesting.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#337

Post by kelnos »

epicureanideal wrote: post #256
swyx wrote: post #20

similar stories are emerging: - https://killnicole.github.io/statement/ (edit i see she has added it to the article itself) - https://twitter.com/brianclapper/status/1387115214064193537?... - https://twitter.com/adelbertchang/status/1387090351626723329... there seems to be some coordination here, as this came out pretty much at the same time. https://typelevel.org/blog/2021/04/27/community-safety.html Yifan also link…

Sometimes character assassination is coordinated. I personally only slightly increase the probability of something being true when multiple accusers come forward. I still want to see proof. What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?

I'm seriously curious to know what kind of proof you would accept that would make you believe these accusations.

I hear your sort of response a lot, but it's mostly from people who won't change their mind no matter what (and will continue to move the goalposts as more evidence comes to light), or set the bar so high that it's basically impossible to provide the proof they want.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#338

Post by eloff »

fabian2k wrote: post #88
eloff wrote: post #36

> I don’t remember how much I drank. I don’t remember him drinking. But I remember feeling uncomfortable when he made advances on me. I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying. I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility h…

A person that is in an incapacitated state is not able to consent, in that situation the burden is entirely on the other person. Just because someone is not able to say no doesn't meant they did consent. I'm talking about close to blackout drunk, heavily incapacitated, not slightly tipsy.

So question then, what if the other person is equally incapacitated?

What if the other person believes the incapacitated person is not so far gone as to be unable to consent?

Is consent only consent if you give a breathalyzer test in front of a witness?

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#339

Post by ummonk »

DaveExeter wrote: post #300
jfengel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming. You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the othe…

> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming. Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!

The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn’t caught at the time.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#340

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

faitswulff wrote: post #48
eloff wrote: post #36

> I don’t remember how much I drank. I don’t remember him drinking. But I remember feeling uncomfortable when he made advances on me. I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying. I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility h…

Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren’t wild bears, they’re human beings who should be held accountable for their actions. How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s culpability.

Without being too flippant, I'd like to point out that we do actually hold wild bears accountable for their actions. There was a news report last week about a bear shot somewhere in the US because it had attacked someone (it seemed to have been trying to guard a particularly valuable food stash).
Post reply on HN