In a startup you want to actively screen for candidates like this. Someone who idolizes technological "purity" above all else and looks down on business will never be happy at a startup that needs to get shit done quickly. It's a lose-lose situation. They'll eventually grow resentful and quit, or you'll have to manage them out. Better to avoid the whole thing in the first place, no matter how great a programmer they are otherwise.
The only comment on HN more tiresome than "lol I can build twitter over a weekend" is a comment by a throwaway implicitly claiming that fixing the twitter product problems is easy.
Sour grapes, more like. If simply asking how they'd work with people from diverse backgrounds was triggering enough for this person, the process worked perfectly in rejecting them.
Andy Grove talks about this in "High Output Management". He says there are two kinds of managers, "know-how" managers and "position" managers. Both have a certain amount of authority, and a successful technology company needs both.
If you're a senior enough person who doesn't want to manage people, you should think of yourself as a "know-how" (knowledge, experience) manager and find a role that allows for that.
An actual person from the commonwealth is trying to tell you that the role of the colonies in WW1 is often ignored, and you can't even bother to read past the first paragraph. You just want to keep repeating that they lay wreaths.
It's because HN prides itself on "civility". So you can "innocently", "just to be fair", "playing the devil's advocate", "but what about" say any offensive thing you like, and when someone who's sick of hearing that bullshit uses a naughty word they get downvoted for being "uncivil".
The rest of the internet figured out long ago that such behavior is actually pretty toxic, and is called "sealioning" [0][1]
No one is disputing that a better system cannot be devised. This is true for many problems in the world. If you could start from the zero state, you can do it much better.
So let me say this: _coming up with the ideal system is not hard_. But how will you transition the world from its current state to this ideal state? Consider that the metric system (or SI), which is much better than the US system of measures, has still not been adopted in the US. Why? Because the problem of transitioning between systems is called politics.
It would be more honest --- still inappropriate --- for a company to take everyone out to a strip club where the rules of interaction are well-known.
It's gross that a company would hire women and have them pretend to be employees solely for the gratification of the men. And no, it doesn't matter if there were a few male models. That's not appropriate either, but it's very clear that this is a practice aimed at men at male-dominated companies.
The employer is not in the business of getting you off. Practices that try to do that inherently create an exclusionary environment.
And if your defense against the blatant objectification of women described in this article is some variant of "oh but look at both sides" then I suggest that you look at human interaction in the context of history and not as a blank Jupyter notebook that you put numbers into.
Commenting on HN is settled. Quarterback, armchair, they call it that.
-- Have you talked to a human? One of the action steps is to not be a know-it-all.
Alas, sentences with two commas, is what you have.