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dang • yesterday at 9:34 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

I know how this kind of thing brings up strong emotions for most people—it does for me too—but you can't fairly judge another person's intimate relationships* from the handful of details that appear in a news article, and responding with personal denunciation is against both the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the intended spirit of HN.

We mostly don't know why other people do what they do, nor what they've gone through themselves, and we tend to be harshest and most uncharitable when we know the least.

Does that mean that the family impact of taking such a path in life should be off-topic in a thread like this? Not at all. But to be within HN's guidelines and (more importantly) its intended spirit, you should do it differently—not in a condemnatory way, but in a wondering way, and perhaps drawing connections to one's own experience, which always helps.

The goal, as always, is to have a curious conversation, not a reductive one.

* (assuming one can ever do that at all, or that it's one's place to try)