I have no way of knowing whether the poster you're replying to intended to use the masculine pronoun as a purposeful declaration that all conference speakers ar

I have no way of knowing whether the poster you're replying to intended to use the masculine pronoun as a purposeful declaration that all conference speakers are male, but I'm having trouble understanding why you would immediately jump to the conclusion that they are engaging in "first-degree trolling". To be frank, the tone you seem to be taking in assuming that what could very well be an unintentional mistake should be used as an indictment of the poster as a troll or worse is one of the reasons I find myself somewhat fearful of posting on HN. English is not my native language, and the language that I first learned to speak has very different rules for gender specific pronouns which results in me being very careful in how I write in English. Despite this, I sometimes(often) make mistakes. One common mistake I've noticed myself making is when I write about a specific person, male or female, I sometimes tend to then use that person's gender as the default pronoun for the rest of my sentence. I have no problem being called out on my mistakes but it makes me nervous that any error I make can be grounds for me being called a troll or a sexist.