You can rank anything by any arbitrary metric and divide the population into deciles, even subjective judgments of attractiveness. People get ranked and sorted all the time. IQ, FICA, GPA, etc. It doesn't make them any less human; it just quantifies the discussion.

She's a person all right, and likely more attractive than I am in the opinion of any judge you may care to ask. And that's part of the reason why someone wrote an article about her, and we're here discussing it, and why I am a faceless pseudonymous nobody that can only aspire to an upvote or two on HN.

I'm irrationally prejudiced against attractive people. That's somewhat rare for them, so might be disturbing. But it doesn't matter much, as my opinion doesn't really count for anything anyway. I have no power to act on that prejudice. Attractive people get all kinds of preferential treatment from people that can actually make a difference in their lives, so they don't particularly need some sour-grapes ugly to like them, too.

I may give an unattractive person more slack, simply because everyone needs to feel like they belong to some community, and mine might just be the only one willing to accept them. Attractive folk need to do more to signal their commitment, just because they have so many more options. But that's not a high bar for me. Sexyhacker has hacked hardware, and proved it on video, so that's quite enough to consider herself a real hacker, in my opinion. If she were ugly, though, I might just take her word for it. In the end, that's my problem, not hers, and nobody should be trying to make their problems into hers by tearing her down with unwarranted libels.