

Ask HN: Why does HN seem oblivious to race pertinent issues like Charleston? - chirau

I understand the need to avoid flame wars but that does not mean HN should pretend these things are not happening and just ignore them. Race issues exist everywhere, including tech. Silence speaks volumes and the tech fraternity cannot continue pretending the issue does exist.
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stray
Because Hacker News is about computer science and entrepreneurship. In
general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies
one's intellectual curiosity".

Race relations as a subject then, is only relevant as it applies to
entrepreneurship. Because computer science has absolutely nothing to so with
skin color at all.

Except perhaps in computer vision, image segmentation, that sort of thing.

For social justice content, Tumblr is probably chock full of content that
would appeal to you. Or maybe reddit.

Nobody talks about religious topics here either.

Why?

Because Hacker News is about computer science and entrepreneurship. In
general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies
one's intellectual curiosity".

And religion too, has absolutely nothing to do with computer science.

Unless God will let file a bug report on the impossibility of dividing by
zero.

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DrScump
Maybe your average HN reader has better critical thinking skills than the
average consumer of mass media groupthink.

Why, for example, is the Charleston tragedy more of a "race-persistent issue"
than the almost _two hundred_ people (mostly young black men) who have been
murdered in Chicago alone in the past 6 months alone?

Who is really "oblivious" here is left as an exercise for the reader.

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nickynix
Why? Charleston is a social issue. HN serves the technical niche. There is
nothing wrong with leaving SJW topics to a more general audience.

Women in tech is social in nature, but it is still relevant to tech due to the
platform being discussed. Charleston is completely different: it was a crazy,
racist man with a gun.

~~~
onion2k
_Everything_ is a social issue. Believing that social things are inherently
different to tech things is a false dichotomy - especially given the fact that
we (startup entrepreneurs) actively seek ways to disrupt business and
consequently society. Founders have a duty to think about the way the things
they build will change society, and to avoid making it worse. That's
fundamentally "social".

~~~
stray
___" Founders have a duty to think about the way the things they build will
change society"_ __

Fair enough. The primary focus though, is still the things they build.

It's always about the things.

The things.

And how _those specific things_ impact people.

