Ask HN: Reliable alternative to Tech Crunch?

As far as gender/race/identity, it is again not a luxury for many of us to ignore those issues, and businesses have a huge role to play there, as well.

You aren't (and can't be) a person unaffected by political issues, so I'm not sure why you'd want to ignore them.

Recode Verge Wall Street Journal (paywall)

and surprisingly enough BuzzFeed's long form content is actually quite strong. They had some excellent investigative journalism on Zenefits this last year.

Techmeme is the best aggregator I've found.

First of all, expecting profit-maximizing entities to deviate from a purely meritocratic hiring process is a fool's errand - why should they act against their own best interests? A number of people argue in favor of race/gender-blind hiring solutions, but I have not seen any compelling evidence (i.e. scientifically-backed studies) to indicate that tech industry minorities have been passed over in favor of White/Asian males of equal or inferior merit in any statistically significant way (I'm sure outliers exist, as with anything of this nature). I'm also not sure how a system like this can be implemented in the first place in any sane way. I've conducted my share of software engineering interviews and I would never consider hiring someone I haven't interacted with face-to-face.

I have however seen much of the opposite behavior, where tech companies I've worked for (Google, Facebook) have given preferential treatment to candidates of inferior quality purely on the basis of race/gender. This is where you create actual problems, because rational people understand that a profit-maximizing organization is the wrong context in which to attempt to re-balance the scales. As an Asian male (who furthermore doesn't fit the introvert stereotype), it personally makes me feel like I'm being inadvertently discriminated against and expected to perform that much better up to and within the interview process to earn my offer.

So where should we be having this discussion? Around urban culture and the educational system. In their militant quest for culture reform, hyper-progressives have rocketed well past the point in the stack where we can actually (and fairly) address this problem. You need to level the playing field to the furthest extent possible, prior to individuals competing on the open market for employment. Anyone who's unable to empathize with the situation of minorities (that Black and Hispanic people are predisposed to tremendously disadvantageous circumstances or that women are raised in a culture that's overtly hostile and detrimental towards their personal ambitions) is a fool, willfully blind to reality, and possibly bigoted.

And lots of things have been tried without success. Zuckerberg attempted to do his part in donating to the Newark public school system and failed spectacularly (arguably on account of corruption and misappropriation courtesy of Booker/Christie). They're not the first to try either. So, why did they fail? Because the stronger factor is the context surrounding a child's education. I once volunteered to tutor gifted urban children and the problem was almost immediately apparent. Outside of school, these children face destitution, are often fatherless, have exposure to gang culture, and have few to no peers or role models interested in promoting educational aspirations. So you end up realizing we have to go even further down the stack and correct the fundamentals. How we do that is something worth entire novels of exposition.

Bottom-line: stop expecting tech companies to be the platform for resolving this discrepancy.