Ask HN: Is HN crowd a left-leaning?

I’m not sure about the aggregate makeup of HN, but there is definitely an aggressively angry leftist segment of participants here.

There are a higher proportion here of persons who think scientifically. There is no automatic intersection between that and politics; any intersection must be forced. But when it is forced, it will be found that scientific modes of thought are not so much Left as anti-Right. The rest is what the stakes are imagined to be.

Not really. This is a forum by venture capitalists for their current and future workers, which is pretty firmly center-right.

I think hn is still heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, so your guess is absolutely correct.

HN is left-leaning only from the far-right POV. Liberals are considered right wing everywhere in the world besides the US. There's no real left there and there's no real left here too.

I'm curious about the details: What is the definition of Left Wing you observed? (Or collection of traits). It is a term which means something different to different people. I'm also curious what your native language and country is, due to your use of this in contrast.

Politics is about framing, posturing and perception. Engineers tend to focus on data, science and part of our job is testing a hypothesis, reviewing results and shifting a solution.

A lot of software engineers make a lot of money in the US from very right/center leaning companies. Its hard to have an honest opinion on political topics like AI data centers, government funding towards AI/tech companies, etc. when some element of those are tied to your career. Even indirectly - funding up across the industry helps everyone out in the industry (same can be said for layoffs, it impacts the industry too).

A corollary might be commercial airline pilots. It might be hard for them to be environmentalists because of the pollution jets create, but they might love aviation so much that they are blinded to the detrimental things their career may contribute to the environment. Engineers loving programming and computing so much that they turn a blind eye towards massive build outs of data centers.

Its called cognitive dissonance.

Depends on what you mean by right wing and left wing, but: Not really, I’d say it’s more neoliberal. That is to say, broadly, more liberal/open-minded on social issues, and more pro-market on economic ones. However I do think there is an increasingly noticeable dislike of tech-for-tech’s sake, which often gets formulated as populism, and that tracks pretty much with the industry as a whole over the last decade or two.

Compared to other places, I’ve found HN to be pretty balanced politically.

Of course the guidelines point out that politics are generally off topic, which avoids a lot of tribalism around it.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Side question, What's the origin of left and right as political terms.

Probably has something to do with smart technical people being attracted to free software, and then OSS, and then copyleft. the idea of writing code under gpl feels pretty left to me.