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

1 points by chirau ↗ HN
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.

7 comments

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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".
tumdum_
Is this 'entrepreneurs news' or 'hacker news'? Luckily we have lobsters ;)
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.

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.

[dead] biggerbob
Because I'm not from the US and I couldn't give a shit about yet another random, mass murdering there. Not all countries in the world have the US's hyper-sensitivity to race (really just black ppl - I never seem to hear about Asians, Indians, native Americans there, etc).
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.