I Quit Hacker News

"The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. "

I have noticed this and unfortunately have to agree with this observation. I wonder what principle (teaching) lets hackernews people behave like that.

Most people are like this. People generally don't have a lot of understanding or empathy to the challenges of people outside their social class.

What's the average age of an HN poster? I remember being pretty judgmental and self-righteous when I was 20…

Your statement made me think. Looking at my friends, family, and colleagues, I can think of 2 small groups where your statement fits. The rest, I feel, do seek to understand and empathize. In my case, it is the minority.

I'd say the secret to self-actualization is having a noetic understanding of the fact that others are simultaneously far more similar to us and far more different from us than we can ever fully realize.

I saw this in a thread about poor people. I got in a long dialogue with a pretty prominent contributor about the nature of poverty and how it can be changed. You wouldn't believe how much people here feel that it truly is poor people's fault 100% that they're poor, rather than pointing at the myriad systemic fault lines pervading being poor in a poor community, such as family turmoil, substance abuse, decaying infrastructure, underfunded classrooms (and, no, you don't get to point at one school of knuckleheads in NYC as being the marker of the entire US school system and its students), and lack of skilled blue-collar work available.

Perhaps I'm just sensitive because I grew up poor, and perhaps they're not because they never, ever had to. But, it seems that they haven't even traveled outside their comfort zones to at least take a peek at the "other half". Because of that, most of them have "common sense" solutions that are about as "let them eat cake" as can be without actually coming out and saying that (such as "just go out and get a job! I have one, and I'm fine!").

Unfortunately, that won't change here. Entrepreneurs, by our very nature, need to be cool to these sorts of fundamental problems (unless that's our problem space); we simply need to hunker down, eyes on our work, and barrel forth.

This poll says 32% are in the 19-24 range, and 35% in the 25-30 range:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923