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I Quit Hacker News

(mattmaroon.com)
261 points cwan | 1 comments | 23 Nov 10 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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pshapiro ◴[23 Nov 10 17:15 UTC] No.1934435[source]▶
"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.

replies(2): >>1934444 #>>1934650 #
1. muhfuhkuh ◴[23 Nov 10 18:01 UTC] No.1934650[source]▶
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.