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I Quit Hacker News

(mattmaroon.com)
261 points cwan | 3 comments | 23 Nov 10 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.562s | source
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maukdaddy ◴[23 Nov 10 17:30 UTC] No.1934517[source]▶
I agree with a lot of his points.

A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is feeding his family, he’s an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the back of someone’s hand before boarding a plane.

I got eviscerated for suggesting an alternative to berating the front-line TSA workers. To repeat, they are working hard, in a shitty job, to feed their families. They are following the rule they're given, and have no input to the process. Treating them like shit isn't the answer.

The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that’s nothing compared to how anti-government it is.

This seems to be a problem in any tech community. Maybe the larger percentage of Asperger-like folks?

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tptacek ◴[23 Nov 10 18:19 UTC] No.1934738[source]▶
I'm not sure it's the specific issue of TSO decorum that Matt is trying to communicate, so much as it is the perceived lack of life experience and corresponding biases that HN commenters appear to bring to issues like this. We do, in the large, sound like a bunch of 17 year olds when we talk about the TSA.

I disagree with Matt about TSOs, but I think that's probably survivable. What might be less survivable is the fact that a group of people who are overwhelmingly privileged young male knowledge workers are spending time talking about politics at all. This is a crappy place to talk about politics. Discussions seem to invariably devolve to Rand-ian libertarian software developer vs. WTO protester software developers.

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1. kenjackson ◴[23 Nov 10 18:38 UTC] No.1934821[source]▶
This is a crappy place to talk about politics.

Where's a better place? I watch CSpan on occassion, and the Hill is a much worse place. Political discussions tend to devolve, but so do discussions about Microsoft, Google, Apple, RoR, Python, typing, editors, IDEs, paradigms, SLC, etc...

With that said, everyone has to decide where to spend their time. And everyone has a preference as to what kind of discussions they prefer to have. I hope Matt finds a great community whereever he ends up going.

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2. tptacek ◴[23 Nov 10 18:39 UTC] No.1934828[source]▶
Finding a better place to talk about politics is not HN's problem; politics is specifically called out as off-topic in the site guidelines.

I don't think you'd keep someone with Matt Maroon's portfolio of complaints just by eliminating politics; after all, people do also write pointless comments about Apple. But that doesn't mean the politics stories aren't a correctible deficiency in the site.

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3. kenjackson ◴[23 Nov 10 22:58 UTC] No.1935729[source]▶
Finding a better place to talk about politics is not HN's problem

To be clear, I was simply responding to something you said. You gave the impression that it was the quality of political discussion, not simply that it was against the rules.

A simple way to avoid problems would be to require all submissions to have code in the body of the text. The broad notion of "hacker" is too broad to be useful, IMO.