Oddbean

A key thing to understand about the technology industry is that Hacker News is a very well-known community for some kinds of coders to hang out; it is an extremist content site run as paid promotion for the venture capital firm YCombinator. Here, an ordinary discussion of the obvious reality that tech workers deserve unions features responses citing explicitly white supremacist rhetoric as a counterargument. No one is even surprised that this is how YC markets itself. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507458

@59f9e828 amazing this conversation is happening at the exact moment AI’s biggest threat isn’t to “low skilled” jobs (lol, would love to see the average HN commenter on a factory floor) but literally programmers. Self-interest can’t even get them to drop their ideological posturing.

@59f9e828 it is so frustrating to look at any thread on this site because it is just choc-a-bloc with people who are making testable, falsifiable (and false!) claims, looking credible because they have oodles of “reputation” because they posted a lot of upvotable zingers about React when it was really popular or something. All while claiming to be more rational than their interlocutors and using terms like “priors” and “signal to noise” to lend a science-y aesthetic to their defensive emoting