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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Posting an article called "users you don't want" and then using a developmentally challenged teenager as the example of a user that you don't want is so spectacularly tone-deaf that I am left somewhat speechless.

I keep thinking this will be the year that the valley types wake up and realize this kind of mentality puts them in existential danger from mobs with pitchforks, but it keeps not happening.

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The user(s) you might not want are the parents, not the disabled child. Proper care for the child represents their quite unique problem that they want you to solve so they can use your product. The child having special needs is what sets these patents/users apart from the parents/users you made the product for.

"Tone-deaf"? Or "failing to adhere to PC norms"?

Its a great case because it makes instinctively want to cater for it. Who wouldn't want to help out the developmentally challenged person?

Which makes it all the harder to use our heads rather than our hearts, and make a good business decision.

I suspect the author chose it deliberately for this very reason.

To me it screams "shrewd business person wants the easy money and wants to easily cherry pick their customers."

The thing is, you can say "We can't afford to offer babysitters that are qualified to take care of people with mental disabilities." Say it apologetically on your website or in a questionnaire for new users or something. Don't go bragging about how shrewd you are because you only target the easy, cheap customers.

2017 is the year of mobs with pitchforks on the Developer.

The developers might be OK. If I was a VC type though I might be looking over my shoulder.

Do you think the 'existential danger from mobs with pitchforks' is justified? If they don't believe the outrage is justified, then they may be aware of this, but still speak these things out loud.

If there are people half starving or barely able to survive, take care of their loved ones, or have any dignity, and you control so many resources as to be able to personally lift hundreds of thousands out of that misery, but don't, those people will eventually try to kill you.

We can sit here and academically discuss the degree of justification of that fact, but that seems to me somewhat tangential to the actual issue.

This is the exact reason that the Disability Discrimination Act, now the Equality Act, was introduced in the UK (no idea whether there's any equivalent elsewhere). It's illegal to for a business to discriminate their service based on a customer's disability.

They will probably say that we live under «the tyranny of the minority» and whine that business are made expansive by following regulations that ought to make their goods/service accessible to the disabled (like every business).

On the other hand imposing gluten free/peanuts free/convservative free healthy over priced diets seem fine to them.

New tech industry seems pretty living with a double standard about what is acceptable: imposing their price on real estate/food. Being not okay to respect accessibility. There are against the tyranny of minorities unless it is them.

It seems a tad Victorian (Eugenist, hygienist and Malthusianist) to me.

(schlink, schlink, (the noise of sharpening the pitchfork))

>puts them in existential danger from mobs with pitchforks

All these valley types need to do is tell the grievance mongers to take a hike, and there would not be anything they could do about it.

It's caving into screechers' demands that does these companies in when the outrage happens.

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