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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I actually think this is a problem hackers have in general. It's the Zuckerberg problem. You build something cool, you want to talk about all the tricks you did to scale to N billion users and all anyone can talk about is that genocide you caused. You just built the tech, right? It's all about the Tech. Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.

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Except it's not about the tech when you're actually having an effect on people's lives, and we should be more willing to openly talk about that. Is it easier to pretend that stuff doesn't exist? Sure. But it does exist, and we do need to actually discuss what happens in the real world due to the technology we work on.

I agree with you, and I'm not asking anybody to pretend that anything doesn't exist. It's just that I would prefer that the "politics / culture / social / whatever" conversations happen somewhere else. But that's just me. I understand that not everyone will agree.

Even better, I'd like to see "How I wrote my own Guile interpreter in COBOL, added Java and Rebol interop, ported it to the Raspberry Pi, and interfaced it with my handbuilt analog computer, and then built a startup out of it."

Zuck and his employees at Facebook need to talk about the social impacts of their tech, for sure. But why does that topic need to be discussed on HN? We (both broader society, as well as the subset of it that makes up the "tech community") have other forums for that.

I too, would like an echo chamber, please.

There's a big difference between restricting topics, and restricting viewpoints. The latter creates echo chambers, the former doesn't.

Facebook created React to get notifications to show up in real time so you no longer needed to refresh the page. There's a place for discussion on the impact of realtime notifications on mental health, and a place for discussion on the use cases of React. You absolutely can separate conversations about technologies from their impact

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