Why so many politically correct people on HN?

Not everybody, of course. But enough to discern a pattern. Programming requires the kind of intellectual rigor and purity that’s incompatible with political correctness. On a good number of the threads, you don’t see enough of the kind of reductionist thinking that one would apply to hacking, applied to just ideas in general. Two examples: every once in a while, the topic of how difficult it is to learn to program well will pop up. And the general consensus often seems to be that anybody can learn to hack well and that learning how to program well has little to do with how smart you are. It’s hard to see how anybody who knows how to program can deny that abstract thinking capacity is a serious factor in learning how to code; and that it isn’t distributed evenly. Second is the issue of why there are so few female hackers or women in technology overall. How many millions of dollars have been pumped into efforts to get girls interested in tech. The results are always dismal. The thinking, even on here, seems to be that women don’t have enough good role models. Hard to believe if you think about it for a second. So few people are willing to admit that the reason women generally don’t get into tech is because they’re not interested in it. I don’t know many females in my life who’d rather spend hours focusing on impersonal abstractions rather than people. It’s generally not a female inclination. This phenomenon plays itself out in college classrooms all over America. How many female nerds do you know? Would be great if more people were honest about what they really believed.