Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnorhs | Hacker News Reader

it's amazing from a historical perspective that there are HNers around now who don't know who DHH is, when he was such a prevailing voice in the HN scene back in the day.

He is the author of rails and there are so many founders who were inspired by 37 signals and their takes on things back in the day.

The golden years of HN.

View on HN

Would have rails taken off if he was equally open about his politics back then?

Yes, people were more mentally resilient and mature then and it was pre Reddit, which has completely broken and warped many people’s minds.

As Gen X, I think they were already softies back then.

It's impossible to know what his politics was back then in fairness.

People's politics do often (but not always) change as they age.

10 years ago Joe Rogan was basically a stereotypical Bernie bro.

10 years ago Joe Rogan was a well known douchebag far-right conspiracy theorist, what are you talking about?

Not a Joe fan but his arc started at socially liberal/economically libertarian.

I'm guessing that GP needs to update their mental timeline of how far back 10 years ago was.

Well, there were some tells... [0]

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/basecamp-didnt-just-ban-poli...

I have trouble imagining it. The early rails community was very welcoming at the time. The things he now openly states were simply not welcome in most polite society at the time.

I'm not sure DHH really held the same views back then, either. The "Overton Window" has moved over the last 20 years so openly bigoted and racist views are accepted in the discourse now.

In Portugal we have a saying, April never more, exactly because the outcome of such ideas should not be forgotten.

Marc Andreessen helped establish the modern web browser, he has always been an Ayn Rand fan for example. But politics wasn't that important back then, I guess? And I just think there simply were not a lot of opportunities to gain some political and financial capital from voicing their fringe believes for people like them back in the day. They were busy building systems and software, now they are busy building or changing political systems.

Libertarian views have always been relatively commonplace in the tech scene. Being a fan of Ayn Rand probably put you in the majority, but left-libertarian views were commonplace, too.

Calling for ethnic cleansing is not a libertarian belief. It is a fascist belief. "Privately owned roads are a good idea" and "Let's round up all the gypsies" are not equivalently debatable ideas.

It started in the early 2000s. Politics hadn't shifted left enough to make him right-wing back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com