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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"inspire lots of discussion"

inspire lots of repeated, rehashed discussion.

Hey you probably don't know this, but some guys working in sausagefest industry segments, like IT, exhibit uncivilized behavior around women, and I theorize acting like apes doesn't exactly encourage ladies to help us fix the sausagefest problem, bet you never heard about that story before! However, story 234243 on that topic adds nothing so it gets flagged. Aside from adding nothing new, its often of the anecdote - generalization anti-pattern which also adds little to the conversation. "Once, postgresql didn't work, therefore it always universally sucks for everyone and all applications". Eh, flush it.

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Not arguing that the discussion is particularly useful, but clearly it is still desired among a large enough subset of HN readers that such stories get voted to the front page and commented on.

pg has a very known bias against "political discussions".

I would argue that all discussions are political, and anyone that can say with a straight face that they "don't like politics" doesn't realize how political that statement is.

I'm genuinely curious, what is political about, say, a discussion between two fellow students clarifying a point of theory that they just learned? Or on the other end of the spectrum, a discussion between friends about the weather? I can easily agree that many discussions are political, maybe even most. But all? I don't see it.

While I agree that some discussions are not political, I think the parent comment's main argument is that "I don't like politics" is a very political statement (for status quo), and I completely agree.

I definitely agree with that as well, maybe I'm being a little pedantic, but she or he did make the claim that all discussions are political. It just struck me the wrong way as someone who really enjoys non-political discussions (when I can find them).

Thank you. Far too often it's the same story, over and over again. Whether it's ageism, anti-gay or anti-women it's always the same issue and the same discussion that comes up. Everyone laments at the situation and then goes back to hiring young white male developers.

I feel the NSA stories are the same. We get it; they're intercepting as much internet traffic as they can get and trying to break SSL (which they haven't succeeded at it without the help of 3rd parties providing signing keys). It's always the same comments (my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targetted, like the rest of the world's privacy is somehow lesser) and adds nothing to the conversation.

"my personal favourite are the Americans who are mostly outraged at the fact they're being targeted (sic)"

Despite a fear of dredging up a flamewar, what you're describing is a turf war where according to various executive orders the FBI is supposed to be spying on us, and the NSA is supposed to be spying on them. Its a (astroturf? planted?) distractor from the core issue of a whole lotta spying going on. And that's the long format explanation of why it adds nothing to the conversation.

I agree aside from the American jab. If it's happening to you, no matter who you are, I don't think it's unreasonable for that to be your primary complaint or motivation. It's human nature; we're selfish creatures.

Besides, most Americans I know aren't upset that it's happening to them to the exclusion of all others. That it is happening at all is the most common and most reasonable complaint. That it's not explicitly couched in concern for non-US-citizens does mean it implicitly discludes them.

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