zlacker

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.

A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.

>>shadow+(OP)
I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more interested in "Check out this cool new Erlang library" or "Why Go should or should not have generics", or "1001 Neat Regex Tricks" and such-like, than the more political stuff.

Maybe, for me, that's a reaction to the amount of time I spend on politics in the rest of my life. I'm politically active enough to the point that I've run for public office before, and spend a not small amount of time discussing public policy in other forums. So I guess I would prefer to find HN a bit of a refuge from that stuff. Of course I understand that other people have a different experience and will therefore feel differently about the "correct" amount of politics on HN.

>>mindcr+U1
Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests needs to see Allison Parrish's "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic" talk (or read the transcript) before posting: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...

>>bitwiz+kj
Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests

Please note that I'm making no such claim. I would just prefer to discuss the intersection of "real-world moral and, hence, political concerns" and "hacker interests" either A. less often and/or B. somewhere else.