Dating, education, and sex ratios

We can't discuss emotions? We do, quite frequently, just under the guise of other topics. What I mean is that discussing even "purely technological" news has deep emotional connections -- not least of which is survival. Many or most of us work in/around the software industry. We aren't really neutral; valuing software is pretty deeply connected to how we e.g. make money and/or enjoy spending free time.

Now, do we discuss emotions well? It seems to me that the U.S. population in general doesn't. But I admit this claim is quite vague, undefined, and hard to measure. The population with higher education probably does somewhat better? (I'd be interested to see what measurable metrics would best correlate.)

Anyhow, it seems to me that most people have an inherent drive for close interpersonal relationships, of which dating is one.

My opinion: Hacker News, as a forum, isn't really properly designed for it (even though it has people who are capable of being articulate and decent to each other). Even if HN was well-designed for emotionally-charged topics, the subset of people here might not be the best choice of a community for learning about romantic relationships with people who are often outside that community. :)

Huh.

Over here in Europe, we have these discussions all the time. They do get opinionated, of course. But it's not yet taboo.

Non-tech is explicitly not off-topic, even if most (it's certainly not all!) of us have a tech background/current job.

Quoting from the guidelines linked in the footer:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> More like most women don't find men who program interesting/fun.

I hear a lot of heterosexual male SW engineers lament this, but I find it not true in practice. We live in a world dominated (and even inundated) by messaging that navigating technology is a recipe for success. It usually pays decently to well. Programmers don't have dating problems from their profession.

HN isn't a tech news board - the site guidelines explicitly differentiate from that in the first paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

This article suffers from a baity title and sensational opening but then gets pretty substantive and, I think many readers would say, interesting.

Topics like this have always appeared on HN and as long as (1) they don't come up so often as to feel repetitive and (b) the article is substantive, I think it's ok.