Live data from Hacker News

How Killers Bought Guns They Weren't Supposed to Get

wsj.com

1–10 of 12 posts

Re: How Killers Bought Guns They Weren't Supposed to Get

#6

How's this related to tech?

It is on a website? Hacker news isn't limited to technology discussions anyway. NFL, dating challenges, depression, politics, it's all here.

Usually some sort of ancillary connection to tech, startups, programming, etc. Oh well, guess HN is becoming more like /r/politics every day.

Re: How Killers Bought Guns They Weren't Supposed to Get

#9

How's this related to tech?

...because tech isn't conceived, designed, or implemented in a vacuum, but rather as part of human society?

There's a growing sense of a disconnect between "tech" (whatever we take that to mean) and, well, just about everyone else on some of these squishy ethical / legal matters like privacy, accessibility, "fair" taxation (whatever that means), etc.

In a less hand-wavy sense, you could also see this particular story as a failure of technology to account for fallible human systems with limited resources, or for the complexity of real-world legal / political contexts. This in turn leads into discussions of the flaws with government contract procurement processes, as well as meaningful discussions of the importance of a solid UI / UX design process.

Moreover, this article itself is an excellent working example of how to diagnose, drill down into, and present user-facing problems. If more of us who write software understood our users' problems this clearly, we'd build much better software.

Post reply on HN