What Happens After Prisoners Learn to Code?

If you look at this in a vacuum, I can see how that'd be attractive. But consider that this will obviously cost them -- and whatever other companies do the same -- money. Now, would you rather all those companies independently pursuing different ways of helping on a particular issue piecemeal, or that the government extract the money that would've been spent pursuing a more cohesive and coherent effort?

> Do you think private companies can “contribute” to the solutions alongside the government and the public, by being open to hiring non traditional workers, by having support programs that help people keep their jobs?

That's not the part I was responding to. When Slack accepts felons or Google uses renewable energy for data centers, that's being a good corporate citizen in the act of conducting their regular business. I think that's fine and good.

But what I quoted, was someone suggesting that Slack assist with things completely outside the scope of their business, like housing. Slack has nothing to do with housing, so the principle underlying that comment must be, "Slack should help these people (and maybe the community at large) in general, even in ways that have nothing to do with their business".

> Large and small companies get local zoning laws changed all the time.

Just look at the bay area as an example. Basically every company would LOVE to massively upzone everywhere for both office space and housing (because this benefits them), these companies are rich as hell, and yet they're woefully impotent at getting these things changed. The broader culture, especially for the politically connected, is against them, and they can do very little about that. Trying to swing their weight around would just result in a huge backlash, as many are already skeptical of how powerful they are.

> If Slack was lobbying for zoning regulations near it’s business, it’s entirely likely they can, in fact, get them changed.

I'm sorry, but this betrays ignorance of bay area politics. Even Google struggles to get changes, and they're ridiculously massive. Slack might be able to get changes if they were moving to a less popular city for tech that's more desperate for jobs, but if they stay in SF, they have very little influence. SF is lousy with high paying tech jobs, most people there don't really fear any particular company moving away, and thus the companies have little leverage relative to how rich they are.

Well, maybe it was from your perspective, as someone who obviously reads HN comments all the time. I was expecting maybe a handful of comments at most, and I sure as hell wasn't expecting people to suddenly start arguing about Brexit.

> The issue with your comment wasn't exactly that it was flamebait, but because it was a classic generic ideological tangent.

I take issue with this. It's true that what I was doing was going up a level of abstraction. But, like, that's an extremely common rhetorical thing to do, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Often there's a good point to be made there; obviously in this case I thought it was true of what I wrote, maybe you disagree, but I've seen your own comments do the same thing all the time to help explain a point, like about contrarianism.

It sounds like "generic ideological tangent" is just "going up a level of abstraction" in the case where it's more likely to start a flame war. But that's not always easily predictable, and even when it is, it essentially means you're shutting down points, not because the points themselves are bad, but because other commenters can't be trusted to restrain themselves from much more awful replies to that comment.

> you picked a particularly weak point from the article

Oh c'mon. Of course people are going to pick on the weak points, because within our minds the weak points are the bad points that we disagree with and want to say so. That people leap to speak when they think a point is dumb or wrong, more than when they think a point is good or okay, is entirely expected and normal and fine. When people hear something that sounds wrong to them, they feel a compulsion to speak out, to correct it, from their perspective. That's not a bad thing.

> that was entirely tangential to the main topic

Well, it didn't feel tangential to me. To me, the article is about how to help felons re-integrate into society, the quoted person was talking about how we need to support felons in other ways as well (which I agree with), and then, to borrow your language, took a swipe at the private sector for apparently not doing their part in those areas, blaming them essentially, which I felt was unfair and unrealistic. I really don't think "should the private sector do more here in other areas to support felons?" is tangential to the topic. To me it felt like one point among many.

> that person's main point was that the private sector can't solve all the problems

I disagree, I don't think that was her point at all. "the private sector has largely turned away from [these areas]" does not read like she's saying they can't, but that they don't, they won't, they've refused to.

edit: I'll try to be more careful in the future, but honestly, even earnestly trying, I'm not exactly sure what would make sense to change about my posting mindset. Try not to comment on points if they're too minor? Don't go up a level of abstraction to make points about more generic principles? These don't sound like good things to me.

edit2: I kind of see what you mean about the swipe. I can try to avoid that in the future, though I feel like it may be difficult without switching to a very dry/stiff posting style. "I mean, yeah?" is not a very abrasive or aggressive sort of comment. It's the written equivalent of a shrug. I'm aware that HN has high standards for civility, but I honestly did not expect such a sentence to breach that.