> Also if the replies in here are representative of Silicon Valley as a whole, damn.
The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night.
I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging.
Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above.
This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them.
Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US.
Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical.
It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.