[Quarrelsome]

its more diplomatic than that. I have very strong opinions I just choose where I present them and where I dont. We're engineers, we're here to share with other engineers and solve problems irrespective of the other engineers beliefs, political alignments or whims. I would not want to turn this place into another spot for activism, there are other fine spots for that sort of thing.

Lets talk about code and business please.

[ubernostrum]

OK. For a while there this weekend, some of your employees/co-workers who had been legally present and working in the United States couldn't gain re-entry to the United States if they happened to have been traveling.

But of course that's "just politics". Nobody should talk about it on HN. No business impact whatsoever. Nope. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nada. A goose egg. No idea why that suddenly got some tech execs to get up and go out and express their carefully-vetted couched opinion that perhaps hypothetically it might from some perspectives be worth considering the possibility of expressing a hint of tentative questioning as to whether the best policy might not be being pursued.

Here's a hint: there is no separating out the "politics". Whether you realize it or not, what you're really doing is trying to separate "things which I perceive to directly personally affect me right at this moment" (on-topic) from "things which I perceive to directly and personally affect other people and not me, or which I perceive to not currently affect me" ("politics", off-topic). The problem with this, of course, is that for every thing that affects you, there'll be another person who is or perceives him/herself to be unaffected and declare your issue "politics". And for every issue you declare "politics" there'll be another person who is or perceives him/herself to be affected and dispute it with you.

[Quarrelsome]

I'm not from America. This doesn't directly impact me. I am interested in the outcome and I post in my communities about the topic with _strong_ opinions, much stronger than you even manage here. Those communities are clearly labelled "POLITICS".

This is hacker news. We have a job to do, irrespective of what the electorate choose we build solutions to make the world better. We inform each other as to what problems are spawning from the political spectrum and how to mitigate those in our solution building. We fix problems. What we tend not to do is devolve into political activism as that is an orthogonal interest to our skills as engineers and most importantly is often requiring of solutions that run counter to our skill set.

Lets leave the politics aside and stop pushing soap box crap like this to the top of the page please.

[matt4077]

Engineers are people, my friend.

One of the lessons learned from history is the danger of professionals considering their actions to be removed from politics and morals, and their jobs to be just implementing whatever their boss wants from them (c. f. Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil": http://amzn.to/2kMX4Wd)