Comment by sounddust | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sounddust | Hacker News Reader

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You got downvoted because you baselessly accused the parent poster of being racist in his comment. If you had left out that comment and just asked the question, you would have likely been upvoted instead.

Apple engineers might be laughing because their prototype tablet - which they have likely been working on for a year - is probably far beyond the the JooJoo pad in innovation. The JooJoo pad is not bad, but it's also not particularly innovative (an iPod Touch resized to 10" would already be a better product, just to give an example).

Also, in order for the JooJoo pad to succeed, it needs strong marketing. Apple is the master of marketing, and the team behind the JooJoo pad abandoned someone who would have been an effective marketer and buzz-generator (and who gave it a great name - the CrunchPad). No matter what happened between Fusion Garage and Arrington, FG should have hired a competent marketing team to come up with a name and strategy for promoting the device.

The parent comment in itself was vague enough to be interpreted as such. I'd rather have an open discussion about such issues instead of covering them up as though they are not there.

I should also point out that the key word in your comment is might. I can just as easily say that somebody might be justified in being offended by the parent comment.

Do you know how many Apple engineers and product managers are Indians? Silicon valley is not the place you wanna play the race card. Desi-coders are a fact of life.

Which is why I doubt somebody at Apple would be giggling, regardless of what they have up their sleeve. Hence my initial comment and follow up question.

To be clear: the parent comment is vague enough to be interpreted as offensive.

I am confused. Are you still claiming that the parent comment was motivated by racism?

the parent comment is vague enough to be interpreted as offensive.

This is false. There is absolutely nothing in the parent comment that could reasonably be interpreted as racist/offensive toward Indians.

I assume you're fixated on the "Cupertino" part of the sentence, but this part of his comment is a completely normal construct of English to creatively refer to a person or organization. Another example of this would be if Microsoft lost a patent suit against a European company and someone said:

"Somewhere in Redmond, a chair is being flung against a wall.".

The above quote would have nothing to do with racism or "US vs. Europe". It would be a creative way to refer to Microsoft, specifically to Steve Ballmer who is rumored to have thrown a chair across the room after receiving some bad news.

Your interpretation of the possibility of the comment being offensive is simply wrong, and it's unacceptable to accuse someone of racism based on an incorrect interpretation of a comment which you weren't even sure about. At the very least, you should have politely asked the poster to clarify.

Linguistically there is no reference in the parent comment to what the Apple engineers should be giggling at; also, the word giggling can be interpreted as ridicule. Based on my life experiences in seeing how "non-Indians" have dealt with off-shore development teams in India, I think my interpretation is perfectly reasonable. I know these are isolated cases and not the norm in the IT world, but the parent comment in itself is fairly non-representative of HN.

"Giggling" does refer to ridicule in this comment. But why would you assume that the ridicule refers to the race of the people involved rather than the actual product? There is no basis for coming up with that conclusion.

I'm sorry that you have witnessed mistreatment against Indians by non-Indians in the past, but that does not give you the right to baselessly slander the reputation of a stranger because you personally misinterpreted what they said.

You don't know anything about the original poster; he could be Indian (or have partial Indian ancestry) for all you know. He might have been the leader of a campaign for equal treatment of off-shore development workers. You don't know him, and here you are accusing him of racism because you witnessed some other people being racist to Indians in the past. I don't know what else I could say to you to explain why this is wrong, so I'll just stop here.

Your analysis is 100% correct.

I regularly work with Indians, and have plenty of Indian friends, and co-incidentally love Indian food. Race did not even enter my mind upon writing my original comment.

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