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> In a London apartment, Shay Banon was looking for a job while his wife attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. In his spare time, he started building a sea

> In a London apartment, Shay Banon was looking for a job while his wife attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. In his spare time, he started building a search engine for her growing list of recipes. This incidentally is one the big reasons why diversity is so important. Often the best software is written to solve problems we ourselves are having or those close to us. If we write software for people we would otherwise not have any contact with, there are going to be severe mismatches between what is written and what is really necessary to solve the issues. This is why I am happy to see startups and teams in places that are not Silicon Valley.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Very important point but it seems like "diversity" is a taboo word on HN. For a community of intellectually curious people, that seems odd. Diversity isn't just a code word for a political ideology. Its about the ability to encounter other perspectives, ideas and ways of seeing the world. There are so many problem spaces that we've not even begun to explore in much detail because we don't encounter them in meaningful ways. At some point the balance will have to shift (maybe we've already reached that point). Tech entrepreneurs will have explored all of the obvious and lucrative avenues and the opportunities in the unexplored problems will seem more attractive. Maybe at this point, we'll have a bigger emphasis on discovering problems outside of our own experiences. Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic in seeing a limit to potential for solving lucrative problems in deeply explored problem spaces. We'll perhaps always be able to create new tech products that solve the same kinds of problems for the same consumers. Maybe, a shift in focus towards less explored problem spaces would need to be intentional. If that's the case, being open to discussing diversity well as a community surely is a sign of how seriously we're taking problems that are not our own.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

Very important point but it seems like "diversity" is a taboo word on HN. For a community of intellectually curious people, that seems odd. Diversity isn't just a code word for a political ideology. Its about the ability to encounter other perspectives, ideas and ways of seeing the world. There are so many problem spaces that we've not even begun to explore in much detail because we don't encounter them in meaningful ways. At some point the balance will have to shift (maybe we've already reached that point). Tech entrepreneurs will have explored all of the obvious and lucrative avenues and the opportunities in the unexplored problems will seem more attractive. Maybe at this point, we'll have a bigger emphasis on discovering problems outside of our own experiences. Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic in seeing a limit to potential for solving lucrative problems in deeply explored problem spaces. We'll perhaps always be able to create new tech products that solve the same kinds of problems for the same consumers. Maybe, a shift in focus towards less explored problem spaces would need to be intentional. If that's the case, being open to discussing diversity well as a community surely is a sign of how seriously we're taking problems that are not our own.