7 ms·

Tech Leaders Blamed San Francisco for Bob Lee’s Killing. Then Came the Arrest

57 points by Pxtl 4y ago

asdfman123 4y ago
I’m still mad HN banished my comment on an earlier article suggesting that the “random crime” narrative was obviously false.
- zen_1 4y ago
  That's likely because given the publicly available information at the time, no narrative was obviously anything, because no details beyond Bob Lee being found stabbed and dead were known. The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens, mossad, or a cooking accident, but people were quick to project their biases onto the situation and jump into flamewars or political attacks based on literally no information other than a man having died.
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    But my point was that the “random crazed homeless assailant” guess (or however you want to phrase it) was every bit as much speculation, and frankly, less plausible speculation. And now is it not only speculation, it’s conclusively just a bad and irresponsible guess.
    - sleepyjohn 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - asdfman123 4y ago
        But I think it’s even more important to recognize your own capability to be led and to succumb to groupthink. We all do it, to some degree or another.
      - nindalf 4y ago
        Account created 10 minutes before posting this. Friend, you clearly care more about these points than you let on.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      I don't think anyone said it was a "random crazed homeless" attack for sure. They just started sharing their stories about crime in San Fransisco from what I saw. The clarification of this specific event doesn't negate the recounts of others in the related issue of crime.
      - whateveracct 4y ago
        people were definitely assuming it was a random stabbing by a person unfamiliar with the victim people were acting like getting stabbed was just something that SF enables
        MrOwnPut 4y ago
        From what I saw no-one was assuming on the specific event, but it was a fuel to let loose the stories of crime that many SF residents experienced and wanted to vent. But yes, ideally we don't ever assume, sure. But don't let that distract from actual problems that people vocalized. And let's also remember that this is a SUSPECT, so we are still assuming to this moment.
        belltaco 4y ago
        > And let's also remember that this is a SUSPECT, so we are still assuming to this moment. In high profile cases like this, the prosecutor risks their entire career if the charges don't stick, so they usually have iron clad evidence or they wouldn't have made the arrest, and would've just waited for more evidence. The suspect hasn't even put in a not guilty plea during the arraignment. Mistakes do happen but I would say the odds are way in the favor of it being what is claimed.
        MrOwnPut 4y ago
        > but I would say the odds Yes, you are still assuming the odds currently. Innocent until proven guilty is the setup of the system.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens, mossad, or a cooking accident, but people were quick to project their biases onto the situation and jump into flamewars or political attacks based on literally no information other than a man having died. I’m going to push back on that. 70-80% of homicides in the US are committed by offenders known to the victims, with the small minority committed by strangers. People here are smart enough to know that and yet still pushed the "crazy homeless killer due to liberal policy" false narrative. That’s the problem.
    - zen_1 4y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. So since ninety something percent of murders are committed by men aged 14-40 (not the real statistic, I'm going off of memory here) do you think we should assume with no evidence that any random murder was done by somebody from that demographic?
      - rovolo 4y ago
        > The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens ... people were quick to project their biases onto the situation It would indicate a specific kind of commenter bias if, lacking any evidence, most comments on the original thread were about alien abductions and cow mutilations. Saying that it's weird that so many people talked about aliens doesn't necessarily mean we should suspect a human. Noting that we know a lot of murders were conducted by humans would be evidence that it was even weirder that there were so many comments about aliens.
      - sammalloy 4y ago
        I think you follow me just fine. We know that men commit most of these types of crimes, we know they are usually younger than 40, and we know that in the majority of cases, they are already acquainted with the victim. We also know the murder rate in Rincon Hill was zero before this happened, lending weight to the relationship between the victim and the offender. The tech narrative that blames liberal SF policies for crime were well underway before this crime occurred.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Only the random speculation comment was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35450340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35450340 (and I think that was correct). The following ones about the narrative were not.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Only the random speculation comment was flagged. But... that comment hasn't been flagged? It just says "[flagged]". Compare this one from the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456831
    - n2d4 4y ago
      Enable showdead on your profile to see what the comment looked like. There are two states of being flagged; one is [flagged], which will still show to everyone but look like the comment you linked, and the second is [flagged][dead], which results in the comment being removed entirely unless showdead is enabled. (A comment can also be [dead] for other reasons according to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 4y ago
  What do you mean by "banished" and what was the comment?
jimsimmons 4y ago
Nat Friedman who I have a ton of respect for went on a tweet spree about SF and crime rates when this happened but hasn’t tweeted anything about this revelation. Not that he has to but I do see hints of bias and now I second guess my feelings about his opinions more often.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  [flagged]
- owlglass 4y ago
  Why should someone's respect for (presumably) achievements as a technologist or entrepreneur extend to opinions about events like these (or really any event outside of business/technology?)
  - 0xcafefood 4y ago
    It shouldn't but it does because their renown gives them a platform. Similar phenomenon to Hollywood celebrities weighing in on political matters.
  - jimsimmons 4y ago
    I never said my respect changed. Just that I don’t take his opinions as being as sincere as I presumed.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Because any kind of significant achievement in white-collar areas presumably correlates well with intelligence which in turn presumably correlates well with the ability to understand other events better.
- HopenHeyHi 4y ago
  You can "see hints of bias" literally everywhere you look my friend. Also known in sane times as having a perspective. Nat said nothing more than stabbings are bad and assumed it was a violent crime, a sane reasonable assumption given the information available. What exactly is the problem? He genuinely believes violent crime is up and that this was some random hobo. I don't recall you or anybody else even theorizing this was a stabbing by somebody who knew Bob personally. You think his opinion is wrong and therefore he is "biased"? And if this turned out to be what he thought you'd say what exactly in that case? Maybe you're the one who is biased. At some point people got to stop playing this aha, gotcha games and agree on some base reality. Either violent crime is up or it is not. Some people like Nat are genuinely convinced it is based on their experience living there.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
refurb 4y ago
Crime is getting worse in SF, murder happens and people get upset, turns out not to be a random crime, but SF crime is still a problem but now the focus is on how this one crime wasn’t a random event. Do i have that right? This argument seems to be a massive distraction from the problem at hand.
- fortran77 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - itsthecourier 4y ago
    [deleted]
    - phone8675309 4y ago
      > police are putting their lives in the line constantly This is not borne out by the evidence - it's propaganda.
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        It's a simple fact. Police are called to high risk situations all the time. Even traffic stops: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_67H-AoQqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_67H-AoQqQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LqcltOnfxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LqcltOnfxU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy1qbLjkJnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy1qbLjkJnY - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5niWr3Elg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5niWr3Elg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgGSWo9-0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgGSWo9-0Y - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6bsr61vrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6bsr61vrw Do you dispute that?
        camgunz 4y ago
        I think the point people are trying to make when they say things like this is that the reaction to "cops sometimes do dangerous things" is exaggerated. It's more dangerous to be a truck driver in the US than it is to be a cop, yet we still don't allow them to bazooka adjacent vehicles if they "reasonably perceive a threat".
Our_Benefactors 4y ago
https://archive.is/k16pN https://archive.is/k16pN
rvz 4y ago
Lots of commenters here were so outraged without knowing what happened [0] and are now really silent today after the arrest. Techies killing each other is even worse than the 'SF crime' assumptions (SF still is a shithole created by techies) and outrage that happened a week ago. Not this time and this one wasn't random. So comes the back peddling and the wall of silence. Let's see if any of these techies will stand up and act on changing the city that they said they would, rather than now running away because another tech bro killed one of their own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899
- WatchDog 4y ago
  I don't think I made any comments on this incident, but I'll admit that when I saw the story, it really resonated with my biases about SF.
49erfangoniners 4y ago
Tech leaders are uniquely bad at self scrutiny.
prpl 4y ago
There’s crime in SF but anyone whose spent significant time in SF (all of SF) would look at this crime and know that it sounded strange. For me, the red flags were: 1. not your average tech bro 2. Rincon Hill is a weird place for a crime like this to happen - it’s relatively sleepy and the homeless population is low compared to other parts of SOMA. Not much (to none) gang/drug activity. No bars really nearby (not even high end ones - a couple of sports bars) 3. no mention of what was missing in initial reports, no hint of it being a robbery gone bad
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  I mean based on the discussion here when it happened I had the vision in my head that they guy was walking around the Tenderloin late at night or something.
  - prpl 4y ago
    past 5th in soma (north of freeway) and maybe I would have thought this was bad luck. (FWIW- I have rented a music space at Hyde and Eddy since 2013, so I’m well acquainted with the terrible parts of SF)
atleastoptimal 4y ago
Crime is bad in SF, and the murder was obviously never a random homeless person type crime. Both are true and the obvious conclusion for any reasonable person.
- xbar 4y ago
  Crime is bad in SF. Everything else was pure speculation.
  - cleandreams 4y ago
    Property theft is bad, significantly worse than the other 20 largest American cities. However murder and aggravated assault are about 50% lower than the average in the same set of cities.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >... and the murder was obviously never a random homeless person type crime. I mean, many, many people in the original thread about this clearly didn't see things so "obviously". >... reasonable person. Maybe that's the takeaway, and what was lacking in spades in the immediate conversations.
drewcoo 4y ago
And this is what I've been saying. Or trying to imply with lots of eyebrow-raised sarcasm! Also, WholePaycheck closing is not about rough neighborhoods or theft so much as mismanagement. "Let's open a store where they won't force rich tech workers back to the office!" I'm not saying they needed to be a Digger store, but sheesh!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230415055025/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/business/bob-lee-tech-reaction-san-francisco.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230415055025/https://www.nytim...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corbulo 4y ago
"see the murderer wasn't random therefore we were right nananabooboo SF isn't a total crime infested dystopia" Is really weird spin on a murder story. What is wrong with people? Does anyone notice how insane spinning a story that hard from a prominent news org is? The line between NYTimes and a long overwrought reddit post is blurring

57 points by Pxtl 4y ago

I’m still mad HN banished my comment on an earlier article suggesting that the “random crime” narrative was obviously false.

zen_1 4y ago
That's likely because given the publicly available information at the time, no narrative was obviously anything, because no details beyond Bob Lee being found stabbed and dead were known. The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens, mossad, or a cooking accident, but people were quick to project their biases onto the situation and jump into flamewars or political attacks based on literally no information other than a man having died.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  But my point was that the “random crazed homeless assailant” guess (or however you want to phrase it) was every bit as much speculation, and frankly, less plausible speculation. And now is it not only speculation, it’s conclusively just a bad and irresponsible guess.
  - sleepyjohn 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - asdfman123 4y ago
      But I think it’s even more important to recognize your own capability to be led and to succumb to groupthink. We all do it, to some degree or another.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      Account created 10 minutes before posting this. Friend, you clearly care more about these points than you let on.
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    I don't think anyone said it was a "random crazed homeless" attack for sure. They just started sharing their stories about crime in San Fransisco from what I saw. The clarification of this specific event doesn't negate the recounts of others in the related issue of crime.
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      people were definitely assuming it was a random stabbing by a person unfamiliar with the victim people were acting like getting stabbed was just something that SF enables
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        From what I saw no-one was assuming on the specific event, but it was a fuel to let loose the stories of crime that many SF residents experienced and wanted to vent. But yes, ideally we don't ever assume, sure. But don't let that distract from actual problems that people vocalized. And let's also remember that this is a SUSPECT, so we are still assuming to this moment.
        belltaco 4y ago
        > And let's also remember that this is a SUSPECT, so we are still assuming to this moment. In high profile cases like this, the prosecutor risks their entire career if the charges don't stick, so they usually have iron clad evidence or they wouldn't have made the arrest, and would've just waited for more evidence. The suspect hasn't even put in a not guilty plea during the arraignment. Mistakes do happen but I would say the odds are way in the favor of it being what is claimed.
        MrOwnPut 4y ago
        > but I would say the odds Yes, you are still assuming the odds currently. Innocent until proven guilty is the setup of the system.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens, mossad, or a cooking accident, but people were quick to project their biases onto the situation and jump into flamewars or political attacks based on literally no information other than a man having died. I’m going to push back on that. 70-80% of homicides in the US are committed by offenders known to the victims, with the small minority committed by strangers. People here are smart enough to know that and yet still pushed the "crazy homeless killer due to liberal policy" false narrative. That’s the problem.
  - zen_1 4y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. So since ninety something percent of murders are committed by men aged 14-40 (not the real statistic, I'm going off of memory here) do you think we should assume with no evidence that any random murder was done by somebody from that demographic?
    - rovolo 4y ago
      > The cause could have been (with equal evidence for each case) aliens ... people were quick to project their biases onto the situation It would indicate a specific kind of commenter bias if, lacking any evidence, most comments on the original thread were about alien abductions and cow mutilations. Saying that it's weird that so many people talked about aliens doesn't necessarily mean we should suspect a human. Noting that we know a lot of murders were conducted by humans would be evidence that it was even weirder that there were so many comments about aliens.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      I think you follow me just fine. We know that men commit most of these types of crimes, we know they are usually younger than 40, and we know that in the majority of cases, they are already acquainted with the victim. We also know the murder rate in Rincon Hill was zero before this happened, lending weight to the relationship between the victim and the offender. The tech narrative that blames liberal SF policies for crime were well underway before this crime occurred.
viraptor 4y ago
Only the random speculation comment was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35450340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35450340 (and I think that was correct). The following ones about the narrative were not.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Only the random speculation comment was flagged. But... that comment hasn't been flagged? It just says "[flagged]". Compare this one from the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456831
  - n2d4 4y ago
    Enable showdead on your profile to see what the comment looked like. There are two states of being flagged; one is [flagged], which will still show to everyone but look like the comment you linked, and the second is [flagged][dead], which results in the comment being removed entirely unless showdead is enabled. (A comment can also be [dead] for other reasons according to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dang 4y ago
What do you mean by "banished" and what was the comment?

jimsimmons 4y ago

Nat Friedman who I have a ton of respect for went on a tweet spree about SF and crime rates when this happened but hasn’t tweeted anything about this revelation. Not that he has to but I do see hints of bias and now I second guess my feelings about his opinions more often.

asdfman123 4y ago
[flagged]
owlglass 4y ago
Why should someone's respect for (presumably) achievements as a technologist or entrepreneur extend to opinions about events like these (or really any event outside of business/technology?)
- 0xcafefood 4y ago
  It shouldn't but it does because their renown gives them a platform. Similar phenomenon to Hollywood celebrities weighing in on political matters.
- jimsimmons 4y ago
  I never said my respect changed. Just that I don’t take his opinions as being as sincere as I presumed.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Because any kind of significant achievement in white-collar areas presumably correlates well with intelligence which in turn presumably correlates well with the ability to understand other events better.
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
You can "see hints of bias" literally everywhere you look my friend. Also known in sane times as having a perspective. Nat said nothing more than stabbings are bad and assumed it was a violent crime, a sane reasonable assumption given the information available. What exactly is the problem? He genuinely believes violent crime is up and that this was some random hobo. I don't recall you or anybody else even theorizing this was a stabbing by somebody who knew Bob personally. You think his opinion is wrong and therefore he is "biased"? And if this turned out to be what he thought you'd say what exactly in that case? Maybe you're the one who is biased. At some point people got to stop playing this aha, gotcha games and agree on some base reality. Either violent crime is up or it is not. Some people like Nat are genuinely convinced it is based on their experience living there.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

refurb 4y ago

Crime is getting worse in SF, murder happens and people get upset, turns out not to be a random crime, but SF crime is still a problem but now the focus is on how this one crime wasn’t a random event. Do i have that right? This argument seems to be a massive distraction from the problem at hand.

fortran77 4y ago
[flagged]
- itsthecourier 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - phone8675309 4y ago
    > police are putting their lives in the line constantly This is not borne out by the evidence - it's propaganda.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      It's a simple fact. Police are called to high risk situations all the time. Even traffic stops: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_67H-AoQqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_67H-AoQqQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LqcltOnfxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LqcltOnfxU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy1qbLjkJnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy1qbLjkJnY - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5niWr3Elg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5niWr3Elg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgGSWo9-0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgGSWo9-0Y - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6bsr61vrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6bsr61vrw Do you dispute that?
      - camgunz 4y ago
        I think the point people are trying to make when they say things like this is that the reaction to "cops sometimes do dangerous things" is exaggerated. It's more dangerous to be a truck driver in the US than it is to be a cop, yet we still don't allow them to bazooka adjacent vehicles if they "reasonably perceive a threat".

Our_Benefactors 4y ago

https://archive.is/k16pN https://archive.is/k16pN

rvz 4y ago

Lots of commenters here were so outraged without knowing what happened [0] and are now really silent today after the arrest. Techies killing each other is even worse than the 'SF crime' assumptions (SF still is a shithole created by techies) and outrage that happened a week ago. Not this time and this one wasn't random. So comes the back peddling and the wall of silence. Let's see if any of these techies will stand up and act on changing the city that they said they would, rather than now running away because another tech bro killed one of their own. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899

WatchDog 4y ago
I don't think I made any comments on this incident, but I'll admit that when I saw the story, it really resonated with my biases about SF.

49erfangoniners 4y ago

Tech leaders are uniquely bad at self scrutiny.

prpl 4y ago

There’s crime in SF but anyone whose spent significant time in SF (all of SF) would look at this crime and know that it sounded strange. For me, the red flags were: 1. not your average tech bro 2. Rincon Hill is a weird place for a crime like this to happen - it’s relatively sleepy and the homeless population is low compared to other parts of SOMA. Not much (to none) gang/drug activity. No bars really nearby (not even high end ones - a couple of sports bars) 3. no mention of what was missing in initial reports, no hint of it being a robbery gone bad

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I mean based on the discussion here when it happened I had the vision in my head that they guy was walking around the Tenderloin late at night or something.
- prpl 4y ago
  past 5th in soma (north of freeway) and maybe I would have thought this was bad luck. (FWIW- I have rented a music space at Hyde and Eddy since 2013, so I’m well acquainted with the terrible parts of SF)

atleastoptimal 4y ago

Crime is bad in SF, and the murder was obviously never a random homeless person type crime. Both are true and the obvious conclusion for any reasonable person.

xbar 4y ago
Crime is bad in SF. Everything else was pure speculation.
- cleandreams 4y ago
  Property theft is bad, significantly worse than the other 20 largest American cities. However murder and aggravated assault are about 50% lower than the average in the same set of cities.
jjulius 4y ago
>... and the murder was obviously never a random homeless person type crime. I mean, many, many people in the original thread about this clearly didn't see things so "obviously". >... reasonable person. Maybe that's the takeaway, and what was lacking in spades in the immediate conversations.

drewcoo 4y ago

And this is what I've been saying. Or trying to imply with lots of eyebrow-raised sarcasm! Also, WholePaycheck closing is not about rough neighborhoods or theft so much as mismanagement. "Let's open a store where they won't force rich tech workers back to the office!" I'm not saying they needed to be a Digger store, but sheesh!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230415055025/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/business/bob-lee-tech-reaction-san-francisco.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230415055025/https://www.nytim...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

corbulo 4y ago

"see the murderer wasn't random therefore we were right nananabooboo SF isn't a total crime infested dystopia" Is really weird spin on a murder story. What is wrong with people? Does anyone notice how insane spinning a story that hard from a prominent news org is? The line between NYTimes and a long overwrought reddit post is blurring