Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.
At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.
This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.
i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.
Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.
The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.
At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.
And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.
To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.