Sounds pretty stupid.

Benefit gained from cancer cure is far higher than detriment from some idiotic comments online an a semi-spammy marketing campaign that was swiftly punished. Net effect is very positive.

"I'm not supporting this by principle!" people vary from legitimate and caring to just pretentious and snobby.

I would understand not supporting a lot of the biggest hardware OEMs for prioritizing machine production cost over the quality of human life (Foxconn and other very popular, very cheap Chinese production manufacturers that employ some really sketchy tactics to keep that production cheap). Obviously for you to make such a strong decision, I'd expect you to have read a lot, way more than whatever Apple-scapegoating bullshit you've read in mainstream media and on Reddit (the whole Foxconn thing is very popular with, like, every OEM, by the way, not just Apple), making sure you knew who and who wasn't actually breaking your very strong principle and to what extent you can expect a company to provide "quality of human life" and what that even means, etc.

But when you boldly declare you won't support a company, no matter what they do, because a co-founder made some stupid and tasteless comments (said company later fucking fired said co-founder) and because they unwittingly executed on a really spammy marketing campaign (which caused them to get kicked off of Google for WEEKS as punishment)?

Where were you when RapGenius made apparent some glaring inefficiencies in Heroku? Where were you when RapGenius was building the most accurate, most well-designed, most comprehensive repository of lyrics and text annotations on the web?

You're really deciding to wave your huge "muh principles. I HAVE STRONG BELIEFES" cock on the Internet because of a couple insensitive comments?

As for the general culture on HN regarding hating the general culture around RapGenius ... so what if their general behaviors are different than yours. What's unprofessional to you is just fun to them. Everyone behaves in different ways; ivy tower academics from researcher academics from front-end web developers from game developers from humanities majors from STEM majors from musicians from DJs from ... there's nothing objectively worse about the rap culture behind RapGenius.

Sure, that culture may sometimes throw around otherwise offensive remarks. But remember that the context behind a word is infinitely more important than the word itself. The context behind the usage of the word "faggot" is much, much more important than the meaningless combination of the letters 'f','a','g','g','o', and 't' and the pronunciation of those combined letters. If an immature 13 year old were to input "faggot" in a text-to-speech program, the text-to-speech program would very clearly say "faggot". You wouldn't blame the program : it's just executing on a pronunciation algorithm. The context is just the manipulation of bits and bytes on a stream. It's harmless. You wouldn't exactly flog the kid, either, he just has a poor sense of humor, and you'd just roll your eyes at that.

The problem we have with the word "faggot" is that, in the majority of cases, it's being used in a pretty offensive context, and said context says a lot of things about the person using the word.

But when the RapGenius cofounder says offensive stuff (I heard one of them insulted Mark Zuckerberg at a conference?), often the context is just lighthearted jabs.

They may be unprofessional and insensitive jabs, but given that they're A) just meaning harmless fun and B) building one of the most comprehensive and well-designed text annotation sites on the Internet, we give them some cultural license to have their shitty taste in humor. In this specific case, obviously, they really overexploit that cultural license by saying such insensitive things on such a raw , emotional topic, but again, the guy got fucking fired.