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Comment on Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds

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Why does it matter that she's Mexican?

Stereotyped as less of a STEM country, probably accurately, so it seems newsworthy plus gives people hope and optimism to hear about cool inventions from there.

Or, you know... people like to know more about the bright kid who came up with a cool idea. Not everything is racism.

either one, yeah

Because it's a Chilean blog about feel good stories in Latin America, just like it says on the tin.

Seems to matter to you

Haha I loved this: in a thread where everybody is talking about the technology, the merits of the kid "discovering" it and all that, invariably there's the guy who enters the room and shouts "why does people care that she is Mexican!!"

Like... nobody cared, until the guy mentions it. And then he replies back "no I don't care she's Mexican, why do you bring their origin!!!"

FWIW I saw these news in my local news Spanish language sources (yep, Im Mexican too) a couple of days ago. And found the majority of the reporting at that time was exactly a "cool science project" thing.

When I saw it here on HN I was surprised. I even thought like "wow, maybe I didn't put a lot of attention, and it's something bigger". But apparently it's just sloppy reporting, in a telephone-game kind of thing: Some Chilean news saw the headline, and decided to report it as "Mexican 16yo invents X", which draws clicks. Then English based news took it and further deformed the actual facts.

Hopefully this kid gets invited to some podcasts or whatnot and gets something from this. Also hopefully it helps other kids get more interested in sciency projects.

No, it doesn't. You're just making a baseless assumption. There's nothing wrong with asking a neutral question.

I wasn't implying anything, just wondering why it needs to be in the title.

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