>IMHO, this goes against the raison d'etre of this site.
It really doesn't.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I'll also add that "politics" bans are always a struggle. My best example was a small social network I was on with other folks who like computers. People often posted every day events in their lives. One day someone posted how their local government had banned adoptions for people like them. This was a serious blow to them and a very personal event. BUT some folks felt like it was politics because ... politicians had passed a law.
To them of course this fit just fine with the typical personal blogging that occurred, the event very much impacted them personally and not mentioning it because some people didn't want to "see" politics made no sense.
The usual divisions occurred, folks who didn't find the law objectionable felt it was "just politics" and others felt it was more than that.
But let's assume HN is just "tech" (it's not but let's assume) while HN might not do a lot of personal blogging, dramatic government change certainly impacts tech... and the personalities involved in recent events very much involves tech.
“Politics” has always been difficult to define for exclusion on HN but recent developments make a lot of US politics fair game, IMO.
DOGE, Musk, etc etc has a very strong tech angle. They’re all folks from tech startups entering the government and interacting with legacy codebases (I’ve already read interesting accounts of where COBOL might be tripping them up!) They have a stated intent of using AI to improve government efficiency.
Pretty much all of this is relevant for discussion here. I’m the opposite of you here, I’m very frustrated by how much “political” discussion is getting flagged. HN users have very relevant perspectives to stories that I don’t see reflected elsewhere, to hide them is a loss.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] threadIt really doesn't.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll also add that "politics" bans are always a struggle. My best example was a small social network I was on with other folks who like computers. People often posted every day events in their lives. One day someone posted how their local government had banned adoptions for people like them. This was a serious blow to them and a very personal event. BUT some folks felt like it was politics because ... politicians had passed a law.
To them of course this fit just fine with the typical personal blogging that occurred, the event very much impacted them personally and not mentioning it because some people didn't want to "see" politics made no sense.
The usual divisions occurred, folks who didn't find the law objectionable felt it was "just politics" and others felt it was more than that.
But let's assume HN is just "tech" (it's not but let's assume) while HN might not do a lot of personal blogging, dramatic government change certainly impacts tech... and the personalities involved in recent events very much involves tech.
Programming is automated thinking, and people think about politics all the time.
DOGE, Musk, etc etc has a very strong tech angle. They’re all folks from tech startups entering the government and interacting with legacy codebases (I’ve already read interesting accounts of where COBOL might be tripping them up!) They have a stated intent of using AI to improve government efficiency.
Pretty much all of this is relevant for discussion here. I’m the opposite of you here, I’m very frustrated by how much “political” discussion is getting flagged. HN users have very relevant perspectives to stories that I don’t see reflected elsewhere, to hide them is a loss.