Plead to HN: Obama will be here for a while. Relax.

The topic is certainly OK, I think the OP's point was that we don't need this to become the pseudo Obama-blog documenting his every step and breath.

When some truly significant happens, post it. 8 stories about his Blackberry are hardly useful info.

It seems to me like he's talking about that particular story, which deals with something becoming more transparent and accessible. He specifically mentions "hacker values." So I think that for that story at least, we're getting a lot of really relevant discussion over the nature of open government.

Some of these submissions have seemed really off-topic, but the one the comment's on fits pretty well. It works best to go case-by-case. I'm sure people will flag the ones that don't fit in.

We survived the surge in November and things went back to normal - and that one was even worse than this is right now. I think this is just a temporary occurrence.

Puleez the article had one line describing how it was different than typical kevlar vests -- wow incredible description of the technology being used.

Explain how the article talking about how Obama making Bush's Record public relates to technology.

Two points stand:

1. Regardless of how tech savvy he is, the intersection of politics and technology is much smaller than either politics and technology. I come here for tech stuff and politics is just noise I don't care for. It doesn't matter that the politics relates to a tech-savvy politician, it's still politics.

2. For a non-US audience, news about/from the US government is not the be all end all. It may be so in the USA, and there are lots of people living in the US that frequent HN, but I'd wager that a large minority is non-US based.

FWIW, I'm very excited for reasons I won't go into here :)

I remember about 7 or 8 months ago or so I had made a string of comments very similar to the one you have made and was subsequently modded down into oblivion. I believe with the new influx of users the line has been blurred as to what qualifies as Hacker News. This is evident with the recent rise in not only political stories and stories pulled right from Reddit/programming. These types submissions are key to maintaining the integrity of a social news website and refreshing in some peoples minds as to what deems a story relevant to the intended goal of a site. New users need to be reminded of what is expected from both comments and submissions or soon the level of intellectualism and substance will be drowned out just like every other website.

Someone might not have the capacity to add much to a conversation or provide any insight, but when they have a point of reference as to was is expected they should still be able to follow accordingly.

This argument wasn't the appropriate side for me to take on months ago so surely it is not appropriate now. If the community decides that this is the direction it will go, then I believe it will suffer the same fate as the other social news sites.