Ask HN: HN Political News Overload?

I&#x27;ve written a lot about this topic, but let&#x27;s see if I can sum it up:<p>* Politics are way more important than most of what we talk about. So if we talk politics, we could easily fill the front page with it, and crowd out all the unimportant tech stuff. Who cares about Bootstrap when people are throwing bananas at a minister in the Italian government because she&#x27;s black?<p>* People don&#x27;t seem to get that you can compartmentalize: I care deeply about politics, but I also like having a high quality tech site that is about tech and startups. On these threads, people say that if I don&#x27;t want politics on HN, I must not care about politics at all. Couldn&#x27;t be farther from the truth. I also love to follow professional cycling, but I don&#x27;t want politics on those sites either.<p>* Way more people care about politics than the stuff that makes HN HN. If we open the floodgates, it will attract lots of people who will dilute the site. As noted elsewhere, I think this is something of a feedback loop.<p>* I don&#x27;t like the divisiveness of the subject. There are frequent posters here who have said they are Republicans, and given their statements on religion, maybe they&#x27;re even in favor of <i>$a_very_divisive_issue</i>. I <i>do not</i> want to get into that discussion with them. It won&#x27;t help anyone, will likely alienate people from the site, will probably lead to hurt feelings, and so on and so forth. I want to talk with these people about tech and startups. That&#x27;s what we have in common.<p>* The quality of many of these discussions is not high, and for anyone who has been on this planet for a little while, little of it is a new or interesting contribution to the subjects under discussion. You can find the same topics discussed all over the internet, in every language.<p>* I think that the site has been &quot;holed below the waterline&quot; by the NSA stuff and the subsequent flood of articles, as well as the &quot;outrage&quot; articles about various grave injustices. Those tend to get a lot of upvotes and heated discussion too. I do not think that it will recover unless PG &amp; Co start moderating it in a more heavy handed way.

I think that this...<p><pre><code> &gt; One of the most admirable things about hackers is their ability to accomplish great things without - or in spite of government. </code></pre> ... is really a pretty sad, small statement. If anything, government is of more importance to us because it is the hacker mentality itself that is under attack right now. The reason, I think, that so many of the recent issues have salience with this community is that what various governments are trying to do is to shut down disruptive economic and social activities, the lifeblood of the hacker community, in order to protect entrenched and well-connected interests.<p>At some point we all have to stop saying &quot;well I&#x27;m a {baker, hacker, librarian, truck driver,...}, why should I worry about these problems?&quot; and realize that this is world-altering stuff happening, and if you want <i>your</i> little corner of the world to survive, you have to mobilize to protect it, even if that means doing a little less of the things you normally do.<p>So I&#x27;m OK with more political posts, as long as something actually comes from the emotions they generate. Frankly, I&#x27;ve noticed a change in myself. Twelve months ago I didn&#x27;t care one bit about cryptography and networking, they were just useful plumbing that worked (or didn&#x27;t). But now I&#x27;m moving to learn more about these topics because of recent events and a desire to at least better understand what is happening. HN was partially responsible for this shift in my attitudes, so good on you guys!

I think having some threads about politics--at least the main issues most people here care about--is very valuable. HN provides a particular perspective that is fairly hard to find outside other tech sites. Sure, the comments are not always up to quality and are sometimes quite extreme, but they offer a very interesting and often reasonably well-supported perspective.<p>The real problem is how many different articles and threads get upvoted <i>on the same topic</i>. One or two Snowden threads? Great! But ten or twenty? With more than one at a time? It&#x27;s all too much. Not only does this take spots away from other relevant topics but it also fragments the discussion. And so we get repetition. Repeated comments, repeated ideas, repeated arguments... ad nauseum. I only have so much to gain from reading the same opinions over and over--especially if I agree with them!<p>This happens with other common topics as well, but it seems particularly endemic with certain political themes. Moreover, the political articles tend to be fairly similar to each other in nature and content. Sure, we get a fair amount of Go and Haskell articles too, but at least the articles themselves tend to vary quite a bit.<p>Of course, a very important aspect of HN is that everything is ultimately implicitly decided by the community. So here&#x27;s my plea to everyone voting on articles: try to vote for fewer political articles, especially on &quot;hot&quot; topics. Don&#x27;t completely ignore politics, but try to avoid having more than one every couple of days or at least more than one at a time.<p>Now, how do we actually go about doing this? I actually have no idea. Hopefully somebody else can come up with something :).

My problem with political topics on HN is that the focus is (in 90% of the cases) completely US-centric.<p>Hearing what US people think about their health system, their education system, their immigration system, or SF roads is pretty uninteresting to me, since it doesn&#x27;t affect me. I can tolerate them once in a while, just to be aware of the general opinion, but I have zero interest in diving in detailled discussions on the details.<p>And the political context and problems in my country are completely different, so they can&#x27;t even be taken as example or something.

I have no problem with political issues on HN if they&#x27;re issues inherently relevant to technology: US immigration, censorship, secret spying, DRM, CALEA, CISPA&#x2F;PIPA&#x2F;SOPA, etc. Things related to startup financing (JOBS Act and equivalent) are cool too.<p>Borderline are probably general education (edu tech or tech specific education are fine), maybe investment tax laws to the extent they influence startup investments. Healthcare is generally not relevant except as there are tech solutions (which is highly relevant); healthcare for startups or individuals working in tech is maybe borderline.<p>Unrelated political issues (gun control or gun rights, politicians in general, tax policy, war, ...) seem better suited for other forums.<p>What we really need is &quot;meta headlines&quot; where the ~10 daily articles about Snowden can get consolidated into one post with shared comments. Same thing happens whenever a new product is launched, too -- it&#x27;s not specific to the content.

Yes. There is far too much political nonsense on HN.<p>Most people do not downvote it. Most people do not flag it. A few people who have flagged it have lost flagging privileges.<p>Some of the new users brought in with political stories are using behaviours learnt elsewhere.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed a few long time users are missing. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s got anything to do with the atmosphere on HN, or if they&#x27;re just too busy at the moment.<p>But please, flag content that should not be here. Down vote comments that should not be here.<p><i>And please stop feeding the fucking trolls</i> - While it&#x27;s possible to have a discussion on the finer points of climate change science there are a number of climate change denialists[1] on HN, but there are also people happy to feed those trolls. It&#x27;s disruptive and harmful.<p>[1] Also other wingnuts.

Once Reddit turned into a liberal orgy I left and found HN which for a long time haven&#x27;t been occupied by political discussions. (and I am not a republican)<p>Now it seems that the same tendencies are trending, which is sad because it&#x27;s very hard to not see how this can spin out of control and attract the &quot;wrong&quot; people.<p>We should discuss things like healthcare, snowden, patent law etc. but try and keep a focus on the mechanics of these things, rather than the morals.

I suspect that PG has given up moderating Hacker News and currently sees HN mostly as an effective marketing channel for YC startups. Lately most replies from PG and many founders seem filtered to prevent the inevitable backlash. The raw opinionated discussions likely happen elsewhere and i miss reading those.

I think the reason HN has seen more politics recently is that the topics directly relate to every-day life of hackers. Most of the things happening on the political scene are pretty much irrelevant to us (or to anything, really), but when someone is trying to break the Internet, we take notice.<p>pg actually described this quite nicely in &#x27;The Word &quot;Hacker&quot;&#x27;[0]<p>[0] - <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;gba.html</a><p>To quote:<p><i>To hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems especially ominous. That must also mystify outsiders. Why should we care especially about civil liberties? Why programmers, more than dentists or salesmen or landscapers?</i><p><i>Let me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you&#x27;d notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. It seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax revenues. At least, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Unlike high tax rates, you can&#x27;t repeal totalitarianism if it turns out to be a mistake.</i><p><i>This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn&#x27;t literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas win. And because this is so important to hackers, they&#x27;re especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.</i><p>The another, more mundane reason, would be that political topics are very conductive to flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion, and we fall prey to this like everyone else.<p>As for my personal feel, I do think there have been a bit too many political articles here recently. Not because the topics are bad, but because most of them don&#x27;t add anything new to the story.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to start posting about Erlang again?<p>ETA<p>As for other solutions, maybe let&#x27;s just wait &#x27;till the Snowdengate blows over while aggresively flagging any political non-topics that tag along for a ride?

I believe that Software is the new literacy. As such software will &#x2F; is becoming a vital operational part of all parts of modern life, from drone operating systems to 911 call centres.<p>The new literacy has the capacity to bring marvellous new benefits - mostly if it comes with the attitudes that foster that literacy (most literate people do not advocate burning books, most software-literate people advocate net neutrality). (see pg (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;gba.html</a>) thx to Temporal)<p>Like it or not, what we do for a living will impact everyone, and carries with it a political overtone for maximum success. That means hackers have a political role to play (not in the partisan sense, but in the broader life of a polis.)<p>And so we should do what HN does best - demand evidence. Agitate, vote for and lobby for empirically driven politics. Demand a law that requires every national or federal political decision to have a 95% confidence value of working. Seems simple :-)

There&#x27;s a few way to improve content without altering the system (which can take much longer and have positive&#x2F;negative effects).<p>One way to instantly get more diversity in content is to frequent the &quot;new&quot; page more often. I find myself doing it more lately to vote up unique&#x2F;interesting stuff that might otherwise get passed over. There&#x27;s actually quite a few articles that are front page worthy that get passed over, but it takes time to go through and look. I just take a small break from working every now and vote a few up instead of waiting for them to hit the front page.<p>Another is to be more discriminative with what one upvotes. Avoid upvoting things from questionable sources or those that fall into being link bait&#x2F;deceiving.<p>A third suggestion is to submit content that&#x27;s accurate, informative and more diverse in hopes it gets upvoted. Try to find articles that you generally wouldn&#x27;t find on another community.<p>Fancy algorithms and solutions aside, content on a forum is mostly a reflection of the current state of the community, for better or for worse. Alternatively implementing restrictions&#x2F;policies would irritate some percentage of the community, but mostly that comes down to whether it&#x27;s a percentage the community that one wishes to cultivate and maintain. As a community grows larger, interests become less focused more watered down as the community becomes more widely known. No major online community thus far I know of has been spared of that.<p>Addendum: I don&#x27;t come to HN for the politics really anymore than I would come here for sporting news. I came here originally for the hundreds of insightful hacker&#x2F;technology related discussions I have bookmarked and found more useful than any previous forum I have frequented. When discussions stray over into other interesting things at times, that&#x27;s okay, but too much of any topic, tech&#x2F;hacker related or not, becomes trite and repetitive.

When I started working with computers, nobody had one. People who programmed computers wore suits, and went to work in special air-conditioned rooms. Then we went through a stage where anybody engaged in commerce had a computer. My dentist had several computers. Finally, we&#x27;re at the point where everybody in the world has computers -- many times several of them.<p>My point being that it&#x27;s very difficult to distinguish between a computer story and a dentistry story. Computers are everywhere. They are part of everything. Likewise, people who hack and busy hacking everything. As hackers, we are involved in most all of the world&#x27;s activities.<p>As several other commenters have pointed out, it&#x27;s not that hackers are suddenly interested in price subsidies for turtle farmers in rural Texas. It&#x27;s the other way around. It&#x27;s that politics has invaded hacking. Political-types are taking the tools we have developed to help people and are using them for massive surveillance.<p>I think we do a great disservice to technology and ourselves if we view anything outside of technical, startup, and nerd-bait topics as not germane here. I think there is a difference between partisan bickering about some issue where one party is wanting to fight the other, for instance the issue of minimum wages in the U.S., and an issue like the extent of foreign participation in Echelon.<p>So sure, divisive political stories on social issues that only create strife and division? Count me out on those. Stories about how the tech we use and develop every day is being used to harm people? If that&#x27;s not hacker-related, I don&#x27;t know what is.

If HN wasn&#x27;t interested in politics, the threads wouldn&#x27;t make it onto the first page. If you don&#x27;t like the post, then downvote&#x2F;flag it. If you don&#x27;t like the post, but your peers do, which appears to be the case, then suck it up. That&#x27;s the whole point about crowdsourced moderation, you might not like what you see. Crying over the content of crowdsourced newsfeeds because it&#x27;s not showing what you want is ridiculous.<p>Politics has been extremely important in the past several weeks to many Americans. It turns out that our hacker peers have been using technology to circumvent the Constitution. This isn&#x27;t something done by lazy, government-level programmers. If you look at some of the other IT projects commissioned by the government, like consolidating government datacenters, those projects have all essentially failed. Instead, as Snowden demonstrated, you have a very, sophisticated mechanism to view everything about anyone. The programmers at the NSA are the very best of our peers. And they are working on arguably illegal programs that have made the US a worse place. It&#x27;s certainly a worse place for foreigners who want to use services like Google, Facebook, etc. If I were a foreigner, there&#x27;s no way I would use those services, since I have zero protection or privacy against the NSA. And if you are one of the 0.01% startup success stories and become billionaires, you will now need to face the US government and hand over all your user data.<p>Forgetting about politics, forgetting about things like the Constitution, and living in your bubble of a life is great if you&#x27;re a kid, but the world doesn&#x27;t work like that. Things like DefCon that remind people that sometimes you do have a reason to be paranoid is important. I was talking with an Ivy League 19 year old, and he didn&#x27;t care that the US government was potentially reading everything about him. He said he had nothing to hide. This is the type of fate we need to avoid, having the seemingly best of the best being uneducated on things like like politics and ideas of simple freedom.

This of course leads to the question &quot;What counts as a political post?&quot;.<p>The reality is: Everything is connected and interacts and we usually prefer to ignore this fact, because it &quot;makes things easier&quot; (only on the surface).<p>There is a <i>huge</i> link between technology and politics.<p>Personally, I believe it is in our future&#x27;s interest that we learn to think more complexly.<p>EDIT: Can you answer the question &quot;What counts as a political post?&quot;, so we&#x27;re on the same page?

Most of the political posts are related to the delay (or inability) in legal&#x2F;social systems catching up with technological change. This is not really new but the frequency of these mis-matches are probably increasing as the technologies improve and get more widely used&#x2F;deployed. There will be similar debates when each wave of change (3D printing, genetic engineering, etc.) hits the mainstream.<p>This all points to a greater requirement for technologists to be aware of and indeed in control of the political aspects of what is being created. The days of tinkering for tachnologies sake are probably becoming rather limited.

Can somebody please answer the first question &quot;What counts as a political post?&quot;<p>- Is &quot;Snowden&quot; = politics?<p>- Is &quot;NSA&quot; = politics?<p>- Is &quot;War machine&quot; = politics?<p>- Is &quot;Poverty&quot; = politics?<p>- Is &quot;Unemployment&quot; = politics?<p>Let&#x27;s first try to see if &quot;everybody&quot; has the same definition.<p>Then &quot;HN management&quot; can update their manifest so we actually do have a <i>tangible result</i> after this discussion.<p>EDIT: As of now, we still don&#x27;t have an agreed-on definition for what counts as &quot;a political post&quot;. Or am I taking this discussion too seriously? Please downvote if you feel it was a bad idea I signed up on this site, I&#x27;d like to know...

Hacker News is reddit, reddit is Hacker News.<p>I think the only alternative is go create a competing site with heavier, visible moderation.<p>A non-political Hacker News might have enough people interest to garner a decent audience. I am pretty fed up with the screeds myself and would welcome any (well-executed) alternative.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen any competing sites&#x2F;CMSes that weren&#x27;t incredibly half-assed.

A quick summary of the discussion as I see it [#]<p>We would like politics threads on HN to be more heavily moderated (out of the way) because<p>1. HN is still US-centric, and US policy discussions are not the same as discussing the facts behind the politics.<p>2. We can get our political fix in (m)any other place(s).<p>3. The total number of political comments and discussions on HN that have add to the total sum of human knowledge is zero.<p>4. Finding articles that do satisfy ones intellectual cravings is hard and if it is not rewarded, will be done less and less.<p>[#] cos its had the highest signal to comment ratio for a very long time

If one more upvoted story talks about a possible controversial law that somebody doesn&#x27;t like, or the latest development in The Snowden Drama, or a new article about how the FBI <i>might be</i> talking to the NSA about the CIA doing something somewhere, or how <i>somebody in government might be doing some thing wrong</i>, i&#x27;m going to bludgeon the mods with a LART.<p>We want hacker stories. Not the politico-news roundup for computer geeks.

I don&#x27;t disagree that HN has been preoccupied with political issues recently.<p>Given the nature of these political issues (and their direct impact on tech) I&#x27;m not sure that this is such a bad thing.<p>As far as this thought:<p>&gt; Great minds could be focused on better things.<p>I disagree.<p>I feel our focus on these things is extremely important. Don Knuth says it well here: <a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu&#x2F;~knuth&#x2F;iaq.html</a><p>&gt; &quot;If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won&#x27;t the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?&quot;<p>Of course, this is just a re-wording of Edmund Burke&#x27;s famous (and oft-used to the point of cliché) quote: &quot;All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.&quot; The point is nonetheless valid, however. If hackers don&#x27;t commit to thinking, speaking and debating about political issues relating to tech - who will? Sure, HN might be an echo chamber where we preach to the choir until our faces are blue - but it provides a place for us to hone our arguments, build alliances and keep our fingers on the pulse of the hacker community when it comes to such issues.<p>All of that said, I couldn&#x27;t agree with you more on this point:<p>&gt; &quot;Very few are evidence of some &quot;interesting new phenomenon&quot;. Most are a rehashing of the same old topics.&quot;<p>I&#x27;d definitely like to see less than 7 articles on the front page every time Snowden opens his mouth, unless all those 7 articles each have something unique and interesting to add to the discussion.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how this can be reconciled with the fact that if 7 different posts about the same thing make it to the front page, then there is obviously a massive interest in the community on that topic. What about the wishes of all of these contributors, who have voted already in our debate by putting the content on the front page in the first place?<p>One possible solution is to implement some sort of clustering system that groups posts about the same topic into a single &quot;uber post&quot; (with links to articles and a single comments thread). I&#x27;m neither a NLP nor a ML guru, so I have no idea how feasible this would be to automate given such a small data set. I&#x27;m also not sure if a manual tagging &#x2F; grouping system would carry with it more overhead than it is worth. Most of the time (when we are blissfully ignoring the NSA, censorship, etc.) the front page is reasonably diverse.

It&#x27;s probably because everybody has got on opinion on political issues, whereas technical matters might generate less feedback...

One could add a new political page, there is one for &#x27;ask&#x27; and &#x27;jobs&#x27;, maybe there should be one for &#x27;politics&#x27;.

It&#x27;s a tricky one. I for one discover most of the political issues relating to &quot;hacker stuff&quot; here on HN. I&#x27;d be worse off if it went away since I don&#x27;t have time to spend on other sites.<p>But I agree, purely political stuff that has no relation to &quot;hacker stuff&quot; should probably be kept elsewhere.<p>But then, we&#x27;re hackers. We&#x27;re meant to be the people who find practical solutions to complicated problems, and I think that political issues do present the kind of problems that hackers would like to take on.<p>I don&#x27;t know. Like I say, it&#x27;s a tricky one.

HN is currently the best site I know of for quality political discussion. It doesn&#x27;t cover the broadest range of topics though, heavily leaning towards politics related towards technology. I&#x27;d actually like to see a broader range of political stories. HN has grown hugely over the last few years and I&#x27;m sure PG is resisting the urge to become more than a site for hackers. Having said that it seems to have become that already. Some way to tag and filter the stories would seem like the best way forwards. Any thoughts?

People are passionate. If a subject comes up which ignites the passion and touches them, they will get worked up about it. It’s not a unique feature of HN. Its everywhere from Reddit to Facebook and YouTube comments.<p>I’ve come to believe there is a lot of group think when it comes to the nature of comments. It’s a consensus of opinion and if you write something which goes against the tide of the consensus, you will be down voted especially when its around subjects people are passionate about it. I don’t have a problem with this per se but it can be annoying when you just wish to give an opposing view point.<p>The fire, anger just touches some and the quiet ones shy away from posting for fear of down votes and those who just wish to give an opposing viewpoint, end up being censored by down votes and negative comments. To be honest, its seems Reddit has influenced a style of voting behavior. It’s a “hive mind” mentality.<p>I personally believe if you stopped displaying the total Karma for each comment and on your profile, it would stop it being a point scoring mentality. Quality content and discussion, not gaining karma points should be the focus. Keep the number internal. Sometimes people say something popular just to get points of Karma but there is no benefit of having a Karma total displayed, it just turns into a phallus measuring completion ultimately. With the total Hidden from profiles and comments, you will see in time a different dynamic.

I think if you look at submissions from a numbers standpoint, the main difference between political news submissions and &quot;hacker news&quot; submissions is the number. As annoying as it may be, there are more outlets (publishers&#x2F;bloggers&#x2F;articles etc) for political news than there are for hacker news. Therefore, when someone writes about his or her weekend project, there is one article; when a major security flaw is found in some piece of hardware or software, there are three articles&#x2F;blog posts; and when something like news about SOPA&#x2F;NSA&#x2F;Snowden breaks, there are five to ten (or even more) articles&#x2F;blog posts&#x2F;news media pages.<p>If we generously assume that 100% of arrive on HN as submissions, then it makes sense that the distribution of submissions will weigh towards the more popular in terms of number of submissions for different articles for the same topic (visualize a histogram).<p>My solution would be to have a way to merge separate submissions that fall under the same topic (basically, one or more URLs per topic). How it would be implemented (tags, users marking submissions as &quot;similar&quot; or &quot;flagged for merge&quot;) would be up for debate.<p>Edit:<p>Maybe a single optional &quot;political&quot; tag with a profile setting and&#x2F;or a separate subsection for submissions marked as &quot;political&quot;.

&quot;One of the most admirable things about hackers is their ability to accomplish great things without - or in spite of government. The recent preoccupation is a bit sad. Great minds could be focused on better things.&quot;<p>Government is certainly capable of excess, as we see on the front page of HN every day, but there&#x27;s a tremendous irony (or blindspot, more accurately) in your statement. The computer industry as we know it, let alone the Internet, would not exist if not for the government. Many of us benefited from public education at some point in our lives, or were educated at universities by professors whose research is at least to some extent government supported. Let&#x27;s not mythologize ourselves by pretending we build all of this great stuff on our own in a vacuum.<p>Like it or not, government plays a huge role in the hacker world. It can be both a huge force for innovation and an instrument of oppression. It behooves us to understand how government interacts with individuals and organizations, and current events. For me, the HN community does a great job of surfacing news stories at the intersection of politics and technology.

Overload? Hardly because HN is self moderating. If the community wasn&#x27;t interested in those topics they wouldn&#x27;t rise to the top.<p>I for myself really like to read what fellow hackers think about certain topics. And for that HN is great. Because I certainly won&#x27;t get that from the washington post comment section or &#x2F;r&#x2F;politics.

I will add this:<p>I generally don&#x27;t mind the news, but the discussion at these submissions are generally pretty retarded; and what is more scary to me, a lot of nonsence gets upvoted and a lot of voices of reason get downvoted.<p>But I guess we are just becoming new digg&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;(take your pick) and this is inevitable.

Surveillance, patents, DRM, and education have a direct impact on the technology industry. Getting these things wrong could destroy our industry. Health costs make it significantly more difficult to hire staff for new ventures.<p>If there was a problem with electric power in the US, we would be talking about that.

EzGraphs: just because you don&#x27;t find the topics of...<p>- patents<p>- DRM<p>- mass surveillance<p>- privacy<p>- censorship<p>...interesting, doesn&#x27;t mean that others do not. These are all very real issues happening now and affecting the tech industry (you know, the livelihood of most people that post here).<p>I know, for example, many programmers start squirming when these issues come up because they&#x27;re of the personality type that &#x27;don&#x27;t want to rock the boat&#x27; but technical and &#x27;political&#x27; issues overlap in a major way.<p>Certainly you wouldn&#x27;t find these recent posts more relevant than the topics at hand?<p>Dropbox’s San Francisco Office<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121234" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6121234</a><p>Bootstrap 3 RC1<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112141" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6112141</a>

Politics is popular now because the hacker news crowd are like a bunch of geeky high school kids who obsess about the gang that&#x27;s been bullying them. Their brilliant intellectual life is decimated by thoughts about the bully gang.

I&#x27;m going to have to point out that &quot;One of the most admirable things about hackers is their ability to accomplish great things without - or in spite of government.&quot; is in itself a pretty political statement.<p>But I definitely think it would be nice to not have the entire front page blanketed with posts on the same current affairs topic. Not sure how to do that though, without introducing tags, or categories, or asking&#x2F;forcing people to post links as comments if there&#x27;s an existing post on the topic.

I eat sleep and breathe politics. It&#x27;s what I do for a living, and it&#x27;s most of what I care about.<p>That said, I don&#x27;t come here to read about politics.

Yes! Over the past several months I&#x27;ve found myself wishing that I was in a better position to launch a site that is solely for tech links.

I think it should be left to the will of the upvote.<p>If people want to upvote it, they shall.

It&#x27;s been a much more acute phenomenon lately, but that&#x27;s what I&#x27;d expect when there is an onslaught of stories that are going to upset hackers.

&quot;One of the most admirable things about hackers is their ability to accomplish great things without - or in spite of government. The recent preoccupation is a bit sad. Great minds could be focused on better things.&quot; What, what, what? Better things?

And I would be even more precise : US based political news.

Oh yeah, more articles about Bootstrap 3 please. I hear it got released or something, and it has flat buttons.<p><i>Great minds could be focused on better things.</i><p>For that, great minds would first need to stop patting themselves on the back, and be concerned about more than what&#x27;s on their desk or in their bank accounts. Supposedly great minds built drones and surveillance technology the not so great minds get to clean up after. Oh so great minds are giving politicians who can hardly spell &quot;web&quot; correctly these fantastic toys because... hmmm, why, actually?<p>Maybe it would help if you defined &quot;great mind&quot; first? Consider Einstein, Russell or Chomsky, for example. Consider Socrates or just about anyone... If they had two brain cells to rub together, chances are good they cared about politics. Saying that politics doesn&#x27;t have any place on HN is itself a political stance in a way, and it&#x27;s hardly like all stories are about politics now.. we simply have those, too. What&#x27;s so horrible about that? What kind of fucked up beauty sleep does it disturb?