[chefandy]

I come here specifically because it's not one of the million billion other places where all other stories get steamrolled by alt.gov.trumpdrama. I can think of two dozen places in less than 10 seconds where political news, analysis, and all of the related stone-throwing get top billing, and I utilize many of them regularly... my 1337 dev skills don't somehow make those political resources less useful to me. If there are government related stories with a technical bent, they do just fine here. Just because tech people have a civic duty to be aware of what's going on in the government doesn't mean that all tech communities should be political.

[yeukhon]

It's called finding people with similar interest. Knowing other technologists are interested in solving social issues isn't something we easy can get on othet sites which are overpopulated. HN is in a good size and the folks are mostly friendly and can the capacity to discuss professionally and openly.

I am disappoited that many of the tech leaders don't speak out hard enough. If I were as powerful as they, I wouldn't stand back. The fact our Congress is a disgrace when it comes to passing the new health care bill, we shouldn't hold back. There is no reason to. Because while that bill may not hurt thousands of Google/facebook employees, it will have impacts on their users and many of their own employees' families.

[chefandy]

"It's called finding people with similar interest." That's what we're doing here. It's Hacker News. Those similar interests are technology and innovation. If politics are involved in tech stories, then the stories are here (hence the story we're commenting on.)

When you say your website is 'for' something, the implication is that you're 'not for' something else. This website is for technical news.

The fact that these "leaders" are involved in technology is mostly incidental, which is why some random tech CEO's opinion on health care doesn't get a whole lot of traction here. Unless there is a technological bent to their take on something, it's not really a technical story– it's yet another rich person that has something to say about politics. Even the ones who became notable for technical reasons, when speaking on non-technical political topics, are no more notable to me than Hollywood personalities doing the same.

I'm not saying you're wrong for caring about what they think or thinking that they should speak up more– I'm saying that the story would be newsfeed fodder at every site from Breitbart to Dissent Magazine, not to mention a million specialized sub-reddits. But how many places can I go to see a neatly ranked list of quality techy stories, such as the latest git release, some neat electronic music composition teaching demo, and news about modules in the JDK? Very, very few. The fact that this is a narrow niche makes it a resource for many people. We 'need' this space to discuss this tech stuff which is important to us as technologists, but given equal footing, would get crushed by stories about world-leadership-level politics.

So I fail to see any reason behind your implication that this group of people interacts with political news so differently that we need our own space to discuss them; we're not even unified in having a particular interest in politics, let alone solidarity on specific political viewpoints.

If you're really sure that I'm wrong, then why not leave Hacker News to start your own political-tech website? The hacker news source is available on Sourceforge. Make a fork and make a poli-hacker news. If people are interested, they'll show up. Even just starting a "poli-tech" subreddit to see if anyone bites.

My theory? We're just not that special.

(As an aside, I also think you're greatly overestimating the likelihood that tech CEOs opinions would align with your own, and it's quite likely that's why they're keeping their mouths shut to begin with. I know if I worked for some startup with a CEO who was fine at running a business but REALLY loved Milo Yiannopolis, I'd be pretty happy that he kept his mouth shut so our company would stay afloat and I could keep paying my rent.)