[mindcrime]

I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more interested in "Check out this cool new Erlang library" or "Why Go should or should not have generics", or "1001 Neat Regex Tricks" and such-like, than the more political stuff.

Maybe, for me, that's a reaction to the amount of time I spend on politics in the rest of my life. I'm politically active enough to the point that I've run for public office before, and spend a not small amount of time discussing public policy in other forums. So I guess I would prefer to find HN a bit of a refuge from that stuff. Of course I understand that other people have a different experience and will therefore feel differently about the "correct" amount of politics on HN.

[bitwize]

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests needs to see Allison Parrish's "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic" talk (or read the transcript) before posting: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...

[mindcrime]

Everybody who still thinks real-world moral and, hence, political concerns are somehow separable from hacker interests

Please note that I'm making no such claim. I would just prefer to discuss the intersection of "real-world moral and, hence, political concerns" and "hacker interests" either A. less often and/or B. somewhere else.