[drewcrawford]

I actually have the exact opposite point of view:

1) To the best of my knowledge, I've never gotten a gig out of the freelancer thread in the past six months, although I am a full-time freelancer. The thread is essentially a list of facts and does not expose me to any new ideas, which would be forgivable if I consistently got gigs out of it, but I do not. As for its cousin the Hiring Thread, I am not nor do I know anyone actively searching for full-time employment (quite the opposite, I know dozens of desperate employers who are desperate for a reason). Job inquiries seem to follow me everywhere I go: to developer events, to my various inboxes, to my phone, etc, and many developers in the tech hub in which I live share the same sentiment. This may be a local phenomena, but it is my experience.

2) I am not an occupier (and FWIW not really a fan). The article was not overly political. It discussed protesting from a tactical point of view and exposed me to a new idea (which may very well be an old idea to others). It is of personal interest because I have been working on pathfinding lately, and this is, essentially, a distributed pathfinding implementation. I wonder if there is a reasonable attack on this kind of strategy or if the strategy is applicable to other protests (Arab Spring, etc.) I think that the discussion quality and level of improvement to my life is going to be a lot higher on this article than on the hiring thread.

[tptacek]

I don't participate in the freelancer thread (which is a new development) but I don't so much have to make the case for the Hiring thread, since (like I said) it leads this month with testimonials about how awesome the hiring thread is.

The quality of discussion on this article is already poor. That's also not surprising, because while the ostensible topic (tactics) is interesting, it's an advocacy article on an advocacy site and is mostly a coatrack for Occupy --- so, again unsurprisingly, it's not allowed for anyone to question the idea on this thread without starting a debate about the value of Occupy.

Think about it for a second and realize that any political story can be shoehorned into a "tactical" narrative; horse-race politics (which I follow like my siblings follow White Sox Baseball) are also full of tactics; there's a whole NYT subsite for political nerdery (fivethirtyeight) --- I highly recommend it, but would flag most 538 stories submitted to HN as well.

The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers". I concede immediately that the guidelines --- I think unfortunately so, and to the clear detriment of the site --- are squishy on this point; it would be better if they simply said "NO POLITICS EVER". They don't. But this is an advocacy piece for Occupy and it is pushing good stuff off the front page of the site.

[drewcrawford]

I did not say that the hiring thread is a total waste of time for all involved, as it is clearly not. But when you solicit "So how has the hiring thread worked for you?" you are not within a mile of a representative sample.

One can make the very same argument that you made about this thread--the sort of people who are interested in the hiring thread are vociferously interested, as either employers or employees, their very livelihood and life satisfaction for years may substantially hang on a comment in that thread. If we are talking about articles that are colored with commercial self-interest or bias, that is the very definition. I would posit that there is a silent majority who are relatively satisfied with their current employment, who read a few comments to see if anyone is hiring to do orthographic drawing theory or NLP in Erlang or topology or [obscure area of research interest] and failing that alt-tab back to Vim to work on arbitrarily less exciting yet still interesting projects.

I don't necessarily disagree with you that it wasn't a particularly high-quality article, that we can do better. But I would not hold out the hiring thread as the example we should follow.

[eternalban]

> The argument that any given political story is "something that hackers would find interesting" and not "just politics" is as old as the site. There is also an infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures that satisfy the literal definition of "interesting to hackers".

That is a bit of a red herring.

We geeks have pretty much addressed the technical challenge of "infinite number of arrangement of cat pictures" and have delivered. It is hardly an urgency, at this point. You wanna see cat pictures? I'm sure there are an equally infinite number of image sites, and various frameworks for creating yet even more.

Today, as technologists, we are very likely to find ourselves employed by financial institutions, security services, military, various "social" big brother platforms, and, corporate media. We are, each and everyone, enablers, for better or for worse.

To discuss larger, relevant, sociopolitical matter and events here on HN, with a focus on the tech dimension, is not merely an 'idle interest' for the subset of us that do very much care if it is "for better or worse".

[edit/ps: to be clear, I am addressing the OP's general remark and not this specific article.]