[mikequinlan]

Hacker News Guidelines

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

[zfg]

So much of the tech industry is now precisely about politics and power.

Hacker News cannot be afraid to look at it, cannot run away from it, and, if you're part of the tech industry, must take responsibility for it.

[dang]

Note those words most and probably.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426

[pvg]

Most things are in some way connected to politics and power and they're regularly discussed here, along with their political implications and power dynamics. That still doesn't mean every news story is worth discussing here given that it's a forum with the explicit goal of not discussing most news stories.

[zfg]

But it's not in "some" way connected. It's now explicitly and directly connected.

You can't look the other way anymore.

[pvg]

Look away from what? Musk and his antics show up in threads regularly. But it can't be on the front page 5 times a day. There's an article discussing current admin shenanigans on the fp right now.

[zfg]

In your previous post you tried to deny and minimize the problem.

That kind of apathy is exactly what you can't afford to look away from.

[pvg]

Can you link me the post where I did that because I don't even know what 'problem' you're referring to.

[palmfacehn]

Does anyone have anything new to say on these topics? We're going around and around in circles. Is there a substantial discussion? Do we learn anything new?

[AnimalMuppet]

Maybe so. But I still don't have to talk about it here. There's lots of places to talk about politics, and Musk, ad nauseum. HN is supposed to be about something else.

Politics may be destroying a large number of things right now; I don't want it to destroy this site too.

[chairmansteve]

"But I still don't have to talk about it here".

But you repeatedly do...

[zfg]

Politics is a major part of the tech industry now. It's what it has become.

Building any kind of ethical framework for hardware and software engineering necessitates looking at the ugly side.

If Hacker News is genuinely not up to that then it's falling short.

[AnimalMuppet]

It may be falling short of what you think it should be. A bunch of the rest of us don't think that, though.

You may feel strongly about what you think we should do, but you don't get to tell the rest of us what the site should be about. You don't get to tear up the community guidelines and write your own.

Let HN be what it is. If that doesn't match what you want, go find somewhere else that does.

[bambax]

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

I guess the second coming of Nazism to an unprecedented scale and without any serious opposition anywhere is 1/ uninteresting and 2/ absolutely irrelevant to tech.

[lawn]

USA turning into a Russian style oligarchy fits neatly in the "interesting new phenomenon".

[rsynnott]

I mean, it does seem that Musk stories get flagged way more rapidly than other Trump misbehaviour stories; in practice I suspect that a certain amount of the user base is comprised of his weird sycophants.