I wonder what the odds are that my HN RSS feed will stop being 30% political crap that's completely unrelated to tech...
When there's a political storm in the outside world, things get wet in here too. It's common to perceive that as a change in the norms of HN but I don't think it is. HN is not a political site and we're not going to let it become more of one in the long run.
Political posts to HN are routinely getting flagged now, including this one. That's good. If we need to, we'll declare a week of political detox and see how that goes. I doubt that we need to though.
Moreover Uber, AirBnB, and the so called GigEconomy is definitively on topic here on HN and they are related to libertarians and likely going to be the economic reality in the near future.
That's a bad argument from an HN point of view. The fact that discussion here tends to be relatively high quality (emphasis on 'relatively'—it's still often pretty bad) attracts all kinds of posts that aren't right for the site.
If we're gonna start including topics that are slightly tech adjacent, IMO you destroy the key differentiator that makes HN worth frequenting.
It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals.
Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores.
Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture.
tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But this? This article has exactly zero to do with tech. It appears relevant because it just so happens that there's a visible libertarian faction amongst developers. But if that's the definition of relevancy, you've lowered the bar so far that almost any topic could be considered "hacker news".
I don't find this particular article interesting, but if you read the site guidelines they suggest "anything good hackers would find interesting," which means almost any topic could be considered "hacker news," if the quality were high enough.