> However, as of recently, the line between technology and politics has become extremely blurred.
> as of recently
We really, really need to require CS majors to take ethics classes. Everything you do as an engineer has an impact on the world around you. Everything. This is actually really good, because most of us are good people! But you can only escape "politics" by escaping people and you simply will never do that.
Political articles that are on topic are those that contain material of intellectual interest, aren't just garden-variety politics or ideology, and contain substantive new information. Those are comparatively rare, but better able to support substantive discussion. Sometimes they get more upvotes than flags, or we may turn off the flags. There are plenty of examples of this—so many that we hear the complaint "HN has been taken over by politics" at least as often as its inverse.
The fundamental tradeoff: the better HN gets, the more people want to use it for things that worsen it. This puts a cap on how good HN can ever get. All we can do is find ways to wriggle out of that tradeoff here and there.