It's a bit more complex than that. You're right that political content isn't excluded completely, but it also needs to be moderated a lot more, because otherwise the site would be taken over by political content, and also because politicized threads tend to break the site guidelines very quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If anyone wants to know how we approach this, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... leads to a bunch of past explanations, though you have to scroll through some boilerplate to find them. Just look for the longer, older posts.

Hi, I'd say that's a pretty loose reading if the posting rules. Here's part of them:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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.