Plead to HN: Obama will be here for a while. Relax. | Hacker News Reader

Plead to HN: Obama will be here for a while. Relax.

42 pointspatio1112 comments

As I write this, there are currently three Obama submissions in the top 5 and four in the top 20. I get it, people are excited. I get excited about things, too. Sometimes they involve computers or programming or business.

Come on guys, you've got four more years with the man. Maybe eight. You don't have to wear the keyboards out in the first week. Exercise some discretion, please -- if Obama puts a bunch of grants for tech startups in the stimulus package let's hear about it.

Obama wears a bullet proof vest? Obama reverses Bush policy decision X? I don't think we'd be noticeably poorer if that kind of story was handled by other forums on the Internet.

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Agreed. If I wanted to see a half dozen stories about Obama, I'd head over to Reddit.

It seems pg is basically ok with these submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444408

I disagree, myself - I'm very happy to have Obama as president, but really don't want to see politics here, even if it's sort of possible to connect it with the site in circuitous way. But it's his site, not mine, so I guess they're a go.

It seems to me like he's talking about that particular story, which deals with something becoming more transparent and accessible. He specifically mentions "hacker values." So I think that for that story at least, we're getting a lot of really relevant discussion over the nature of open government.

Some of these submissions have seemed really off-topic, but the one the comment's on fits pretty well. It works best to go case-by-case. I'm sure people will flag the ones that don't fit in.

We survived the surge in November and things went back to normal - and that one was even worse than this is right now. I think this is just a temporary occurrence.

The topic is certainly OK, I think the OP's point was that we don't need this to become the pseudo Obama-blog documenting his every step and breath.

When some truly significant happens, post it. 8 stories about his Blackberry are hardly useful info.

Since stories don't have a downvote, I'm just upvoting much that's non-Obama.

No offense but you just added another story. People won't get over him for the first couple months.

I think it's very fascinating when you're talking about perhaps the most technologically-saavy president in history. What he does will drastically affect the direction of technology. Nearly all of these articles are related to him, his administration, and technology. It's very relevant.

I'm not even a democrat and I think it's great.

Two points stand:

1. Regardless of how tech savvy he is, the intersection of politics and technology is much smaller than either politics and technology. I come here for tech stuff and politics is just noise I don't care for. It doesn't matter that the politics relates to a tech-savvy politician, it's still politics.

2. For a non-US audience, news about/from the US government is not the be all end all. It may be so in the USA, and there are lots of people living in the US that frequent HN, but I'd wager that a large minority is non-US based.

FWIW, I'm very excited for reasons I won't go into here :)

As a non-US based person, it really doesn't bother me with all the Obama related material that is appearing (which is to be expected as obama-mania is still occurring)

It will die down eventually, just let things run their natural course.

I remember about 7 or 8 months ago or so I had made a string of comments very similar to the one you have made and was subsequently modded down into oblivion. I believe with the new influx of users the line has been blurred as to what qualifies as Hacker News. This is evident with the recent rise in not only political stories and stories pulled right from Reddit/programming. These types submissions are key to maintaining the integrity of a social news website and refreshing in some peoples minds as to what deems a story relevant to the intended goal of a site. New users need to be reminded of what is expected from both comments and submissions or soon the level of intellectualism and substance will be drowned out just like every other website.

Someone might not have the capacity to add much to a conversation or provide any insight, but when they have a point of reference as to was is expected they should still be able to follow accordingly.

This argument wasn't the appropriate side for me to take on months ago so surely it is not appropriate now. If the community decides that this is the direction it will go, then I believe it will suffer the same fate as the other social news sites.

Puleez the article had one line describing how it was different than typical kevlar vests -- wow incredible description of the technology being used.

Explain how the article talking about how Obama making Bush's Record public relates to technology.

I don't know about you guys, but this is called Hacker -News-, not Hacker 'Ignore the News'. Just like you said, he'll be in office for a while, so things will die down. Until then embrace the articles and discuss them. Otherwise, introduce other articles and posts that you think are more important.

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