Pretty sure this is a feature not a bug. Most people aren’t here for political topics.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
To the latter point, hundreds of comments in, and nobody has even brought up the intellectual curiosity angle of this (what limits are in place to the Federal government using data from Federal programs for law enforcement purposes? and does it matter if the program is administered by individual states?).
Instead it's just political rage bait, including citing the Rev Niemöller poem as if we're talking about Nazis.
(It used to be part of Internet culture that the moment you compared something mundane to the Nazis, you automatically lost the argument and were mocked mercilessly. We should bring that back.)
What if I'm concerned that leaving such topics up would attract more of the kind of people that prefer discussing these topics over tech topics?
Hiding doesn't fix the problem.
There is no way you just wrote this wtffff
I also think there’s very few places with the power to meaningfully dialog with and among people who build stuff in Silicon Valley. I have dozens of friends, coworkers, etc who are in FAANG or the newer big tech companies, and all of them are extremely well paid, and most will insist they work for positive reasons. I believe in that most of them believe in other people, and don’t want to build a surveillance society or one that concentrates all wealth and power in a few.
For this reason, I think that some conversations on here are important to have - the impact technology is having on people who are outside the tech sphere, the effect of leaders of our companies on the economy, geopolitics, and power generally. Mark Facebook is a powerful player on the world stage. So is Paul Graham, and Sundar Pichai. Davos just took place - leaders from major economies are seeking guidance from these people who many people here work for. Let nobody say they aren’t participating in politics. Where you work matters, what you build matters. It’s not tinkering around in people’s garages anymore - they’re building the infinity gauntlet and someone is gathering all the gems. The Death Star plans are on AWS.
To pretend otherwise is to deny one’s responsibility - in the short term frequently profitable. In the long term, the pendulum tends to swing back..
If your problem is that you have no means to control what other people find important enough to talk about on a public forum, in their spare time, or that the means at your disposal to do so are insufficient to make other people saying things that make you uncomfortable go away... That isn't a problem that can or should should be fixed. Hell, the desire you've expressed could be uncharitably interpreted being contributory to part of the problem that has people around you discussing politics in the first place.
The government doing bad things is a political topic.
How the government is using technology to do bad things is both a political and technology topic.
Technology, technology leaders, and technology companies are literally driving politics, buying elections, driving the whole US economy.
Saying what “political” topics are IS political - and it’s decidedly a right wing position. Only those with the powers protecting them get to avoid politics.
[1] When representatives spend something like 4+ hours a day fundraising, people have good reason to say "this is f-ed up." https://gai.georgetown.edu/an-inside-look-at-congressional-f...
You never see the "no politics please thk u" crowd when it is about protests in Iran, Chinese oppression in Hong Kong, Russian aggression on Europe or hell, when people were literally running a political campaign the EU to stop killing games. You only see people flagging political submissions when it is a particular kind of politics - just like you only see corrupt officials jailed when they are a certain kind of officials.
Connect the dots, make your own conclusions.
I think that forums like this one should discuss politics as affected by computer code seeing as HN is one of the main (for lack of a better word) computer programmers' forums based/located in/with a focus on SV, it's not some random computer forum which specializes in some random computer programming issue.
Hacker News is not lambda-the-ultimate.org, seeing them as similar is part of that hiding behind the bush, people commenting on here actually work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet, Meta and the like, companies whose recent involvement in politics affects us all, at a worldwide level. Also see this recent FT article [1] in connection with how the leaders of those companies have gotten a lot reacher since Trump ascended to power for a second time.
> Tech titans lined up for Trump’s second inauguration. Now they’re even richer
> Silicon Valley bosses who lined up behind the US president for his inauguration have fared well under his administration
[1] https://archive.ph/https://www.ft.com/content/674b700e-765d-...
This forum is for hacker news. Some people believe tech news related to politics qualifies, some don't.
Your perspective is equally arbitrary. You have no reasoning, no justification. So stop pretending you do.
Weather is political - Climate change, fossil fuel policy etc etc.
I rest my case.
"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Or rather, most people aren’t here to have their preconceived notions challenged by reality.
Politics is a nebulous term for topics that affect a large number of the population. Tech intersects with politics all the time and deserves good faith discussion.
Still, I was down voted a lot when I said there's too much politics here.
There was a time when SV and technology eschewed politics, but that time is long gone. You only have to look at how often all the big tech CEO's end up at random Whitehouse events to see how they are intimately intertwined now.
Presumably there’s so much pushback now because people are quite uncomfortable having to confront the fact that they may be the bad guys (even though they were probably the bad guys years ago as well).
Not rewriting at all.
Nien-hê Hsieh, a professor of business ethics at Harvard University says that in the 1990s, “there was a real reluctance or reticence to engage in Washington” from the leading tech companies of the day.
...
The early 2010s saw huge growth in lobbying spending by tech companies. A plateau in the late Obama years was followed by another steep increase once Trump took office. But in recent years some major players have slowed or even decreased their spending, suggesting that major corporations are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to wielding power on Capitol Hill.
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/reve...
Looking at the vote numbers on these posts before they get flagged would suggest otherwise.
Ok, I'm not "here for political topics" but I'm here to discuss things with my peers in tech. Mostly that's tech news, yes, but not always.