Hacker News Reader

While in general I approve of the policy here of renaming posts to match the title of the page, the change here done by the mods (to simply "Manchester City Council") makes the whole discussion make no sense. (The original title was "How government sites should be designed".)

View on HN

This wouldn't have happened if the original submission had followed the site guidelines[1]:

> If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

I view it as similar to Wikipedia's "no original research" policy.

[1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If we're gonna follow the guidelines, then the Boston bombing was entirely off-topic and should have been removed immediately instead of getting thousands of points. The only Boston-related on-topic story was Bruce Schneier's view on it, which is also the reason why the other stories should not have been on HN.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Edit: Well that was a quick downvote. Guess the Boston bombing strikes a nerve. But is it so hard to be objective about it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com