Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don't get it. Just because something outrages you doesn't make it HN material. IMHO, the story is 90% politics. Sure, there may be some interesting HN bits, like the tech aspects of how the data was collected, but the morality and legality and the politics of the question are basically side issues that generally lead to intractable flame wars and whatnot and contribute to the redditization of HN.

Exhibit A, from yesterday:

"I hate to use this tone but, so be it. Maybe now you morons who continue to vote in the pieces of shit into our government who are bent on taking more and more power for themselves will wake up and figure it out? How much more proof do you need? Does this make you angry yet or is Obama still your diety? Oh, and Republicans don't get a pass either.

The point is that all of you morons voting like robots along party lines are destroying my country, from the inside, one fucking vote at a time."

This is the sort of tone that makes me want to leave this site for good. It's not that I'm not interested/concerned about this subject -- hell, hit me up for a beer and we can discuss politics all day long -- I just don't think that we need to discuss it here, in dozens of threads.

Exactly. Note that despite the plethora of articles, there is virtually no new content. The issue is an important one, both the breaking story and the details, but layers of political discourse on top of them don't strike me as particularly useful or what I used to consider "HN-worthy," nor do any of them seem likely to produce positive change (i.e. either a coordinated response to a large problem or an alternative system).

So at this point I am also considering leaving HN for good.

And no matter how smart the crowd here is when it comes to technology, discussing history or politics here is like talking to children. Many of the comments around here today sound like they came from the Drudge Report. It's embarrassing.

Completely agree. Every so often I promote hacker news through twitter, such that my own "brand image" is associated with Hacker News. Today I am completely ashamed to be associated with this twaddle. A couple of days ago a long discourse defending child pornography, today this stuff. Time to start with a new slate!

Well considering that a large portion of us are responsible for our user's data (from small to large) it's a very hot topic that is pertinent to what we do on a daily basis.

We may discuss business decisions over email, we might even exchange information via Facebook, even if we're sensible enough not to do this with critical information that doesn't mean our whole company knows the score.

It impacts the kind of promises we can make to our clients about the safety of their information and makes us have to consider the usage of these popular services.

As a brief example we have a facebook import function that enables a user to import some limited information about their friends. This means that if someone uses this function on our site then Facebook will probably track that access. That means that when someone is using our site someone else is tracking them. Sure that's not a big problems in most cases but it is in some. Do my terms and conditions even cover that? What if I've previously erroneously made the claim that we don't track usage on the site?

I think all these are interesting and relevant questions, but these aren't (typically) what are being discussed. Instead we're going down well worn paths about libertarianism and whatnot...

I understand that basically all I can really do is flag what I think should be flagged and whatnot, so this just falls into the category of "pointless whinging about HN degradation."

This story lies at the heart of many entrepreneurial technology matters. I disagree wholeheartedly that the story is 90% political. This is electronic surveilance on a broad scale, thus it impacts any startup that is handling user-data. Not to mention, it creates tons of opportunities for secure communications startups. This is an issue with one foot in politics and another foot in the IT industry. We'd all be well served to pay very, very close attention to how this plays out.

I agree with you, in principle. I would like to see less politics on HN as well. But I will admit to allowing myself to get sucked into a few of these debates... and this NSA one is a bit different in my mind. I mean, yeah, you're right that it doesn't necessarily need dozens of threads, but there are important aspects that link this to HN and our crowd. Especially the technological aspects of how to protect our data, and our users' data from PRISM and its ilk, and the sociological aspects of how to educate people on the importance of encryption and the like.

I think the topics have a place on here (and really, it's supply and demand, so I have a hard time complaining about what people decide to upvote). Regardless, I agree with you about that particular poster. The tone is incendiary, and the content is ignorant. It's feel-good, meaningless tripe. It's the lowest common denominator of critical thinking: "Oh look at how smart I am because I recognize the situation is 'bad' and when will you sheep all wake up?" This sophomoric argument is the most ignorant, because it sits in between admitting you don't know something and actually doing research to become informed.

Dude....it's the inet.

People say dumb shit all the time.

Just downvote it and move on. No need to get heated about it.

IMHO, the story is 90% politics.

To Americans, it is a politics-as-usual discussion. To the rest of the world, however, there has to be a strong question as to how rational it is to federate much of the world's data to American corporations that fall under the realm of American intelligence and legal purview. This is going to have much broader influence on the data practices of multinational organizations.

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