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Comment by l33tbro | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm, I think HN is pretty great for interesting news from decent sources (usually Atlantic, NYT, New Yorker, etc). I also think people getting questionably denied entrance to the US is pretty newsworthy given the bomb that has been dropped in the last few days. Maybe don't click if it doesn't interest you?

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If you read the guidelines, it's pretty clear that simply being "newsworthy" is not really what this site is supposed to be about:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That US immigration is f'cked up is not exactly new or interesting in any case - and certainly not "intellectually gratifying". Do you remember when Linus Torvalds had bureaucratic problems with his green card?

They can deny you for any reason. Very literally any reason. It's not newsworthy, they've been able to do this since the US started to control immigration and it is not related to what the NSA has been doing since basically the NSA has been in existence.

People are trying so hard to find tangible evidence of someone doing something with info the NSA has collected that they are latching on to anything that could be construed as such if you look at it believing you found that evidence.

It's almost like that example Doctorow gave about false positives when you're searching for very rare events... now HN is "flagging" every government screw-up involving non-Americans as being due to PRISM.

Unfortunately I can't stop people from voting this stuff up and there is no way for the majority of us to vote it back down.

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