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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

It's very related! From the HN guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

The release of major new documents about a major historical event that still has major side effects today easily clears that bar. What's not related are comments like "how is this even remotely related":

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Story: interesting.

Result thread on HN: nightmare.

For me, that suggests we keep it off the front page, but I'm just one me.

Basically, the problem with your argument is that the quality and tone of the comments on even purely technical stories is equally sad these days on HN.

So you're saying there's a correlation between the rise of the political stories, and decline of the technical content?

Seems plausible to me.

That is exactly what I was thinking, yes.

When I posted, there was no thread to speak of. Now that I've seen it, I can't disagree.

And you could argue that replacing governments is political "hacking" on the grande scale.

This is 'argument by smurf', wherein the word takes on whatever meaning you want it to mean. Smurf me that smurf, Handy Smurf!

why not? is not the core of "hacking" finding alternate ways to solve problems working out side the rules meta gaming if you will.

How is not propaganda and direct action not hacking the political system.

And

> why not? is not the core of "hacking" finding alternate ways to solve problems working out side the rules meta gaming if you will.

Politics is about establishing/modifying/eliminating rules that we all live by. Like the 4th amendment, to name something germane to an ongoing controversy. Going outside the rules often leads to bad things. That's why it's called "the rule of law".

> How is not propaganda and direct action not hacking the political system.

Because there's nothing particularly clever or unique or "hacky" about it. It's what groups like the NOW, NRA, EFF, Sierra Club, ACLU, etc.... etc.... do, and have been doing for years. It's a slog and involves lots of work, and money. That's how politics works when divisive issues are involved.

You obviously haven't seen the power of a properly worded motion or amendment in the political arena.

Why does a hack have to be clever or unique or even involve computers? I have done a few hacks to solve problems which were not pretty or particularly clever but they did solve the problem.

One "hack" from my early years was projecting film from an experimental rig's high speed camera against a wall covered with graph paper and performing manual digitization of a [REDACTED] by stepping the film though one frame at a time.

So by that logic, if you got enough people from reddit to come here and upvote political stories and conspiracy theories, it would de facto be Hacker News.

Well good thing that's not happening.

You're account is not even a day old. You should read the guidelines about how when you're new here you probably shouldn't be saying this site is turning into reddit.

Also its relevant because it contextualizes the whole us intelligence apparatus -a topic very relevant given the impact on internet business and traffic.

This is a throw away. My main account is about 2 years younger than yours.

How can you not see that the rhetoric here has declined drastically over the past year? Do you disagree that there are significantly more political/non-technical stories reaching the front page?

Even if you agree with the gist arguments being made, disregard your personal politics and beliefs in coming to an assessment.

Making a throwaway and arguing the points as vaguely and indirectly as you are with it - combined with your focus on derailing conversation with tangent about politeness or whatever is certainly not helping the situation. There have been a lot of "green" accounts arguing very incoherently based largely on appeal to emotion in the last several days - I agree it's frustrating and very distracting from the usually high level of discourse. However the topics are also something a bit new for this place - extremely relevant things about policy that affects the community a whole, wrapped up in national discussion and culture wars, so there is some adjustment required.

Your actions of creating a throwaway to preserve karma or keep people from knowing your actual thoughts are contributing to the problem you are complaining about.

How should I react to a brand new user account - actually a whole set of them (not that any others are you, not accusing you of that) spewing vitriol and vague stances, and engaging in seriously poor debate form? My initial and continued reaction is that they are some form of sockpuppetry.

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