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If the subject is not technical, it should be removed/flagged.

There is a ton of content here that is non-technical and relevant. Steve Jobs death covered the entire front page, there is policy and regulation, general startup stories, stories of developers in need, etc. Those all get an equal opportunity - so why is there a technical requirement now and only within the context of stories that are related to, dare I say it, the NSA?

The thing is - the very foundational components of everything posted here, technical or not, can/could be impacted by news around this topic. Like I've stated before, it's not that I want more, but I don't want the stories to be buried. I want the good stories with good content and relevancy to have a fair shot.

Your comment around people talking out of their wheelhouses is highly subjective and seems to me, personally, to be rather ignorant. If you constantly stated things about iPhone hardware, but were not a hardware engineer for Apple then you shouldn't be able to comment with that line of thinking. People can talk about whatever they want and people who don't have foundational expertise on a topic can, and do, contribute positively to topics outside their wheelhouse. In some cases those people bring new and interesting perspectives.

Unfortunately the political perspective has irrevocably been tied to the technical one for now. Take what you can from it instead of touting on a soap box that you know better what other people should be talking about and what content should be on HN than the next guy.

I don't think all political discussion should be banned from HN (I do but it's an unreasonable stance, I get that). This NSA story is a unique case, however. It's purposefully being dragged along for the explicit reason of keeping political discussion active, and it's doing that job very well, and for a good cause. I'm highly glad this is how Snowden and Greenwald decided to release this information.

HOWEVER, this is not the only website on the Internet. There's nothing special or novel gained from posting these stories to HN. No one here has any extra or particular insight into these stories.

Please read the essay I linked to. In a conversation about iPhone hardware, a person making a comment will be stating facts, with conclusions and verifiable information. That person is either wrong or right, with little grounds for confusion or grey-area. It's not up to how I feel how many hours of battery life the iPhone is going to grant a user.

Political discussions and religious discussions do not have the benefit of this rigor. Everyone's opinions end up being treated equally, even when they're absolutely not equal. It's a terrible place to try to conduct an intellectual discussion, and I'd like to see this place maintain its reputation for a high level of discourse.

This is currently the first comment on the latest Snowden development (nontechnical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369472

Compare this to another submission comment (technical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6367943

The nontechnial comment provides me nothing but an individual's viewpoint. I can't take that anywhere, I learned nothing except that one individual thinks something, and I'm in no way a better engineer or entrepreneur for having read it. The technical comment, however? Now I have a better understanding of the submission as I've gotten an alternative (slightly different use-case) implementation. That's what HN is here for.

I want things I can walk away from HN with, as I'm here to learn. Nontechnical Snowden stories, as it turns out, aren't stories which provoke any kind of interesting comments on HN, and are therefore interfering with a person's ability to use HN to learn and grow effectively. Therefore, they should go.

I'm curious why then these stories should all be classified as political? If Microsoft was doing this - by itself, it would be a different story, right? Then, and only in contexts like that of which are deemed and vetted as technically founded, can this discussion continue? I get it - the politics of the conversation "get in the way" per se. However to address your point - there is no way to vet a lot of this information as it's not verifiable, that's the problem. If the iPhone had an embedded back door and now documents came to light showing how a new kind of processor has been hidden in the silicone, yet Apple wouldn't provide documentation around it - that conversation can't happen because there's no verifiable yes or no answer? There's a million ways you can spin a closed minded approach. It seems to me as if you're trying to build a box around very static content, of which HN is not.

I agree that HN is useful when you can take something away from it, learn from it. However, in all fairness, the essay you linked to says nothing about a strict guideline about "technical" discussions. It's also not addressing this grey area where technical problems, that are not verifiable, and are tied to government all intersect. To me that makes this topic not a closed case of binary true or false regarding it's place on HN.

That's why I like HN though, there are a lot of smart people to discuss these sort of issues - technical or technically related.

If you can't see the difference between a political/religious discussion and a technical discussion, then we will never come to any kind of agreement on this topic, because my entire basis for thinking submissions should be removed is because they're too political and not technical enough.

If you're just arguing a level of degree, then that's a non-starter; the HN admins are the arbiters of degree, and will decide which discussions to keep around and which not to. That's how it's always been. In fact, this whole discussion is at least partially moot, given the fact that this very poll was created by a user. There is no indication that the people in charge of HN care about this issue, at all.

HN is useful because the commenters are highly knowledgable in their technical field, and the comments these people leave and the discussions these people foster are unlike anywhere else on the Internet. These technical people are not useful for political commentary. Politics is hard, and HN turns into an echo chamber very quickly. It's useless, and should therefore be stopped.

I would just say that it's unfortunate you're unable to concede that technical and political items can and will intersect.

Good luck in your quest for a binary reality and acceptance of the current state of affairs based solely in the fact that an ideal should be preserved for reasons of technical merit alone. Unfortunately for you political commentary will continue, especially along the lines of this topic, and if it is pushed into submission I would gather the majority would call it out for what it is.

You're generalizing, when I haven't been. I'm speaking very specifically about individual stories related to the Snowden leaks.

This isn't about my life outlook or my political views or if my daddy loved me when I was a kid, it's about the flood of nontechnical stories being submitted, and the worthlessness of the subsequent comments sections.

What you don't seem to understand is that nothing on HN is going to change as a result of this poll. HN admins are holden to no one, they act independently of HN users.

I do not think the opinion of a person who works with computers for a living has a more privileged opinion than anyone else.

I do, however, enjoy coming here very day and reading the opinions of that subset of the population. That's why I continue to upvote NSA-related threads and voted "I wanted more."

So you might say you allocate additional "privilege" to this subset of the population's opinions?

I don't think it's wise to do that, but I understand why one might think it a good idea.

> So you might say you allocate additional "privilege" to this subset of the population's opinions?

Not in the slightest.

I checked the definition of "privilege" - a special right, immunity - and I have no idea why you think I communicated that at all.

All I said was that I enjoy reading the opinions of the Hacker News population on topics that go beyond startups/technology.

I think when you say "enjoy" you really mean "value". Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it reads, to me. I think valuing these opinions is a bad idea, because they're not special.

I think that is a stretch. One can certainly enjoy reading opinions from people they place no special value on. I enjoy reading the opinions of idiots just for comedic value. ;)

Why stop there ? I definitely want to know HN's opinion on knitting, kite surfing, food preparation, Game of Thrones, car maintenance as well.

They are equally relevant to worldwide "hackers" as US-only politics.

Knock yourself out, submit articles about those things.

One of the most interesting articles I've read from HN was about citrus fruit and polar exploration. Real enlightening stuff. If you've got good kite-surfing articles, submit them.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912)

I agree. When I say "technical" I don't mean "computer science" specifically, although I was leaning that way when I originally wrote the comment. I hadn't thought of stories like the one you linked to, but those have a place here, most certainly.

>If the subject is not technical, it should be removed/flagged.

Incorrect. See the HN FAQ. Political discussions are allowed (saying only that most are discouraged implies that certain ones are. If there ever was one, this is it).

It's not incorrect that I feel that way about this specific story, which is the question being asked.

Of course you can feel any way you wish, but please realize that per the first line of the HN FAQ, this is on topic, and your assertion that valid topics you don't wish to see should be flagged is an abuse of the feature and rules of the site.

I hope you can see the distinction.

I don't think the HN FAQ was written with this situation in mind, and thus don't consider it a useful reference when determining a course of action for this specific problem.

Perhaps one submission should contain the sum of political discourse on the topic, and all other submissions should contain the technical discourses.

> but please realize that per the first line of the HN FAQ, this is on topic

Hang on - there's a big difference between saying "not all political stories are off topic" and saying "this political topic is on-topic".

Many of the NSA submissions are clearly off topic and have no purpose for HN.

>Hang on - there's a big difference between saying "not all political stories are off topic" and saying "this political topic is on-topic".

I'm saying both.