The snowden petition gets buried, the NY times misleading BS title stays and now this fluff piece of propaganda gets on front page.
HN is just another tool of propaganda for the white house.
There are 10% of things people disagree on. There are a lot of things ~everyone agrees on. The political thing is to tie up everything waiting for the 10%. The tech solution is to do the 90% and defer the 10%.
I want to make government and society better; I don't want to be a tool used to enable further entrenchment of incumbent policies. I voted for Obama twice; disgusted doesn't really suffice for how I feel about how him, Kerry, et el are handling current tech policy.
Does the Bernie Sanders campaign have any volunteer technology team positions open?
The manufactured idea of partisanship in US politics is a very elaborate but worn out misdirection.
The Snowden petition thing is inconsequential theater. There's no new information in it, and so nothing substantive in the thread, just people repeating pre-existing opinions. That's not what HN is for. Threads like that routinely fall off the front page, mostly because of the flamewar detector, but we downweight them too. Such stories don't gratify intellectual curiosity because they're predictable.
The other two articles contain substantive reporting, so are fine here. That doesn't mean we endorse what they say or share their politics, whatever those may be.