Lawmakers Say Redacted Pages of 9/11 Report Show Saudi Official Met Hijackers | Hacker News Reader

Lawmakers Say Redacted Pages of 9/11 Report Show Saudi Official Met Hijackers

losangeles.cbslocal.com

18 pointsrfreytag15 comments

Which doesn't support the "truther" narrative in any way, of course.

But adds incremental evidence to the support the observation that there's still a lot we're not being told about how the attacks were orchestrated, and who their financial supporters were.

This is super duper off-topic for HN...

I've been on HN for a very long time (3207 days) and have seen it ebb and flow over time, but recently I've seen the front page inundated by stories that feel like a dilution of the formerly start-up and technology focussed news stories that were here.

For example: this story, another about a Verizon strike, one about multinational corporations, one about NPR, one about The Guardian evolving, one about Blackwater.

Lots of us read HN from outside the US and do so to read about technology. Any chance we can get back to that?

Tech was the talk, but tech is useless without business, and so we see business news. Business is linked with government so the interests overlap. A story about tech could be just as much about government or even morally perculiar individuals.

An article I posted a few weeks ago about Saddam Hussein's failed "Supergun" project (based on the work of a physicist designing satellite deployment alternatives to rockets) fits all of these categories.

I see plenty of articles on HN regularly about SF/Bay Area living conditions, housing prices, policing....none of these are explicitly about tech, but HN readers eat it up. Where do we draw the line? Should we?

From the 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.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

By these criteria, the posted article would seem to be an edge case. I lean toward the "on-topic" side, because it isn't just reporting some routine disaster -- rather it touches (quite deeply, in my view) on the nature of how we really come know about important events that affect our daily lives.

And because this information damn well should have been covered on TV news, around the time it was known to investigators. Why it wasn't is, in my view, certainly a valid question to ask.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This is about politics. It is off-topic. You can argue how the rules are written, but as they currently stand, this is off-topic, by definition.

OK - we interpret the rules differently, then.

Nope, this is not up for interpretation. It literally says, "politics is off-topic" in what you quoted.

It literally says, "politics is off-topic" in what you quoted.

That's very plainly not what it says.

Twisting the words around (when the direct quote is just a couple of centimeters above your reworked version, for all to see) doesn't exactly help your case, either.

BTW it's kind of weird you would claim that "politics is off-topic", when it only takes a few seconds to dig into your own comment history and pull up stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455942

Nope, this is not up for interpretation.

Find someone else to boss around, please.

Politics is off topic, that's clear to anyone who reads the rules. Don't make this about you or me, that's pointless and small.

That I'm human and capable of making mistakes doesn't mean what I just said is wrong now.

No, it says "most stories about politics".

I think you need to review the definition of the word "most", and then read the section on what is on-topic, as well. When you do, you'll realize that there is no black and white objective line, and that's by design.

I'm playing the odds, and using my judgement. Combined, this submission is most certainly not what PG had in mind when he founded HN.

I could be wrong, but I don't see how.

You are wrong, because this comes up ALL THE TIME, and the simple answer is that it's not off-topic if enough HN members find it interesting enough to upvote.

Assuming you are not aware of this already, you may want to check HN classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic which only displays posts from people with sufficiently old accounts, IIRC. The Blackwater and NPR post seem to be on that list, though.

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