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Comment by tung | Hacker News Reader

It looks like more people agree with you than me, so I'll take the opportunity to at least explain my point of view.

I come to Hacker News to see people talk about technology, innovation, trends, start-ups and tiny projects that pop up that do things that seem so obvious in hind-sight, but are in fact really clever. This recent news about WikiLeaks and Assange I feel don't really fit in any of these categories.

The Hacker News Guidelines [1] may be open to interpretation, but it does explicitly state:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

and

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

There is a bit after the first quote that states "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon," which I suppose is where we disagree. Nonetheless, if you and others feel it fits here, I'll respect your opinions.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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The world is changing around us. Thanks, in large part, to a hacker. It doesn't get much more on topic than that. It's also a very interesting new phenomenon.

When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment.

>When your startup is terminted on PayPal or AWS on dubious ground, come back and leave a comment.

If that was what this post was about then you'd have a point. Wikileaks and Assange's private life are almost entirely orthogonal IMO.

You mean as opposed to say mountain climbing, dietary habits or aspirin ?

I don't see you complaining about things being 'off topic' in those threads.

I might if there are another 20 of them over the next week or two, and they aren't about combining them into an astonishing new mountain climbing strategy that involves aspirin-based dietary habits. :)

I also don't see countless near-dupes of those threads being upvoted

And then killed.

Come off it, you expect him to comment in every thread that he believes is off-topic?

This sort of argument should have a name (I'm sure it does) - "but gov, you didn't complain last time I cleaned your windows badly".

No, it's just that those are far more off-topic than this one.

Off-topic is largely subjective though and there were about a million submitted posts on the same topic. One post can be ignored, multiple posts on the same topic that one finds off-topic probably warrants a comment.

Oh and one more thing: topic, topic, topic topic.

I think what you find on HN is that these fit into grey areas, and basically the community decides on if they stay on the home page or not.

How I look at it is that you are never going to be reading all the articles on the front page right? So if this doesn't interest you it is as simple as skipping it. If one day there is 15+ of these type of grey area links on HN, then that will be a problem, but I just don't see that happening.

I suppose you're right. I just felt frustrated seeing the same topic over and over, and wondered if anybody agreed.

On the whole, Hacker News is a great place, arguably the best of the news aggregation sites on the Internet. Even people who disagree with me here have upvoted other excellent submissions and posted excellent comments, so I'll at least thank them and the community as a whole for those.

The great thing about HN: there's so many good submissions. Don't like what's on the front page? Check out a page or two after it, or put a feed on new submissions. You don't have to read the stories and comment threads about Wikileaks, you know. And when you get more karma, you can even start flagging things! (I don't know the karma threshold.)

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