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Comment by sittingnut | Hacker News Reader

politics allowed here?

Interesting stories with political overlap are ok (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I don't think one even needs to apply that criterion here, though. It's a story about a politician, but not exactly politics.

Sounds like he hacked the societal expectations of what constitutes a speech via social engineering

twice, the exact same way.

Plus who knows how many more the witness wasn’t privy to.

And the speeches that are to come!

Do you run programs only once? If you have a fabulous spicy pickle recipe and it rescues people from depression and cures alzheimer's, do you chance experimenting with the preparation? ;- )

This does seem like a contradiction of rules.

There's no rule against politics on HN as such (and never has been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869).

The rule is against garden-variety politics—the kind with no intellectually interesting aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Many good HN submissions have some political overlap. That's inevitable and fine as long as people don't use the site for political battle, which takes discussions out of the range this site exists for (the curiosity range). I've written about this a fair bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The no political battle rule though seems to make all direct U.S politics off limits however.

It's a question of what the community is capable of. If a thread can substantively discuss some interesting topic that overlaps with "direct U.S. politics", that's fine. If it degenerates into political battle and flamewar, it's off topic. Preserving the container takes precedence.

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