Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment, which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
that political posts and commments have no place on HN.
That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to listen to community consensus here.
I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement
"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."
I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"
http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"
and
"Undergraduation"
http://paulgraham.com/college.html
and
"Is It Worth Being Wise?"
http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing business who wants to hire competent workers.
What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?
as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how XXXX works and how it can be improved
I like other political discussions (of XXXX) here- when the above is adhered to- because I seem to find the facts more quickly here than on any other site. The diverse points of view and contexts of experiences of the people here nearly always makes me realize something I hadn't previously considered. But I think the broader consensus is that too many people won't feel bound to adhere to the facts, and the conversation will tend to devolve as patio11 suggests.
Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.
IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete political threads. Then the definition of politics will be subjective. That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme. What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective action if the experiment starts going wrong.
In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.
"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."
The guidelines grant too much leeway here and make it difficult to educate new members about what's appropriate. Off topic should just read: "NO politics, sports, crime or general news stories." Full stop, no excuses.
Likewise, the on topic section provides too much cover for people to submit just about anything (hard to get more broad than "anything that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity."). I'd rather see tight, specific rules and let the community decide when it's appropriate to bend them.
I've seen these things discussed, and pg has given his opinion on some of them in comment threads, but we should decide and put the answer in the site guidelines.
I've had a few discussions with people on HN that have bordered on political (mostly around Wikileaks and Terrorism) and I think these discussions have left me more rational, as any good discussion should.