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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk - SpaceX and Tesla have been on HN pretty consistently this year, and it's an inspiring option, too.

Snowden is not a bad choice, especially since he'll probably be snubbed by the Times in favor of the politically safe Miley Cyrus, but he's not really in tech. Satoshi Nakamoto should have been the HN POY last year (or next year once BTC goes really mainstream).

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How can you say Snowden is not "in tech"? He revealed the entire global internet to be something different than we thought it was. It is political but that doesn't mean it's not technology.

There's no question that the information he leaked concerns technology, but at the same time it's clear this is a throughly political problem. So that's how I can say that Snowden is not in tech, because he's not and the whole NSA storyline is only incidentally about tech. Believe me, I'm as pissed off about the whole affair as anyone, but this is a world stage event and I was thinking a HN POY could be, at least in principle, "one of our own", as poorly defined as that concept might be.

On the flip side, getting a job working at the NSA and smuggling out hundreds of Top Secret documents, talking to a bunch of reporters across the globe to orchestrate a controlled release of the information, all while seeking asylum and evading capture is a pretty neat hack.

since you put it that way, I agree also.

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