From the guidelines. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Spectre/Meltdown showed up on the news. Does that mean it's not relevant? Same goes for the Broadcomm purchase blocking. Same goes for whatever statement Elon Musk made this week, or the current SF housing policy. (I chose examples intentionally in "Decreasing-tech-relevancy" order, and could probably go even further and still be picking recurrently front-paging-topics.)
I would also argue that openly placing someone with such a history in charge of an agency we're all under the purview of, one with already such iffy history, is both interesting and new, and to echo my post from the thread in question, the prevalence of corporate governing boards to take members with iffy track records on these subjects to my eyes links the relevance directly with our purview as tech entrepreneurs. (see: Uber Board) I do not believe we (members of the tech community) can abscond the responsibility of involvement that our position affords us.
The "hide" button exists as well, and I've become somewhat saddened by the extent to which HN seems to lean on "flag" for topics which, in an interconnected world, I consider very worth discussing in a tech context. I have a fundamental mental dissonance with the pattern this enables, that "I don't want to see this topic discussed" turns into "I don't want others to see/discuss this topic." HN (and the startup/tech community as a whole) is not a monolith, and if the mechanisms of voting try to structure it that way, I see that as highly unfortunate.
(I don't mean to "complain about points" but it's rather absurd to look at the wild swings from +8 to -8 and back again for any of my posts on this topic. It speaks to me that there are at least two "factions" with very polarizing opinions on this, and the context has turned less from discussion into silencing vs vouching. I certainly don't remember seeing these patterns as strongly 5+ years ago.)