zlacker

>>nicola+(OP)
Question for the mods:

In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> 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.

But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.

Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?

P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.

>>awb+r8
As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result.

I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little.

I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from a centrist that typically doesn't care for political discussion on any medium.

>>bin_ba+wa
As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result.

As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc.

And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.

>>mindcr+pd
I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy.

History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.

A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.