zlacker

>>jseip+(OP)
The avoidance of controversial topics when talking together is one of those things we Europeans are typically not so good at. I know from many Europeans who like me lived in the US for a while that they had to learn the art of talking without touching controversial subjects. At first it seemed superficial but then I realised that it makes discussions that are not controversial but nevertheless important possible and I came to appreciate it every now and then.

Anyways, it would be nice if we in the settings could apply our own penalizing to subjects that we don't care about or that we find controversial instead of having others decide for us. But that would mean that submissions ranked differently for different users, of couse...

>>flexie+u4
Hacker News has pretty clear guidelines, and reasonably clear subject matter:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Although a lot of people are (IMO) intellectually dishonest in what they really consider intellectually gratifying, rather than simply find themselves strongly agreeing with, or angry about. For instance, US immigration/border policies are something that I feel strongly about, but are they interesting from an intellectual point of view? I don't think so, particularly.

>>davidw+U4
I definitely think jurisdictional issues can be interesting from an intellectual point of view. Especially since the Internet has made many such concepts far less obvious. One could of course argue that discussions (especially outside of obscure technology) rarely reach a level where they become interesting.

>>subsys+g7
Most people here have a lot of domain knowledge about some combination of startups, hacking, and design, meaning they are quite qualified to comment about those things in an interesting way. Domain knowledge about legal issues is limited to a much smaller subset of people here, so discussions have a lot of strong opinions, but not a lot of basis in established laws.

>>davidw+Z7
Domain knowledge about legal issues is limited to a much smaller subset of people here

This is true, but often times we learn quite a bit from conversations digging into eg IP law. The bigger (and unfortunately) more nebulous area is who writes the laws? That is a question of politics, why discussions have a lot of strong opinions.