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 first TSA post was (marginally) germane. The TSA is now on the front page of CNN. Unfortunately, HN "blessed" the topic by spinning off gigantic discussion threads on early TSA stories. So, even though this is a current events topic currently being covered on network TV news, it still finds a place here.
I bring this up not to further the argument about the TSA on Hacker News, but rather to demonstrate a pathology that occurs when we accept borderline stories that end up breeding months-long narratives in dribs-and-drabs. I also say this as someone who has written many hundreds of words here in comments on TSA stories.
As for filtering the front page: you might as well suggest "sub-HN's", like Reddit. Part of the point of the site is that it focuses a lot of interesting brains on a single spool of stories and discussions.
PS: For what it's worth, this is actually not a tech-centric community full of tech-centric ideas for community building problems. HN is a deliberately simple site curated by a single guy who started it as a demo for his programming language and liked where it went. Very few of the technical ideas anyone has proposed for this site have been tried, much less adopted; that's just not how HN works. This is a community governed by norms more than by code.
I'm not taking sides here, and throwing the rulebook at me isn't helping to solve the problem.
The filtering suggestions was the first example technological approach to solving the problem that popped into my head. I agree that there's a danger of fragmenting the community with that sort of change, but filtering out '-TSA' is hardly the equivalent of having a 'TSA sub-HN'.
Regardless of whether the filtering idea is good or not, I'd like to see more suggestions on how to fix the problem.
and they cover Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. on TV news. they all seem to be popular on HN
If we're going to "- TSA" filter the site, I'd be happy if 'pg just fired up a REPL and did that to news.arc.
That there is someone here that can write engagingly about the dosimetry of backscatter machines proves my point. Yes, there are TSA discussions that have value to HN. That's the mouse hole the swarm of TSA stories crept in through. This is the pathology I'm talking about.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting" is a norm that is being abused.
The guidelines leave an opening for politics and even religion, so long as you're contributing something genuinely new, which has been true of a few of the TSA stories.
The rest need to be flagged aggressively.