There's no "non-political rule", as you'll see if you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and in fact HN hosted a huge frontpage thread about this issue just a few days ago:
You guys should familiarize yourselves with how this site is operated, because it has been explained endlessly (to the limit of my patience, in fact) over many years, and the assumptions you're making do not match reality. If you want to do that, you'll find entrypoints into thousands of past explanations in my comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724590.
> This site is owned by ycombinator, who have a motivation to "not rock the boat"…
I’d argue that leadership of ycombinator is glad where this boat is sailing. Just look who are they inviting to advertised AI startup school at the bottom of this site.
The founder of Gumroad works inside DOGE now. One of the founders of AirBNB works inside DOGE now. Musk founded DOGE. Peter Thiel's Palantir is generating the information for ICE now.
Some further context for anyone who reads this and thinks it's a factual or plausible summation of the factors that influence HN moderation:
- Gumroad is not a YC-funded company and its founder has no influence on YC or HN.
- Joe Gebbia is just one of more than ten thousand YC-backed founders and does not represent YC or influence HN.
- Of the other people named, none has any official role or influence at YC, and only one of them has ever had a formal role; a brief, minor role that ended over seven years ago. At least two of those named have had very public, bitterly hostile disputes with former presidents of YC and founders of notable YC companies.
- The only person with any role/influence at YC who publicly espouses any position on U.S. federal politics is Paul Graham, who tweets almost daily in staunch opposition to the current U.S. administration.
- HN moderators and YC management know that HN is only valuable if it is a place where people can find content and discussions that engage intellectual curiosity, and the surest way to destroy its value is to allow it to be captured by any political or ideological agenda.
Paul Graham is actively discouraging people from working for Palantir if it is building technology that helps the government violate the U.S. constitution:
I doubt they need to adjust the algorithim though to get rid of politics heavy posts specifically.
I’m pretty sure anything that gets more than twice as many comments than upvotes gets a huge downrank penalty, such that they would almost never hit the front page without moderator intervention.
I didn't mention Nazism, I said _fascist salute_. The fascist movement that was popular earlier in the 20th century and led to Nazism, but is not exclusively limited to it. The adoption of the "Roman" salute was from Italian fascism, which the Germans borrowed.
I agree, and there’s plenty of political discussion here. E.g. Navalny’s death / murder was discussed wildly here, but is completely irrelevant to tech. (If this resource pretends it’s about tech.) Politics is ok, unless it’s politics we don’t like you to talk about.
They did not. Very specifically, only flagged articles are the ones that paint current president or current republican leadership very badly while going into details.
That is only flagged kind of article. Other political articles are fine.
Decision to be non political would lead to different selection of articles to be banned.
If things like these happen, staying silent is — guess what — political.
If your neighbours are being taken away by state police there is no non-political move you can make. Helping the police is political, ducking away and pretending it is not helping is political and hiding them is political as well.
While I understand that this site tries to not drown in the flaming garbage site that online political discourse can be, if I — the exact demographic who startups would like to have working for them would list precisely this as my main concern stopping me from moving into the US it is a bit odd that it is verboten to discuss it.
Hackers historically were (and are) extremely critical of authority and for the freedom of knowledge, and now we can't discuss an direct attack at those very values on a site that calls itself Hackernews? Come on.
It sounds like a few software projects I've worked on. Incorrect base assumptions and not swapping out the components that were made unwieldy by those assumptions not reflecting reality.
I was thinking that the US marshals need to be the enforcement arm of the courts. But I am not sure if that would help much in the current situation.
Maybe police and federal enforcement agencies should be solely under Congress? At least then senior people can actually get fired for obeying unlawful orders from the executive.
The judicial branch is meant only to provide clarify of laws on the books. I'm not sure what they would do with an enforcement agency, and I'd be worried about what that would do with regards to the types of people attracted to those judicial positions.
The legislative branch already has a lot of power. I'd be very concerned giving them the direct control, or even shared control, over enforcement. They should be controlling enforcement through legislation.
That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there. That is a very good reason to otherwise limit the authority of the executive branch though, and why executive orders as used today shouldn't be legal (they effectively are a legislative branch with the enforcement agencies).
The legislative branch can pass a law requiring enforcement, likely within some specified parameters or timeline. If that passes and is constitutional, the courts could be tested and uphold the law.
Ok, but (a) they won't, and (b) if they do, who carries out the actual removal of the president from power? ... oh, right, the executive branch, again. Oops.
If your concerns are only procedural, surely congress could fix that if they cared. If they actually had the vote to impeach they could likely have the voter to either pass new law or amend the constitution to ensure the removal is enforced.
Were we? This chain started with the idea of getting rid of the concept of the president and moving to a parliamentary system. Then it shifted a bit into giving the judicial branch its own law enforcement agency.
Those both risk creating a constitutional crisis, not avoiding one.
Amending the Constitution to create a judicial law enforcement agency would not, in itself, be a Constitutional crisis. Or if you meant that such an agency could then cause one, yeah that could happen in theory, but so could the Executive causing a crisis because the courts don't have an enforcement arm. And to act like the President causing the crisis isn't the more likely scenario in 2025 would be stupifyingly ignorant.
Congress already have the Capitol police which they could have arrest anyone they think committed a felony in any jurisdiction and have top jurisdiction in DC and any government building within it.
And I'm of the opinion that the capitol police should be limited only to acting as a security force for the Capitol itself. They shouldn't be enforcing anything beyond building security.
It could be a little smaller, but compared to the USA plug and socket it's pure perfection.
USA plugs have prongs that are so thin they bend. The prongs act as a hinge that lets the plug pivot away from the wall to expose the live prongs! And most USA sockets don't have ground on top to block anything resting over those exposed live prongs.
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