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0 pointsryandrake1y ago0 comments

"About politics" is kind of vague. It's not like an article is either political or it's not. If you saw these headines at the top of HN, which of these would you consider "too political" and worthy of flagging?

- "Funding for NASA's next science mission in question"

- "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems"

- "State governors band together to propose new cyber-security rules"

- "UK government again takes aim at encryption"

- "List of IT systems DOGE staff members have access to"

Are all of these things just not-discussable here anymore, merely because they brush up against a government or politics?

0 comments

dang1y ago

That's correct. I use the tagphrase "political overlap" to post about this, so there's a trail of past explanations about how we handle this here (if anyone doesn't already know, and wants to):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

fngjdflmdflg1y ago

Well there are two qualifiers there:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

and

>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."

fngjdflmdflg1y ago

(For the record https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged shows zero entries for me.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

dang1y ago

That's correct. I use the tagphrase "political overlap" to post about this, so there's a trail of past explanations about how we handle this here (if anyone doesn't already know, and wants to):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

fngjdflmdflg1y ago

Well there are two qualifiers there:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

and

>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

fngjdflmdflg1y ago

(For the record https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged shows zero entries for me.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse