Presumably, you have read through the comments of the referenced thread[1]. If so, your essay omits a perspective about politics dicussion that many HN participants have. I'll attempt to summarize that position:
1) Yes, politics is extremely important.
2) Yes, politics touches every subject.
3) Yes, HN readers perform technical work in programming and hardware that affects politics, and vice versa.
4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.
5) The overall net effect of political discussion on HN is negative and we'd rather not have 1 of the valuable 30 slots of the front page taken up by a political story (e.g. "Trump denies climate change.")
To reiterate the points above, it does not mean "climate change" is unimportant or that HN posters are "burying their head in the sand". That's a 1-dimensional caricature of the people who'd rather get their diet of political discourse from somewhere else besides HN.
Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN. Your essay doesn't address this perspective.
A lot of the best posts on HN are narrowly specialized, so that apart from maybe asking questions, most HN commenters can't contribute much (but benefit from reading!).
But political arguments are available to every member of the site, no matter how specialized the story might be.
So we get situations like Amazon announcing Route 53, and the thread being hijacked with comments about how Amazon handled Wikileaks, or a new paper on measuring and mitigating statistical bias in machine learning algorithms hijacked with comments about political correctness.
Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.
We also inevitably get technical threads being derailed by people complaining that the posted site blocks their ad-blockers, is behind a paywall or uses javascript, but for some reason those aren't considered as off-topic as tangential politics.
Maybe the quality of the political discussion is so crappy because we don't talk about it?
My experience is that one has to express their emotional relationship to problems and be aware of it before they can actually insightfully engage with problems; if people don't, they just introduce their emotional biases into their problem solving and pretend they're not.
That works in personal therapy. If you expect people in a thread of hundreds of partisan comments to have some kind of catharsis, please see r/politics.
It's too complex of a topic and too emotional to be discussed in a large group setting.
But wait a second, the "detox experiment" was abandoned after only two days. 'dang summarized the learnings as
"it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus because that question is itself highly political, and that HN is at its best when it can meander through all the (intellectually) interesting things, some of which inevitably have political dimensions."
Yes, and the key words there are "intellectually interesting" (as opposed to other kinds of interesting) and "some".
The other thing to understand is that this has always been the policy. It hasn't changed, other than the few times we've run explicitly temporary experiments, like the no-politics one or Erlang day as described elsewhere in this thread.
> 4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.
Disagree. Because what about that phrase from extreme programming / devops: Bring the pain forward.
I was personally really disappointed in premise of the detox -- though perhaps more retrospectively as time wore on and I saw this place neutered. I now go elsewhere for my fix of political ideation and creativity.
> Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN.
I grudgingly fell into this category. For a long time, I was frustrated that certain technology-related political topics were being banished from HN, but watching what is happening to other online communities I must accept that this is the best practice. I used to love Slashdot, but that community has grown completely toxic, and I blame the flame-war political discussions for its decline.
I heavily follow the Science Online community on twitter because I loved the sense of wonder I got from the articles all the PhDs were sharing. Now I open twitter, get infected with their outrage, and take it out on my political-opposites on Facebook. I've had to limit my social media exposure and unfollow a lot of people in an effort to stay out of that bad mental place.
I need a place where I can forget about politics and recharge my sense of wonder. We need to keep HN a sanctuary for rationality and promoting human-improvability.
Yes, much political discourse on HN tends to be lower quality.
However, trying to establish HN as a "politics-free zone" is not only impossible but deeply problematic when so many of us work on things that are politically important. (I'm trying to avoid rehashing the whole article's argument again here.)
Getting your diet of political discourse somewhere else effectively means staying in your ideological filter bubble when you talk about politics. The political discussions here are valuable precisely because we can't do that here; HN members are self-selected by interests that cross-cut political lines.
The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization, and the underlying motivation for some is the desire to treat tech and the work we do as apolitical, because to do otherwise would have uncomfortable consequences.
The political discussions here are valuable precisely because we can't do that here; HN members are self-selected by interests that cross-cut political lines.
That's only the case because the guidelines and moderation practices are set up to keep political flamewars off the site. Those benefits would evaporate very quickly if HN was allowed to become a political free-for-all.
The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization.
The difficulty of political discussion isn't the rationalisation; the rationalisation is the predictability and mundaneness, and pointless incivility; i.e., people get emotionally heated, but resolve nothing and nobody learns anything. Nobody benefits and the quality of the site only degrades.
Topics related to politics are discussed here quite successfully all the time, and when it happens it's because the topic and resulting discussion is gratifying to one's curiosity and/or evidence of some interesting new phenomenon , as per the site guidelines.
the underlying motivation for some is the desire to treat tech and the work we do as apolitical, because to do otherwise would have uncomfortable consequences.
Few people are intelligent and socially-aware enough to be a high achievers in their business or career and yet naïve enough to think that their work is apolitical. And plenty of prominent HN contributors are perfectly capable of expressing strong political positions in their tweets and blog posts but keeping them out of their comments on HN.
I agree that the net effect of general political discussion on HN is negative.
Jacques M did not post his article to HN though - that was someone else. He put it it on his own blog, where surely he's entitled to talk about politics if he wants to.
Furthermore, in the article there's no mention of Trump anywhere. He's taking about the intersection of politics and technology, and surely there needs to be a metaspace to talk about that somewhere, even if that space is not on HN? (For example, SO has a meta.) Otherwise, if we Hackers cede that metaspace entirely then the lawyer types who run the world from Davos will just decide for us. [1]
[1] I don't agree with everything he says, but IIRC I first read that sentiment expressed by Eben Moglen, though I don't
True, but unfortunately, those are the stories we're talking about - because those are the ones media write.
If you can and post a story called "Detailed analysis of Trump's new energy policy", that features credible facts and figures instead of opinions, simplifications and insults, it will have pretty good chances of sticking on the front page here.
I disagree with you on 4): there are quite a few insightful interesting discussions on HN about politics I've observed and been part of. They have changed my mind and made me think about things. I find political comments on HN to be noticeably higher quality than other sites, though I'll grant political HN comments are lower quality than technical HN comments.
But the main point I'd like to bring up is this: what you're saying is true about politics in general. But there are a lot of politics which are explicitly about technology and more specifically software technology. Political decisions are being made and laws are being passed that effect our industry, livelihoods, and lives and the community as a whole is infected with this head-in-sand "I'm above politics, politics isn't truly 'geeky' so I don't deal with it, I check out when people describe their emotions or lives instead of technical runtime analysis" attitude. I've observed it online in forums, in industry, in academia, it is an unfortunate facet of the cultural place the tech community inhabits.
But if all of the technical experts eschew politics then these political decisions that seriously effect our lives and our work will still be made: but without our input. By refusing to discuss and create politically active technical communities we cede all power to people who know nothing and care even less about the important technical issues of our time.
The tech community is pretty wide ranging in its political beliefs, but when we discuss the politics of technology there is general consensus on many issues among most: NN is good, banning encryption is bad, unrestricted access to the Internet is of fundamental importance and a liberating force, it would be better to have a choice of ISP, software patents are too broad, copyright/IP law is too extreme and stifles creativity, mass surveillance is troubling (whether you think it is also necessary or not).
There are a variety of extremely political issues that are fundamental to tech:
1) Should developers have a professional organization or union with e.g. ethical standards and certifications?
2) As a fundamental moral question, how do we feel about/what should we do about the millions of workers we personally displace and leave jobless through automation?
3) How, if at all, should the Internet be regulated? Is it a utility? Antitrust?
4) Immigration and outsourcing technical jobs.
5) What should happen when law enforcement demands information that is protected by encryption? Should encryption that the FBI cannot break be allowed?
6) How should copyright and IP work with respect to software, algorithms, APIs?
7) Should developers be held accountable for writing software that leaks data? Should users have fundamental rights to their own data? Privacy?
8) Regulations on IoT devices like cars
The list can go on and on and on. While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above regularly so that when a bill is put forth, or input is elicited, there is an actual community of experts that present a (reasonably) united front, who have discussed these things amongst themselves.
If we had banned political discussion on HN and sites like it, SOPA would probably be law right now. It was stopped because the entire tech community discussed it constantly, came to an agreement that it was bad, and took extreme collective political action against it.
>While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above
I would add though that the HN community at large, when we do slide into politics, does have by far and away the most interesting discussions on that topic I've ever read. There's no comparison to Facebook IMHO.
If the net effect of political discourse on HN is negative, it's a pretty good sign that the community needs to grow the fuck up. If we're unable to examine our role in the world -- what is happening and how our work fits in -- anyone advertising a startup as "world-changing" is dangerous, naive, or dangerously naive.
That said, dang almost ran me out of here for daring to call out conspiracy theorists out on their BS, so perhaps things are broken by design.
Political discourse ruins online communities for people looking for technical and not political discussions. It's ruined Reddit as a technical forum; I have to filter several subreddits from r/all because I'm trying to avoid Trump news, and r/technology fought long and hard to keep political posts from dominating their subreddit, which it now does.
Basically, I want there to exist a safe space for computer engineers that I may disagree with politically to talk solely about solutions and products that solve technical problems, and not get sidetracked with whether or not I agree that Donald Trump having Patriot Act powers is terrible. I don't need yet another circlejerk in my life, I want the news.
You know how you have that hacker meetup, or small conference that starts off as all meaty tech topics? How great that feels to be able to learn/teach/demonstrate advanced topics knowing that everyone is on the same page. Then gradually money/business interests get involved to the point that the fundamental flavor of the group changes, and the first ones to leave are the most interesting. Five years later it's just a bunch of business/sales guys in suits giving power point presentations to each other. Of course no one would say that money, or business interests aren't important, but something has been lost here that is difficult to rebuild.
It's true that we should all consider the ethical ramifications of what we do, but opening the floodgates on politics will have the cost of reducing the utility of HN. The most hyper specialized and interesting hackers are also the least likely to have time to waste arguing about the political battle of the day.
After the Second World War, the part of the city the Technical University of Berlin was in came under British administration.
They quickly passed a decree mandating classes in philosophy, politics, languages, and other social sciences to be required for every student–engineers, physicist, chemists etc.
The idea was that never again should a generation grow up with the power of scientific knowledge but none of the tools to judge the ethics of using that power.
Meaning: there are times where enjoying purely the wonders of technology is a luxury you can't afford. For HN, it doesn't mean a need to debate the Paris accords. But this community has quite a few people sitting at the levers of power, and where technology and politics/policy intersect, it can make a meaningful difference for people to know that the group of peers whose judgement they may value would, for example, applaud them for walking off the job instead of handing over the iPhone encryption keys.
That's strange because that's not how British universities work at all. Our education system from age approximately 14 onwards is concentrated on specialisation.
Yes, because the British, so versed in politics, language and philosophy never created concentration camps, starved hundreds of thousands of innocents, carried out chemical warfare, did summary executions, ... /s
You know, I think you could actually swap out "tech" with "political", in your first sentence, and make everything you said equally true about politics. Because most of what actually happens in politics, starts with passionate talented people, who are creating brilliant new ways to do things better.
The more groundbreaking something new is, the more the businessmen take over. Only in politics it's the bureaucracy and career politicians rather than shareholders and MBAs (though there are more and more MBAs on the political scene as well).
I recently wrote major parts of the digitization strategy for the municipality where I work, and I participate in a lot of multi-municipality "unions" where we're working out how to digitize our future, so I may be a bit colored, but I see a lot of similarities between making politics and creating new tech.
> The most hyper specialized and interesting hackers are also the least likely to have time to waste arguing about the political battle of the day.
I find the opposite to be true. The most intelligent and experienced hackers are not hyper-specialized, but have wide ranging knowledge of computing, mathematics, science, and people. They have strong, well-considered opinions on many topics, including politics.
Spending time arguing about it on Hacker News, probably not, but face-to-face with people they respect, yes.
You'd really enjoy the Chaos Communications Congress. It's something like 20 years old I believe, it's among the best in its niche of security/hacking/thats-great-but-why??-projects, and you won't find a suit there.
It is, however, extremely political, with a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalistic message.
>> You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang
Interesting concept, but, I (and I guess I am not alone on this one) would have found this particular topic extra interesting, and would have generated a few more site-interactions this way (instead of the other way around). But I can understand the gist of it...
Besides some minor experiences start-up world is the third worldwide phenomenon that I participated in while it grew. It was really exciting, a lot of fun, a lot of stories to tell, a lot of experiences made. But there is no reason to be sad about that it's over. It will happen again. Another topic, but it will happen, and it will be just as good and for the same reasons.
Also, it wouldn't be as good if it would stagnate at some point. I am/was also part of communities that stagnated, some since long before I was born. It's not the same level of engagement, not the same glory, not the same amount of brave, smart people. So if HN stagnated on a smaller level it wouldn't have been as good either.
For me I really found the best approach is to take it like a surfer. There are good waves and bad waves, but each one will end. Ending wave just means it's time to get ready for the next.
There was a nice long essay that looked at that same phenomenon from the context of underground music that gradually shifts in tone as it gets more popular, until the particular genre now names simply a kind of pop music that isn't really what it started off as. Sadly, I can't find a link to it, so I'll be grateful if anyone can provide one.
Still, politics are probably important and if we could engage in politics with non-techs with amazing efficiency, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too - address the political issue in 5 minutes at the start of the conference, then get back to business.
> opening the floodgates on politics will have the cost of reducing the utility of HN
I'm not apolitical, far from it, but that doesn't mean I want all the spaces I use to be politicized. And when HN does veer into politics, it almost always lowers the level of both insight and courtesy several notches from discussions of other topics.
I'm relieved to see politics stay tangential, because I think the alternative is not HN gaining insight on politics but losing it on everything else.
I think that it's more about politics and investors/advertisers not really clicking. The rest I just don't see, we already opened the flood gates to stuff like discussing "another trivial update of this piece of software a bunch of us use". Most of the comments aren't technical, and it's not like anyone ever got downvoted for telling an anecdote about their child or their parents, and "X is awesome" is exactly as valuable as "X is shit". Yet one is allowed, the other isn't.
> Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
What's the hacker angle? There isn't one. It's interesting to people who care about politics and for people with dollars in their eyes. Amazon being "in the industry" is enough. How's that interesting? Maybe it's the idea that having a lot of users or commanding a lot of investments makes something intellectually interesting, a notion that is as widespread as it is mediocre.
All in all, I often feel the best analogy to some HN subcircles is the beam breakers in Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Don't think too much about it, just do what feels good, and just avoid what scares you, nevermind how that feeds into what disfigured and forced people into settling for such a life to begin with. Gotta keep those attention spans short while pretending to be deep.
For every 10 stories about people labouring under psycho bosses for years there's one of someone standing up to them the second they violated boundaries. The opposite ratio would be a start, and people who don't do that in their life I genuinely have no business and no politics to discuss with, and I don't care for their rationalizations of their weakness and accomplicehood, either. I read and comment because different people write and read here, too.
> "political battle of the day"
That doesn't require you to not think or respond deeper than that. How many "0.001 release of the day" posts trigger people into tirades about general programming principles? How much do we learn from that? There is no consistency here, either, and if you find one interesting, why don't you find the other even more interesting?
If people understand intellectual curiosity, why don't they understand the combination of intellectual curiosity, a moral grounding, and a will? Maybe because those who don't have it can't possibly accept that they are indeed the weakest link. It's like when we assume attractive people are dumb -- we wish! Sometimes they just have and are everything we do, and then some.
The HN that had Erlang day was a lot less moderated, and people posted about politics at will. The new, heavily moderated HN is the one filled with the same bland reposts of today's stories from top 10 news sites that are on every other aggregator.
What makes HN so great is that when a topic is discussed, often someone with direct participation in the topic is somewhere in the thread, to give an inside view.
What I miss about mixing HN and politics, is that HN doesn't have politicians who can pop in and say 'oh hi guys I wrote this bill feel free to ask me some questions'.
(I'm not saying nobody on HN participates on politics, I remember reading an interesting post about someone who ran for governor(?), but those posts are rare).
For example, a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides, people who write some controversial bills, people who take part in lobbying, and even senators. This approach has really opened my eyes to the political process and I have heard many well formed counter arguments which made me reconsider some of my positions.
I cannot say I have ever experienced this on an online forum.
Personally I do not enjoy seeing politics posts in HackerNews, similarly how I don't enjoy seeing them in /. or /r/programming. Specially because they are usually US politics and I live outside that country.
I definitely enjoy my share of the circus that is happening in that space. I watch CNN usually in evenings while having dinner as a form of "light entertainment". And in the mornings I do have my share of political news reading on my preferred sources.
But when I get to a science or technology forum, I love to see science or technology news and information. Thus when suddenly the majority of items are related to politics, it turns me off.
I live in the US and still dislike political posts, largely because political differences are such a source of hatred. It always devolves into bad Hitler analogies even among otherwise intelligent people. I imagine there are some people who are just annoyed that HN won't let them spread their thinly veiled political hate; I recognize this isn't a charitable interpretation, but it's been so long since I've heard a productive political conversation online, and I've never heard one involving someone as angsty as the OP.
> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides
Planet Money is better than average on this, but is definitely in the NPR bubble from my perspective.
I think EconTalk does the best job of airing different perspectives on (at least tangentially) economics related issues. The host has his own perspective, but he's very candid that he knows he has his own cognitive biases and often invites his guests to enlighten him by challenging those biases. It's also a longer format, so there is more time to unpack issues.
...which is a really good point. I think a lot of shallow political dialogue happens because of a lack of attention and space as much as anything else. Explaining why net neutrality is a big deal in emotional terms takes some technical explanation and some narrative building, for example.
I think what the article tries to say is that everything that has at least two people is political by heart. HN is political. Giving you the option to respond and upvote and flag is political. You doing any of this is political. You are a politician, automatically just by being here and interacting with me.
The article is ostensibily about explaining that technology is political, with the tacked-on truth that HN must allow more actual politics. If HN 'squelches political debate', I'm not sure if this refers to whole submissions, or the posters within threads - submissions get flagged for appearing to be preachy with no real intrigue, posters get downvoted and detached for derailing threads. At first I wouldn't know why this submission was flagged, but now I understand it comes on the heels of a spam of Paris threads.
That's a big issue. HN has no special insight on politics so the discussions turn into the same old canards and groupthink on Reddit or anywhere else. There's just very little informative or useful about those discussions.
It's pretty often that stuff which is factually wrong but meets emotional needs gets upvoted without a second thought. Disagreement with the notion the world is ending or Trump is literally James Harden and is gonna start the Holocaust (a popular feeling at HN 4 months ago) gets swiftly downvoted because it doesn't meet how people feel.
Every time one of those groupthinky discussions happens it makes HN less attractive to informed discussion.
I'm sitting at -12 in a thread from yesterday in which a guy responded "No offence you don't seem to have much knowledge of post ww2 history" after he was the one who made a weird historical analogy and I more or less copypastad part of a wiki article on the issue. I don't really care about being wrong or losing Internet points, but when stuff like that happens it just convinces me that even really intelligent people would rather agree with their biases over actually debating something. No thanks. It's the kind of behavior expected on r/politics.
I cant find the thread, but last year someone posted something close to 'all Trump supporters are idiots, I don't know how he got so popular,' and someone replied, 'I have a top uni degree, successful career and I am voting for Trump, so start with reassessing your assumptions about Trump supporters if you want to understand them,' and everyone just downvoted him. Nobody asked him anything.
For the record I'm not a Trump supporter, but I can see that when it comes to politics people think emotionally and ideologically, and very few are asking themselves "have I not made any mistakes?" in the same way we do (everyone does make mistakes) when we care about being proficient.
I studied economics and had a passion for public policy and realized how corrupt that all is. There's no moral excuse for anyone to still suffer in 2017--but it persists. People are irrational, greedy, and selfish. Not all, but enough.
The parent post was at +5 and now it's in the grey. The downvoters don't bother responding, they just downvote, because differing opinions aren't welcomed.
> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides
Great tip. The solution to so many problems is to involve challenging opposing points of view.
There is a big problem with the left in America rejecting opposing points of view. "Safe space" and "shut it down" culture, etc. Mainstream media newsrooms packed with only liberal reporters, etc.
But unfortunately everyone gravitates to places of comfort around people with like-minded views, because its too difficult to constantly be questioning your beliefs or challenging someone else.
Good examples are Fox News' Hannity and Colmes and CNN's Crossfire. Both shuttered, and just ended up with replacement shows with one point of view.
I find that more and more Trump people can make the arguments of left-wing people, but the inverse is not true.
I would love to have an open and honest (and civil) AMA from people who are writing these bills. Especially "cyber" legislation.
I personally helped create a government commission in Oakland, California that now decides on privacy topics that go to city council. We need more things like that.
Here's a challenge: how to enable honest AMA for a politician? Every thing a public figure says is read by the media, which gives a very strong incentive for them to not say anything that could damage their public position.
I would absolutely love to get insight into thoughts of politicians and problems they face, but it's hard to trust anything they say on-record, simply because of media pressure.
I love how this article became an example exactly of what's wrong in politics in general. There is a huge group of people in every political unity, that doesn't care about general consensus, understanding problems, considering different points of view. Yet, these people tend to turn on their political flak cannons from time to time and march into the political landscape like elephants into a porcelain shop (thinking about a funny picture with Trump here).
Many IT guys are like this. They hope their desires are simply well known by everybody and the results ought to be handed to them. That there is a self-responsible process going on that desires not just the fulfillment of a single person's desire but group consensus is just outside their spectrum. They don't even see that it exists.
So instead of discussing about responsibility they decide to use the consesus finding methods like flagging a post to just shut down what is oncomfortable to them, no matter what the results for the group are.
I'm really confused about what could be done with these people. They have the highest amount of participation options anybody ever had on the planet. Yet they don't want to participate. They just want to get fed. And you can't just ignore them because they are so many.
I totally agree, but there are two things to note:
- I think for many the "flag" button is in a grey area between downvote and an actual flag button. I am pretty sure many people use it as a downvote button with the original meaning of StackOverflow's downvote, so it might be partially unintentional and with no ill intention.
- HN should probably implement a downvote for stories, leaving the flag for truly abusive behaviour. Then implement their algorithm based on (Up/Downvotes radius) * (Total votes).
This would probably allow for conversations like this, polarized/controversial but still valid, to remain in HN.
My observation from other communities with downvote buttons is that they encourage more groupthink, not less.
With no downvote button, it's at least possible for a subcommunity to get a thread near the top for a while. Downvotes let the majority suppress these.
Yes, it is mostly used as a downvote, which doesn't make it always right.
Btw. in fact there was a downvote for stories for some time. But leadership decided to take it out due to it being misused like flagging is misued by some now. At least by calling it "flag" for many people it's still clear that "this is content that doesn't belong on HN, like Spam, ads, sexual content etc".
Hacker News now has the ability to hide stories. This should be the default reaction to stories which one simply doesn't want to engage with, but which are not obviously egregious, rather than flagging them. It also hides comments from those stories.
Maybe better tools like "Dialogue Mapping" with IBIS (identifying Questions, Answers, Pros & Cons on a shared display as a conversation proceeds) can help solve the issue of constructive participation by all parties? For a start, see Jeff Conklin's book on: "Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems".
This is a process. Like every other process it requires people to participate in it. Or does it pro-actively contain methods for near-majority amount of people not participating in it? In that case please make an example or explain it a little more, because it is not obvious. Pretty much all methods I know require participation. Example: What would SCRUM be if nobody writes or interacts with the stories?
i'm constantly surprised at how many people in our industry have a problem with articulating their own desires / needs in general.
i wouldn't be surprised if the same people asking HN how to get a higher salary are the ones hitting 'flag' on individual posts they don't like. you can't just push a button and get what you want in life.
Everything worth "reading" about ex-Yu wars and world/EU politics one could find in the works of this guy, afaic the greatest artist of 21. century - the position took in 20th century by the Jew is now taken by the Muslim.
Oh dear. I couldn't disagree more with the assessment of this story's position on Hacker News.
There is a difference between sticking your head in the sand politically and having a forum where people with differing political opinions can come together and discuss ideas in other areas than politics. You can both be politically active AND participate in a forum that avoids politics. Hacker News policy and avoidance of most political issues is precisely right in this regard. I know I come here to listen to stories dealing with computer technology and expert/practitioner commentary on those stories and business people engaged in the business of technology, particularly start-ups. At those times public policy has direct bearing to these subjects, such as patent law or net neutrality, I do expect to see discussion here.
Some here have been saying this has to do with US/Paris Accords. I agree with those topics being purged from this forum. I mean, really! How many readers of Hacker News do you think are on the fence about this subject: probably not zero, but my money says pretty damn close. I would wager that most here not only have already formed opinions on the subject, but strongly held opinions on the subject. If that's the case what possible value is yet another place to shout how right you are and wrong the other guy is at the top of your lungs given the number of other venues for such virtue signaling? I doubt you move the needle in one direction or the other on such terms.
So, what can you possibly achieve by being political in all venues and discussion forums? I suppose you can further entrench the move to ideological purity in all endeavors, further degrade any ability to find common ground with people that don't otherwise agree with you, further degrade the political discourse, and achieve a flourishing sense of tribalism in a large, complex society.
Is politics important? Sure it is. But so is time and place.
I guess jacquesm would like to see a political discussion of the same high quality many technical topics are discussed here. But it won't work - you can't shove politics into a quality tech forum and expect quality politics to come out, simply because political discussions inherently invite low quality. They're rarely about facts, mostly about status and opinions.
Hence, I agree HN should keep limiting political discussions.
That too. There's no necessary connection between 'good at programming' and 'understands politics well'. Or being good at anything else a forum covers and knowing much about the politic world and current situation within.
I mean, you wouldn't necessarily expect a site populated by mathematicians interested in discussing what's going on in their field to give you a good political debate. Why would you expect it on Hacker News?
> Hence, I agree HN should keep limiting political discussions.
I don't believe that it does, though — at least not consistently. The moderators will periodically squelch some particular point of view, but which they silence and which they leave along, and where, are all over the board.
This is part of the reason I've decided to read HN less (first time in over a week!): I could deal with a mostly-unfiltered feed, and I could deal with a well-curated feed, but as it is I feel that it's just not worth the bother anymore.
"There is a difference between sticking your head in the sand politically and having a forum where people with differing political opinions can come together and discuss ideas in other areas than politics. "
Yeah, this is what's important here. Hacker News doesn't need to cover politics for the same reason your average sports, celebrity gossip, fashion or gaming forum doesn't need to cover politics. Because people aren't going there for a political debate, and if the site owners and community decide they want to keep strictly to that, they're entirely fine to.
> "Hacker News doesn't need to cover politics for the same reason your average sports, celebrity gossip, fashion or gaming forum doesn't need to cover politics"
Indeed. And when sports forums (e.g. ESPN) start getting involved in politics, then invariably end up alienating half their audience. This has happened with ESPN, which has contributed to its downfall.
I don't want that to happen to HackerNews.
I come here for love of the software craft, not for subjective, divisive political stories.
Right. But are you comfortable with the fact that not all hackers will be on the same political side?
I wouldn't go as far as voting for Trump, but I am one of those crazy ultra-libertarians you occasionally encounter (I support tax cuts AND free migration). There are some well-educated people, even some with PhDs, who actually _did_ vote for Trump (I know a few), and most certainly, there are many Trump supporters right here on HN. Will you be comfortable with that, enabling political discourse?
Everyone wants to change the world, but not everyone is sharing your direction of change.
I don't really care what this <political figure> or <this party> means about an issue, I enjoy the discussions here on HN as they often present well-presented arguments from multiple positions, without appealing to authority or what side in politics means what.
On the other side I do like discussing topics with people with opposite ideologies. Some of the most interesting discussions I've had started with something like "Imagine that machines continue automating jobs and in the future there is only 10-20% of jobs today. What would you do with the rest of the people?".
Edit: I normally take the opposing side of the person that gives the argument just to explore the topic in-depth, so probably people from the left thing that I'm from the right and the reverse as well.
While I agree with what you're saying, allowing politics tends to mean EVERY thread gets a discussion of politics over time.
I've watched a lot of forums gain the axe grinders who don't debate, they fight. Over time, it's simply people yelling at straw men.
I don't come hear to get lectured, and that's what most political discussions and articles really are. I come here because of the creative techy vibe and relevance to things to which I can actually make meaningful contributions. I have a dozen other places to read impassioned rants about the issues and hot buttons of the day. I don't respect nor value those sites because they're junk food. Politics is where celebrity gossip meets sports.
I often read hacker news articles and threads from ten years ago and find value. Go find a political argument that old that isn't as quaint as the things we wrote in our high school yearbook.
Keep hacker news focused on what it does well. Don't create division.
The one problem I see with most people discussing things with "the other side" is that they don't genuinely care, nor would be ever swayed by what the other person says. It's just a game of "gotcha" most of the time and thus unproductive.
Some people are so anti-Republican or anti-Democrat that you might as well be trying to convince a Jihadi to eat bacon or a Catholic to abort a pregnancy or a Baptist to star in gay porn -- or a Mormon to play blackjack -- or an Atheist to become a Buddhist monk. Online forums (and newspaper comment sections) have created such a political balkanization as to make participating nothing more than sadomasochistic entertainment.
I used to care about those sorts of discussions with the "other side," but I've found that the level of discourse has devolved into to some variation of "Trump wants to send people to the gas chambers and destroy the planet" or "Hillary hires hitmen and Bill took a payoff from the Russians." Or, often it's "America is horrible and should be boycotted" -- or some other hyperbolic rant based on an anecdotal news item about a brown person at an airport.
I've got no use for it. I vote, encourage my like minded friends to vote and that's about it. Occasionally, I'll get sucked into a political discussion on Hacker News, but pretty much instantly regret it. I'm ok with the "crowd" disagreeing with my politics -- but I definitely don't relish getting into intense political debates with people here that I'd probably like to call my friends in real life.
Maybe it's my age (I just turned 40,) but I feel like engaging with deep economics and political discussions with those under 25 to be bordering on pointless. There are exceptions obviously, but when a 19 year old college sophomore wants to tell me about business unit economics, tax policy or building permits -- I'm pretty closed minded simply because they're generally citing other people's ideas rather than ideas based on actual experience or original thought grounded in experience. But that's ok. Views change as we begin to see the world for what it is rather than as what we want it to be. Everyone has the right to be wrong -- even me, as rare as that is. ;)
I'll leave you with a quote that is attributed to many people but this version came from Anselme Batbie, a 19th century French politician..
Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.
We all have plenty of opposing views on non-political matters, many of them quite polarizing, so I don't see why discussing opposing political views would be inherently more problematic or difficult.
Most other views are amendable to facts. Politics, by a) dealing with the most complex and messy aspect of reality, which is human interaction, and b) being very strongly based off opinions and status games, inherently invites bad discussions.
Leaving politics aside allows e.g. me to collaborate productively with e.g. ultra-left socialist bicycle-driving UBI-supporting people. If we leave politics aside, we can agree to disagree and still work together on something useful. If we will discuss politics, our time will be spend in unproductive discussion without actually changing the world in any direction.
Have you seen how the poli discussion goes usually around here? Endless circlejerk where every voice out pf the choir is downvoted to oblivion
Truth is this place majority comes from a verry narrow social bracket, and thus has a very narrow mindset and as such a very small set of ideas keep resonatin
(To clarify: I think it's important but to stop discussing and acknowledge which other views exist and are widespread and why they are. That doesn't mean I share all views or think they are all equally valid. I personally think Trump was the worst that could happen and the climate action was once again proof of that.)
I am a lobbyist and I work in Washington, so I'm surrounded by politics every day. I think what makes HN great is that it avoids politics, for the most part, and true intellectual stories and debate is able to take place. Politics is extremely polarized, and permeates every aspect of our society to the point of extreme. I prefer an HN sans politics, without incendiary articles and commentary, because I learn a lot more about the world and society that way.
One of the more interesting lines of political inquiry that I think has arisen lately outside of HN, is the question of the actual true affect "hacking" (and I don't just mean in the Security sense -- I mean in the Hacker News "Comp Sci" sense as well) actually had on recent elections around the world. In what way, technically speaking and regardless of your personal political affiliations or beliefs, could US and other electoral processes (and let's just say government in general) have been directly affected by technical means? Maybe there are some good links to technical resources that others could direct me to?
I think the rest of the world desperately needs the Hacker News viewpoint on this, in detailed, non-partisan technical manner. I believe there is some deeper, non-polarized, apolitical (think, "highest bidder") aspect to what is actually happening right now around the world.
Well in the interest of discussing that, I do have some thoughts:
>could US and other electoral processes (and let's just say government in general) have been directly affected by technical means
One could claim that an intrinsic variable in democracy is the "voice" of any one citizen. For lots of years that has stayed stable. If a politically minded individual wanted to affect change, they could only "shout" so loudly.
They could spend day and night lobbying, petitioning, speaking, getting elected, but all that effort is only a constant multiplier. Technology in politics, just like in other areas, can move the needle orders of magnitude more effectively. When any one person or organization can use technology to add voices (apps, hacks, robots, etc), it can exacerbate issues and cause secondary effects that weren't present when 1 person = 1 voice.
I agree with everything you've said. There's enough politics in everything else; I come here to be a nerd and learn about nerdy things.
Also I've noticed that even though HN tends to promote discussion pretty well on technical subjects, even here political discussions tend to devolve into flame wars.
The irony in this entire thread is that sufficiently broad technical leadership is indistinguishable from organizational politics. It's all about talking stakeholders into doing "the right thing".
I would love to just be able to solve Big Problems by hacking on them, but the more experience I get, the more I find that the biggest roadblocks involve changing minds, not changing code.
Is organizational politics inevitable once you reach a certain size? Any ideas or lessons in avoiding politics in favor of solving problems – short of a mind meld?
The less people are there in a group and the less formal the area, the less organizational politics. The more difficult the problem, the more people you need to tackle it. Problems are made simpler by better tools (and smarter people).
Idea: make more tools reducing complex problems to something tractable by small groups of people. Couple that with freedom of association and let people self-organize.
TL;DR: I think the appropriate thing to do is talking about ETHICS here as that's universal and some times it will involve politics, but not just politics for the sake of it.
From an opposite point of view to this article, politics vary greatly around the world and I'm guessing that by politics the article mainly refers to USA politics. For instance I ignore my country's politics talk since it's too old fashion and USA politics talk since it feels quite pointless arguing/bashing for the sake of it most of the times. I do enjoy a meaningful politics discussion from time to time, normally in person and with someone I trust already.
While I do agree on the big picture--USA is one of the most influential countries, politics there affect all the world--this article seems to be setting the prerogative to get into everyday politics. I do not really care whether or not Hillary or Trump were talking about their cat on Twitter (metaphor) during the elections and for many months after it and it became quite unbearable at points TBH.
So I would say that the things we should continue doing is talking about ethics (especially when it is related with hacker ethics). My short list of rules for HN topics are (the more the better):
- It is about hackers/startup/programmers/IT/privacy/etc.
> this article seems to be setting the prerogative to get into everyday politics. I do not really care whether or not Hillary or Trump were talking about their cat on Twitter (metaphor) during the elections and for many months after it and it became quite unbearable at points TBH.
I didn't get that from the article at all, just that we should be discussing politics when it's intertwined with the technology we build and care about.
I am not certain ethics are universal. I think "The Righteous Mind", by Jonathan Haidt, does a fairly good job showing that there are different aspects or flavors to ethics, and that not everyone can agree on which aspects 'count'.
Your comment is political. It adds a point of view to the discussion about politics in HN. It also tries to achieve something (talking about ETHICS). This is politics. No need to talk how US government politics is different from Russian government politics. We can just talk about our politics here.
If you take such a broad definition of "politics", then the word becomes meaningless, since everything is "politics".
'jacquesm wrote about politics as in what politicians in the governments do. This is a particular thing, and I personally believe it's rarely useful to discuss it on HN.
From my point of view, discussing politics is a waste of time. We don't make progress by discussing the daily musings of the people who appear to wield power in the world.
I'm more interested in the technology that will eventually render their power useless: counter economics.
For me the goal isn't to find the right people at the right time to seat the power of nation-states, but to make it impossible for them to wield any meaningful power at all.
I am deeply interested in politics, governance, and the way humans interact at scale, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in what bills get passed, who gets elected, or what Trump said in a tweet. While these small blips in history do have an impact, I think technologies such as bitcoin, uber, etc., have a much bigger impact on the world because they usurp political power.
Lets all waste time virtue-signalling about things we have no experience or expertise in, that are dominated by charismatic dummies we can barely communicate with, and that we'll have no measurable impact on!
Or we can keep doing what we can do well and has actually, fundamentally changed the world for the better and made us rich.
Well, if you negate what "politics" mean and conflate it with the current politicians star-system, your reasoning holds.
Although I can raise doubts whether it has made the world better, it certainly has made many people rich, at the expense of others. What you said is very political, ironically.
I'm not sure if I agree with the author. Hackers do care about political issues. My question is whether political discussions over short form text do more harm than good to a community.
To me, HN detoxing politics seems more like the librarian enforcing a rule of silence rather than encouraging ostriching. And polarizing topics like politics, especially over short form text, to me, seems like it would destroy that ideal of HN.
That being said, the Internet sure could use a proper forum for political discussions.
I don't think one must devote themselves to politics. However, this thoughtful essay by regular contributor here should be UNFLAGGED. It is piercing, but measured and in line with the ideals here on this site AND the reasonable discussion.
If dang or another moderator could weigh in; this is not how I believed flags were meant to be used. We defend free speech here unless we have a strong reason.
It's tedious bullshit that makes a bunch of mistakes - some of which have already debunked.
In particular it mostakes the reason for the detox. This was only ever about stopping tedious pathological arseholes making the same boring hyperbolic bullshit flamebait arguments that a not particulary bright 16 year old would make.
HN thinks of itself as smart but the political discussion here is normally embarrassingly weak.
I found his write up of the custom Lego sorter hardware design he made to be innovative. With a treadmill and some spare parts he made a classifier and trained a neural net.
Either way; I think your comment is rude. If you don't like his piece-- which again I am not sure I agree with either; use <hide> not flag.
<personalOpinion>
The problem with political or religious discussion is that much of it is irrationally about 'tribes' and self image.
Some positions cannot be easily influenced with mere 'facts' because you're arguing against people's feelings and cognitive dissonance is very powerful.
Bringing politics up on Hacker News will rarely positively influence anyone's opinion but will almost always be divisive and distracting.
</personalOpinion>
Sometimes the goal isn't to "convert" people to your political or religious views. There is immense utility in reinforcing that there are intelligent and congenial people (who deserve the benefit of the doubt) that disagree with you on important issues.
I think pushing "controversial" discussions to the edges of polite society has been shown to make us more culturally ignorant.
I'm sad the posts about USA withdrawing from the Paris deal all got purged fro the front page yesterday. Yes, some political issues aren't relevant on HN, but this I think was.
Edit: Kinda ironic that this post is now having the title [FLAGGED] and being dropped from the fp as well. Edit2: Still flagged but back up, interesting
No HN only allow political ideologies or narratives they agree with. The moderator team do not hide that they are SJW's.
As another example, currently HN's narrative of choice is how Uber is literally the worst thing since Hitler and you can't go a week without seeing 3 or 4 top-voted links bitching about Uber. Perhaps some people like being able to conveniently travel from point A to B without caring about what some whiny keyboard warrior hates about Uber this week.
I'm interested in politics, I follow it closely and I am a member of a political party. But I don't want to see it here, I don't think HN is a good venue for it.
That's a shame, because the things we discuss here have political consequences, and it's irresponsible to ignore them.
I wouldn't want to see posts strictly about politics on the front page, but I think discussion of political topics that relate to technology and our industry is not only interesting, but necessary.
It's not irresponsible to keep discussions in their right place, of course politics will seep in everywhere but if I want to talk about the US pulling out of the Paris agreement (and I do) then there are better places to do that than here.
One of the reasons I think that we hackers like to stay out of politics is we feel that politics itself, as a subject, is broken - and we can fix it by computerising everything.
This may or may not be true. In the meantime, computer programmers all over the world are working on computerising subjects that are traditionally used to having political power/influence involved. Pulling the humans out and replacing them with shell scripts, in this scenario, is of course a source of contention.
Fundamentally, governments and politics are broken. Computers can be used to fix them. However, this is one of the most controversial areas of computerisation and - like politics itself, along with governance - a cause of never-ending social strife.
Its almost like something, "ethical", is missing in the equation.
> One of the reasons I think that we hackers like to stay out of politics is we feel that politics itself, as a subject, is broken - and we can fix it by computerising everything.
I agree with the first part, but personally disagree with the second part.
Yes, I find politics broken, but I have absolutely no faith in fixing it in any way. So I hack away on problems I feel like I can solve or at least improve on. This keeps me sane.
Same here. I don't buy fixing politics with computers - not until we take politics entirely away from humans and give it to a superpower AI that will act as a god.
The argument for this belief is this: people keep gaming stuff. No matter how smart your system is, given enough interest someone will hire someone smarter to cheat it. Even mathematics won't save you here, because math is too narrow-scoped. For any theoretically secure system on paper you can find holes in its messy real-life implementation. See e.g. quantum entanglement used to create untappable communication channels being defeated by simply tapping at the classical endpoints.
There are two different types of politics and we often conflate both. The type that many people hate is "politics the art of manipulating people".
The second meaning refers to actual policies and their effect on people's quality of life. I don't think anyone would have trouble discussing that - that is, if it were somehow magically separated from the manipulation. But often its not.
If you look at the first meaning, things like "detox week" make a lot of sense - its about getting rid of the manipulation so that your brain can process information better again. "Squelching political debate" means stopping discussion that attempts to manipulate, and so on.
Since the tools used for manipulation are currently better than ever before, and we don't like manipulation, I suppose the best approach would be to work on things that expose manipulation and/or defend people from it.
edit: exercise - try to replace the word "politics" with "manipulation" in the article and re-read it. The point that we shouldn't burry our head in the sand still stands, but the reasons why that happens become much clearer.
Politics, from my Norwegian social studies textbook, is defined as "the subject of distributing the burdens and surpluses of society". Nothing to do with manipulation there. The same definition can be used for office politics.
Manipulation only enters into it when people use dishonest means to pull the surpluses over to themselves, and the burdens over to people who shouldn't carry them.
> The same definition can be used for office politics.
> Manipulation only enters into it when people use dishonest means to pull the surpluses over to themselves, and the burdens over to people who shouldn't carry them.
... which is pretty much the exact meaning of the term "office politics". You don't talk about "office politics" when people get rewarded appropriately for their contribution to the company. You only talk about it in the context of e.g. sucking up to managers, backstabbing cow-orkers, taking credit for something you didn't do, etc.
As for the government-type politics, "the subject of distributing the burdens and surpluses of society" is as good a definition as "the subject of distributing land and wealth of a society" is a good definition of war. It's technically true, yet totally misses the important and problematic aspects of it.
Definitions are a way to draw a broad-stroked border in thingspace, so that you know the general area in which the meaning of a word lies. Nothing more.
Thats a fairly naive way of looking at it. Modern politics is all about manipulation (mostly emotional manipulation) from all sides, even those that fight for just causes. Simply laying down the facts and research about what we know is not enough to change people's minds. Instead, political messages are crafted to have emotional impact: the goal is to cause people to feel empathy, outrage, shame, fear etc depending on the circumstances.
That's an interesting and enlightening perspective. Thank you for sharing.
Have you read the famous book How To Make Friends And Influence People? I found it changed my definition of "manipulation" substantially. In a democratic society, distributing the burdens and surpluses of society is an exercise in persuading people.
I would argue that politics have infiltrated tech too much already.
Don't believe me, try being a open, vocal Trump supporter or conservative at a major tech company in Silicon valley. You will be labeled a hateful, racist (fill in your favorite derogatory term) based on your political beliefs irregardless of your actual actions both at work or even in your personal life. Most people who are conservative are afraid to talk about their political beliefs due to the very real threat of losing their job.
Look at Larry Garfield with Drupal. In the course of things stuff went as far as people in the Drupal association actively trying to ban conservatives among other things.
The ruby community is just as bad. Rails Girls, Rails Bridge and later on tech404.io banned a woman because she was conservative https://code.likeagirl.io/thoughts-from-the-editor-172e93ecc.... Then there was Opalgate where a community diversity leader tried to get a key contributor banned over his personal conservative beliefs.
At this years Lambdaconf a black, first time speaker and military veteran, who grew up dirt poor in the projects, but pulled himself up by his bootstraps was blasted by a group of people because in his personal life he believes in the red pill, specifically, in his own words seeking the truth, not being anti-woman.
As a moderate I really don't need to be concerned about someone's personal beliefs work with people or to even have a friendship with them. People are messy imperfect beings and there are many shades of grey with people and beliefs even when they hold views that I'm against. The only time that becomes an issue is if someone acts on it. IE: they steal from the company or murder someone etc. but that is not what I am talking about here. In all of the cases I mentioned here, these people did not act inappropriately in a professional setting. They didn't harass people, try to convince people about their personal beliefs, make sexist statements etc..
People who dedicate their lives to parsing out complex political/moral issues have a tough time doing it. If I go to a tech event I'm there to talk about tech not a political conference. The irony is that if people on all sides of the political issues have a place where they came come together and see someone as a human it also may be more effective than the division that the politicization of tech has been creating. Could that open us up to some bad, maybe, but politics being combined with tech are causing a lot of damage to the industry and people already. More importantly its not working.
---Rant over--
Yes or it could have the opposite effect. What I think is that a lot of people feel hated upon from the rest of the society.
In my country there is a political party that has been excluded from a lot of public things, other politicians telling them they are fascists, racists and just any kind of slur basically. They were even excluded from a party where Saudi Arabia was invited. Just think about that.
Now, they are the second largest party in the country and well on their way of being the largest. They had everything to gain being the underdogs and their opponents has been their best ad for gaining trust and votes.
Fascists are excluded from public discourse in many societies, and I'm not positive it makes the situation worse in any respect. People still supporting them no matter what are typically like-minded bigots rather than some sort of libertarians sticking up to authority.
If they had done that, that would have just played into his narrative about the media being against him, along with vindicating a lot of accusations against twitter for "shadowbans".
Lets say, theoretically they block that one account. What would be twitter's recourse if the POTUS decides to Gitmo their CEO/developers/prod engineers in retaliation.
Let's start with the techno-essentialism that many in the tech world depend on for their mental well being: Yes developers impact the world, no they do not impact them as much as TV (still), comedians and most other fields of science. Dumping movies, 0days, user databases online, developing some new prediction market with whatever cryptocurrency doesn't change that. Still, I completely agree one should be aware of the ethical implications in the code they write.
Relevant quotes from article:
> and that hackers, more than any other profession, create the tools and the means with which vast changes in the political landscape are effected.
> The ability to influence with disproportional effect on the outcome of all kinds of political affairs compared to someone not active in IT, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to pull on very long levers, far longer than you’d normally be able to achieve
> Between ‘Wikileaks’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica’ it should be more than clear by now
stop this. Go back and look over CA's marketing material. They brag about taking Ted Cruz from a field of 20+ into 3. Not exactly a winning pony. And I'm sure there were plenty of other analytic companies that would have used it to their marketing benifit if their pony got further instead. The "we predict you better than your mother with just 300 likes" is a line people already wanted to believe. Someone just made a good story for us to bite into it.
Still, I do agree "everything has a political dimension"
We are, right now, influencing each other through a filter. A filter designed by Paul Graham and friends with some values in mind. For instance, there is no picture of each other, no reference to sex, nor race. That prevents many prejudices from being activated. That is impact.
If actions speak louder than words, infrastructure, that which dictates which actions are possible at all, speaks much louder. Developers are building new infrastructure all the time, for every action and human need. Right now I can buy groceries online, get a remote job, and find a date on an app. That is techno-essentialism.
The future belongs to the hacker in much the same way that medieval Europe belonged to the knight and the bishop. The power of the computer is obvious to anyone that isn't living under a rock, naturally, this brings many fakers, if you focus on them it all seems like a bubble, because you are focusing on the bubble. Treat yourself better and focus on what pervades. The Times They Are A-Changin'.
Does it ever occur to people who want to introduce explicitly political conversation to a project, that a "lets focus on the task at hand" policy might be for their own good? That bringing the political dimension in might chase away contributors with whom their interests were temporarily aligned?
I can understand bringing up politics when the topic is something like deliberately using psychological manipulation against their users. Because if you think it's morally wrong, your interests were never even slightly aligned, and the goal is to be off-putting. Hopefully in a way that puts people off of what they're building, rather than putting them off of venues where you can converse with them.
But using that case as rhetorical cover for bikeshedding a minor slight that occurred in the context of an otherwise noncontroversial piece of software? That is why people hate "politics."
(I wish I had the link to where I saw this argument presented first, but I'll guess my poorly rephrased version will have to do.)
Political discussion tends to be of a fundamentally different type vis-à-vis technical discussion. Discussion mechanics like voting and flagging (particularly apropos here) which work well for technical discussions are often...lacking...when it comes to political ones. This is literally what much of the article is complaining about.
If someone is pounding in nails with a screwdriver, I might suggest that they use a hammer instead. That doesn't mean that I think nails are beneath me.
"The ability to influence with disproportional effect on the outcome of all kinds of political affairs compared to someone not active in IT, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to pull on very long levers, far longer than you’d normally be able to achieve comes with some obligations."
If this is true, then "some obligations" would almost certainly include a reluctance to abuse those long levers or alienate a large swath of users. Power ought to be used responsibly.
Back to reality, though, the reason why hackers and other tech-minded folk are averse to politics is the exacy reason why they're hackers: because politics is about as far away from the hacker ethic as possible. It'd be like asking a racecar driver to take up an interest in gardening; yeah, some NASCAR drivers can probably grow one hell of a vegetable patch, but it ain't exactly something one could or should expect them to do.
Hackers would rather focus on being immune to politics. It should be no surprise, then, that they tend gravitate toward things like cryptocurrencies and other technologies resistant to governmental control (or providing a means for such resistance).
Are you kidding me? It's not that I'm not political, but this isn't a place for doing anything with politics, it's for hacking and talking about that. Go away with this crap.
Politics is OK to get into but I skip over any comments that directly provoke flame wars. I don't flag articles but I sure did flag this. And I deleted a personal insult from that first part. What are you thinking??
Explicitly talking about politics is exactly what everyone who doesn't have any access to long levers is doing. Using those levers to accomplish something doesn't necessarily look like "doing politics". It might instead look like writing the bitcoin whitepaper, or running some tor exit nodes, or just improving wikipedia.
Politics divides us. The more we can do together whilst holding opposing world views the better.
If the left didn't excommunicate anyone they disagree with maybe there would be more a chance to have reasoned political discussions, but so far, anywhere online where there is a left-wing community, all opposing viewpoints are silenced. See Reddit, etc.
I'm yet to see a political discussion among people not dedicated to that or with no in-depth knowledge that actually accomplished[1] something. Several (hundreds) of posts/comments asserting opinions before dying out, or turning into a flamewar of insults, doesn't do much to change the world, as far as I see anyway.
With that in mind, I don't see the point of promoting even more (it's not as if there isn't plenty of it already) political talk in HN.
Is it important to be aware of political ramifications? Maybe, and that's why I personally follow several general news publications in my RSS feeds and not only tech blogs. Is it important to discuss it? Following what I said above, not, in my opinion.
[1]: Even among knowledgeable persons, most of the accomplishment is swaying people from one side to the other and that can be good or bad.
In many people's view just being broadly aware of political situation around you is not enough anymore, they seem to believe that you need to have a strong emotions about (certain) political subjects, you need to take actions... even though for the most of time they don't do anything constructive about it either, except for venting off the frustrations on twitter or with friends over a beer. Which is perfectly OK, I do it all the time, but you need to be aware that some people just don't get that much emotionally involved in politics as you do. And that it's perfectly OK, because not taking active part in politics is also a form of politics. IMHO one should be free to choose his role in the society, without being forced into one or the other by peer pressure.
I tend to think of politics as resource arbitration. Say, you have limited resources (as we all do) and there are too many contenders who want to settle this without resorting to any sort of violence, then you need pretty much politics.
Technically, a kernel scheduling algorithm or packet forwarding algorithm are politics too (hence they're called "policy"). The problem is that the real world is so messy and complex and has too many variables unlike CS stuff that we can hardly reach any sensible solution in a timely way. In theory we can tackle on politics in a somewhat objective manner but it's typically waay harder than any software project.
See the book: "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making" by Deborah Stone for an exploration of this issue of resource arbitration and politics.
One simple example she uses is how do you divide up birthday cake? Equal pieces? What if come people arrive late to the party after you start cutting the cake and giving out pieces? What if some people are full but others have not had dinner yet? What if some people don't like the pieces with chocolate icing?
While we can be "objective" within a set of established priorities, we can't be objective about designing a set of priorities. Albert Einstein wrote on this in "Science and Religion" about how science can tell you about what is and how it is all connected, but it can't tell you what should be.
One other point Stone she makes is that when people are on the outside of an organization they want transparency of the decision making process -- while then the same exact people move to the inside of an organization they suddenly have many reasons why they want decision should be opaque. "Yes, Minister" has a great comedy episode on that called "Open Government".
The problem with politics and a great many other things is that talking about it is just talk. The vast majority of these problems are so outside the scope of any one's frame of reference and that creates two problems. Even the most educated of all people are only able to say "it's complicated" and most people only have opinions. It's glib to say that it will just turn into FB with everyone spouting their own un-educated opinions. But the reality is that unless you have actionable YES/NO type ideas, no one in the tech industry (or any other group) cares much about opinions other than their own.
There are two claims here that should be considered separately.
1. Hackers are reluctant to acknowledge that their work has political ramifications. I believe this is true, and a problem.
2. Politics should be discussed more on HN. This is what most in the comments are disagreeing with, and I think with good reason. I like that HN avoids politics for the most part, but I'm also very glad to see someone point out that too many intelligent and technologically-inclined people insulate themselves from taking questions of values seriously.
The topics of impact of tech on society, and of ethics in technology, are something that I too would like to see discussed more. Separated from politics as much as possible, per your point 2.
Even the Snowden leaks seemed not so important to me. Unless there is good oversight of who views what as long as there is due process, I don't see any reason to view those things as politically charged.
Honestly I prefer having a nihilist point of view about politics in general, having a minimum amount of trust towards separation of power, always weighing the pro and cons, trying to guess what public opinion wants. It's much more freeing to see voters as children expecting things.
The tools we create can be used for both good and evil. It's not my place to decide who can and can't use the tools I create and what they can use it for. Frankly, I simply don't care at all about any kind of politics, which is why I got into programming in the first place.
And if the author doesn't like that, than that's just too bad for them.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got a problem in your design specs, buddy. Torture devices aren't supposed to cause pain, they're supposed to generate compliance.
Now you also have to consider your market segments. Some folks--we'll call them the Jack Bauers--need to maximize the compliance per time unit ratio. Sure, those devices are probably going to be painful. And expensive. So good profit margins there.
But also consider the compliance per energy unit ratio. Your basic oubliettes and music-blasting oubliettes fall into that category, along with emetic-laced meals and gratuitous bureaucratic nonsense runaround. That kind of customer is looking for something cheap, almost by definition. So maybe we look at that like a subscription service.
...wait. The torture device was a metaphor, wasn't it?
So let me point out the problems with your metaphor.... ~
What kind of geek doesn't at least temporarily lose sight of the big picture while obsessing over the cool and interesting details?
Technology development does directly affect trajectory of where the humanity go as the whole. Yes.
But I think that HN shall be the place where we can discuss how AI moves us from post-industrial to post-human world for example rather than particular fluctuations of the trajectory (a.k.a. realpolitik).
I'm pretty sure a lot of my favorite blogs on political subjects I discovered from reading hacker news, so im a bit skeptical of the premise. What I see get (mostly) rejected here is outright political activism -- but it doesn't seem like the place for that.
Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
Maybe someone could build a forum that enforces civil discussion on political issues, either with automated or manual moderation, but Hacker News' moderation isn't nearly strict enough.
> Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
It's interesting that you think so, because this very discussion is extremely political, though perhaps meta-political.
I think Hacker News may be unique in that political discussion can take place in a technical forum.
The main barrier to thoughtful discussion may be the HN points system.
I suspect that many insightful posts are not written due to self-censorship (fear of losing points). It's completely irrational of course, the points are meaningless, but when they are lost it can cause some distress. Nobody likes to lose a game.
> Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
Hacker News does not disallow, and but for a brief experiment never has disallowed, political discussion. This non-existent ban does not, therefore, explain HN's quality.
Hackers don't bother with politics because they understand that it's the people who change the world and not the politicians. Politicians' job is to get re-elected, everything else is irrelevant.
Agreed, but not entirely - people in position of power do have a theoretical opportunity to make some meaningful change, but they seldom make use of it (often exactly because they focus on being re-elected).
The way I phrase it is usually this: if you want to change the world, politics is waste of time. It's one of the least efficient ways of helping, because you'll end up stuck in constant battles over trivia, status and, well, office politics. By the time you wind up in position of actual power, you'll likely be up to your ears with various deals, and you won't be really helping society anymore.
(Corollary: I don't buy that the higher up you go, the more power you have. Looking at the dynamics of political parties, it's very rare someone will let you achieve position of power if you've not proven again and again to be open for deals and preserving status quo. My current belief is that usually, the higher you go, the less actual agency you have.)
Politicians are people, they definitely are changing the world and affecting people's lives. If you care about your society, the world in general, then it is relevant.
Showing no interest in politics is like having no self-preservation instinct. You, as a hacker might hope that your work will change the world someday, while the politicians are busy changing the world to their liking right now. So it is better to keep an eye on them.
Coverage of political machinations is pointless, but information on political outcomes is invaluable - there is a massive difference. Chomsky has said the only paper that tells the truth is the Financial Times, in part because you don't make money with lies, whereas most news is designed to push an agenda and obfuscate anything real.
Understanding political outcomes is very different to listening to political debate/punditry/noise, and learning, for example, that certain subsidies are ending is not the same as reading political arguments on the environment, and they shouldn't be confused.
Knowing that Trump is president means one can predict certain things - the Paris accord ending - but not others, for example budgets are far less fungible than people think, and a lot of the budget of any nation is kinda locked in, so a lot of the noise on funding cuts and changes is unlikely to come to fruition. If you read a lot online/watch a lot, how do you know which of the multitude of BS will come to fruition?
I reckon if more news focussed on "this is the debate, these are the likely outcomes, these industries would be affected in these ways", then reading more would be invaluable. OTOH, Covfefe coverage? I'll Pass.
You guys, what would be the crucial ingredient in "socdem" vs. "libdem" diff that makes you so angry when someone compares it to "angular" vs. "react" diff?
You're downvoted because you're exactly right. People on here generally can't handle inconvenient truths that include themselves. Never trust a person who can't rend their garments.
> This generation
No. Resoundingly NO! These smug clowns can't speak for anything and anyone. They're not even a generation, just farts in the wind. Even just 1% of the people paying attention outweigh them easily, and at any rate, the world belongs to those who genuinely care about it. Period, anyone who disagrees can come fight me. Think less "no child left behind" and more "Noah's Ark"; they had their chance, they made their choice, let's not be held hostage by them. At the very least, let them queue after those who are not ungrateful.
Can I flag you? Yes? Oh, there's the link. I just flagged you.
You see, this is why some of us want less politics on HN. Because every political topic inevitably turns into people doing the thing you're doing here - assuming that those who have different views than you are "smug clowns", instead of trying to figure out why their views differ from yours.
> Every time, I speak out for the truth on HN, I am down voted continuously, only half-hearted tech-blabla is suffered here.
Not every. Be precise. I checked.
> Any discussion about important future stuff is instantly penalized by the system here.
I disagree. Just browse the front page history if you don't believe me. There's plenty of discussions about important future stuff that's hanging on the front page every week. It's just that we have a strong quality expectation here, both in terms of posted articles and the discussions they generate.
> I really regret to have registered at all.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Just doing geek-stuff and enjoying the live as techie is just to hollow for me. It really makes me sad.
And I agree. It's hollow for me too. Personally however, I find politics to be one of the least effective and least efficient way of contributing to betterment of the world. Many people on HN disagree with me about that. But either way, lots of people are interested in things outside the tech sphere. It's just that when people are interesting in changing things, they're interesting in actually changing things - and not being sidetracked by ego-based flamewars.
It's strange to admit this, because I'm sure the OP doesn't share my worldview on most topics. But as a National Socialist I completely agree that everything has a political dimension. The code we write touches the lives of so many of our people. We should keep that in mind while we write it.
Attempting to segregate one's work from the wellbeing of one's volk is a sign of a sick spirit.
That HN flag's this post but not some VC B.S. about company valuations is ironic. Can we call a moritorium on posts entirely about finance and money as well as posts like this one here about politics?
Just as much as whistleblowing and exposing fraud, espionage, or illegal activities has nothing to do with journalism and transparency. Let alone politics.
In general, software has nothing to do with anything but software itself. Take encryption: it has nothing to do with privacy, which has nothing to do with with surveillance which has nothing to do with politics.
Also - Startups also have nothing to do with the economy; Automation and design has nothing to do with the industry.
And while we're at it: Science has nothing to do with politics. That's why politicians ignore climatologists, physicists and biologists.
It's like conventional currency vs cryptocurrency. If you couple the two, given enough market size for each, volatility couples as well. No need to go through the meanders of algorithms or blockchains.
(Coincidently, cryptocurrencies are just another target for some hackers with deep consequences for any economy that trusts them.)
Some things cannot be ignored, or seen as independent. They are stuck together since their conception.
Jacques M,
Presumably, you have read through the comments of the referenced thread[1]. If so, your essay omits a perspective about politics dicussion that many HN participants have. I'll attempt to summarize that position:
1) Yes, politics is extremely important.
2) Yes, politics touches every subject.
3) Yes, HN readers perform technical work in programming and hardware that affects politics, and vice versa.
4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.
5) The overall net effect of political discussion on HN is negative and we'd rather not have 1 of the valuable 30 slots of the front page taken up by a political story (e.g. "Trump denies climate change.")
To reiterate the points above, it does not mean "climate change" is unimportant or that HN posters are "burying their head in the sand". That's a 1-dimensional caricature of the people who'd rather get their diet of political discourse from somewhere else besides HN.
Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN. Your essay doesn't address this perspective.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
Another intrinsic problem with politics on HN:
A lot of the best posts on HN are narrowly specialized, so that apart from maybe asking questions, most HN commenters can't contribute much (but benefit from reading!).
But political arguments are available to every member of the site, no matter how specialized the story might be.
So we get situations like Amazon announcing Route 53, and the thread being hijacked with comments about how Amazon handled Wikileaks, or a new paper on measuring and mitigating statistical bias in machine learning algorithms hijacked with comments about political correctness.
Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.
We also inevitably get technical threads being derailed by people complaining that the posted site blocks their ad-blockers, is behind a paywall or uses javascript, but for some reason those aren't considered as off-topic as tangential politics.
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Maybe the quality of the political discussion is so crappy because we don't talk about it?
My experience is that one has to express their emotional relationship to problems and be aware of it before they can actually insightfully engage with problems; if people don't, they just introduce their emotional biases into their problem solving and pretend they're not.
That works in personal therapy. If you expect people in a thread of hundreds of partisan comments to have some kind of catharsis, please see r/politics.
It's too complex of a topic and too emotional to be discussed in a large group setting.
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But wait a second, the "detox experiment" was abandoned after only two days. 'dang summarized the learnings as
"it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus because that question is itself highly political, and that HN is at its best when it can meander through all the (intellectually) interesting things, some of which inevitably have political dimensions."
More at https://medium.com/a-change-is-coming/learning-from-hacker-n...
Yes, and the key words there are "intellectually interesting" (as opposed to other kinds of interesting) and "some".
The other thing to understand is that this has always been the policy. It hasn't changed, other than the few times we've run explicitly temporary experiments, like the no-politics one or Erlang day as described elsewhere in this thread.
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> 4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.
Disagree. Because what about that phrase from extreme programming / devops: Bring the pain forward.
Maybe if there hadn't been censure, we'd be inclined to work here on better ways to have controversial, emotional conversations. See: pol.is https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5
I was personally really disappointed in premise of the detox -- though perhaps more retrospectively as time wore on and I saw this place neutered. I now go elsewhere for my fix of political ideation and creativity.
> Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN.
I grudgingly fell into this category. For a long time, I was frustrated that certain technology-related political topics were being banished from HN, but watching what is happening to other online communities I must accept that this is the best practice. I used to love Slashdot, but that community has grown completely toxic, and I blame the flame-war political discussions for its decline.
I heavily follow the Science Online community on twitter because I loved the sense of wonder I got from the articles all the PhDs were sharing. Now I open twitter, get infected with their outrage, and take it out on my political-opposites on Facebook. I've had to limit my social media exposure and unfollow a lot of people in an effort to stay out of that bad mental place.
I need a place where I can forget about politics and recharge my sense of wonder. We need to keep HN a sanctuary for rationality and promoting human-improvability.
This is just a rationalization.
Yes, much political discourse on HN tends to be lower quality.
However, trying to establish HN as a "politics-free zone" is not only impossible but deeply problematic when so many of us work on things that are politically important. (I'm trying to avoid rehashing the whole article's argument again here.)
Getting your diet of political discourse somewhere else effectively means staying in your ideological filter bubble when you talk about politics. The political discussions here are valuable precisely because we can't do that here; HN members are self-selected by interests that cross-cut political lines.
The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization, and the underlying motivation for some is the desire to treat tech and the work we do as apolitical, because to do otherwise would have uncomfortable consequences.
The political discussions here are valuable precisely because we can't do that here; HN members are self-selected by interests that cross-cut political lines.
That's only the case because the guidelines and moderation practices are set up to keep political flamewars off the site. Those benefits would evaporate very quickly if HN was allowed to become a political free-for-all.
The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization.
The difficulty of political discussion isn't the rationalisation; the rationalisation is the predictability and mundaneness, and pointless incivility; i.e., people get emotionally heated, but resolve nothing and nobody learns anything. Nobody benefits and the quality of the site only degrades.
Topics related to politics are discussed here quite successfully all the time, and when it happens it's because the topic and resulting discussion is gratifying to one's curiosity and/or evidence of some interesting new phenomenon , as per the site guidelines.
the underlying motivation for some is the desire to treat tech and the work we do as apolitical, because to do otherwise would have uncomfortable consequences.
Few people are intelligent and socially-aware enough to be a high achievers in their business or career and yet naïve enough to think that their work is apolitical. And plenty of prominent HN contributors are perfectly capable of expressing strong political positions in their tweets and blog posts but keeping them out of their comments on HN.
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I agree that the net effect of general political discussion on HN is negative.
Jacques M did not post his article to HN though - that was someone else. He put it it on his own blog, where surely he's entitled to talk about politics if he wants to.
Furthermore, in the article there's no mention of Trump anywhere. He's taking about the intersection of politics and technology, and surely there needs to be a metaspace to talk about that somewhere, even if that space is not on HN? (For example, SO has a meta.) Otherwise, if we Hackers cede that metaspace entirely then the lawyer types who run the world from Davos will just decide for us. [1]
[1] I don't agree with everything he says, but IIRC I first read that sentiment expressed by Eben Moglen, though I don't
"Trump denies climate change" is not a political story.
It's a story that takes a place of a tech politis story that could be there.
True, but unfortunately, those are the stories we're talking about - because those are the ones media write.
If you can and post a story called "Detailed analysis of Trump's new energy policy", that features credible facts and figures instead of opinions, simplifications and insults, it will have pretty good chances of sticking on the front page here.
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I disagree with you on 4): there are quite a few insightful interesting discussions on HN about politics I've observed and been part of. They have changed my mind and made me think about things. I find political comments on HN to be noticeably higher quality than other sites, though I'll grant political HN comments are lower quality than technical HN comments.
But the main point I'd like to bring up is this: what you're saying is true about politics in general. But there are a lot of politics which are explicitly about technology and more specifically software technology. Political decisions are being made and laws are being passed that effect our industry, livelihoods, and lives and the community as a whole is infected with this head-in-sand "I'm above politics, politics isn't truly 'geeky' so I don't deal with it, I check out when people describe their emotions or lives instead of technical runtime analysis" attitude. I've observed it online in forums, in industry, in academia, it is an unfortunate facet of the cultural place the tech community inhabits.
But if all of the technical experts eschew politics then these political decisions that seriously effect our lives and our work will still be made: but without our input. By refusing to discuss and create politically active technical communities we cede all power to people who know nothing and care even less about the important technical issues of our time.
The tech community is pretty wide ranging in its political beliefs, but when we discuss the politics of technology there is general consensus on many issues among most: NN is good, banning encryption is bad, unrestricted access to the Internet is of fundamental importance and a liberating force, it would be better to have a choice of ISP, software patents are too broad, copyright/IP law is too extreme and stifles creativity, mass surveillance is troubling (whether you think it is also necessary or not).
There are a variety of extremely political issues that are fundamental to tech:
1) Should developers have a professional organization or union with e.g. ethical standards and certifications?
2) As a fundamental moral question, how do we feel about/what should we do about the millions of workers we personally displace and leave jobless through automation?
3) How, if at all, should the Internet be regulated? Is it a utility? Antitrust?
4) Immigration and outsourcing technical jobs.
5) What should happen when law enforcement demands information that is protected by encryption? Should encryption that the FBI cannot break be allowed?
6) How should copyright and IP work with respect to software, algorithms, APIs?
7) Should developers be held accountable for writing software that leaks data? Should users have fundamental rights to their own data? Privacy?
8) Regulations on IoT devices like cars
The list can go on and on and on. While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above regularly so that when a bill is put forth, or input is elicited, there is an actual community of experts that present a (reasonably) united front, who have discussed these things amongst themselves.
If we had banned political discussion on HN and sites like it, SOPA would probably be law right now. It was stopped because the entire tech community discussed it constantly, came to an agreement that it was bad, and took extreme collective political action against it.
>While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above
Your "tech politics" isn't what the detox experiment was about. Please see my other reply that repeats dang's clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476525
I'd agree here. There's no reason to discuss politics on HN when there are numerous other places to do so.
HN is a forum about technology and the startup world, let's keep it about that.
I kinda like the eclectic mix of articles linked on HN, and offers something in terms of content discovery.
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I would add though that the HN community at large, when we do slide into politics, does have by far and away the most interesting discussions on that topic I've ever read. There's no comparison to Facebook IMHO.
If the net effect of political discourse on HN is negative, it's a pretty good sign that the community needs to grow the fuck up. If we're unable to examine our role in the world -- what is happening and how our work fits in -- anyone advertising a startup as "world-changing" is dangerous, naive, or dangerously naive.
That said, dang almost ran me out of here for daring to call out conspiracy theorists out on their BS, so perhaps things are broken by design.
Please note, this is just my 2 cents.
Political discourse ruins online communities for people looking for technical and not political discussions. It's ruined Reddit as a technical forum; I have to filter several subreddits from r/all because I'm trying to avoid Trump news, and r/technology fought long and hard to keep political posts from dominating their subreddit, which it now does.
More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/23y1j4/meta_doe...
Basically, I want there to exist a safe space for computer engineers that I may disagree with politically to talk solely about solutions and products that solve technical problems, and not get sidetracked with whether or not I agree that Donald Trump having Patriot Act powers is terrible. I don't need yet another circlejerk in my life, I want the news.
You know how you have that hacker meetup, or small conference that starts off as all meaty tech topics? How great that feels to be able to learn/teach/demonstrate advanced topics knowing that everyone is on the same page. Then gradually money/business interests get involved to the point that the fundamental flavor of the group changes, and the first ones to leave are the most interesting. Five years later it's just a bunch of business/sales guys in suits giving power point presentations to each other. Of course no one would say that money, or business interests aren't important, but something has been lost here that is difficult to rebuild.
It's true that we should all consider the ethical ramifications of what we do, but opening the floodgates on politics will have the cost of reducing the utility of HN. The most hyper specialized and interesting hackers are also the least likely to have time to waste arguing about the political battle of the day.
I miss Erlang day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145
After the Second World War, the part of the city the Technical University of Berlin was in came under British administration.
They quickly passed a decree mandating classes in philosophy, politics, languages, and other social sciences to be required for every student–engineers, physicist, chemists etc.
The idea was that never again should a generation grow up with the power of scientific knowledge but none of the tools to judge the ethics of using that power.
Meaning: there are times where enjoying purely the wonders of technology is a luxury you can't afford. For HN, it doesn't mean a need to debate the Paris accords. But this community has quite a few people sitting at the levers of power, and where technology and politics/policy intersect, it can make a meaningful difference for people to know that the group of peers whose judgement they may value would, for example, applaud them for walking off the job instead of handing over the iPhone encryption keys.
But I doubt they mixed politics lectures into the physics course.
Of course politics is important. Doesn't mean Hacker News is the best place for a high quality discussion of politics.
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That's strange because that's not how British universities work at all. Our education system from age approximately 14 onwards is concentrated on specialisation.
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Yes, because the British, so versed in politics, language and philosophy never created concentration camps, starved hundreds of thousands of innocents, carried out chemical warfare, did summary executions, ... /s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atrocit...
You know, I think you could actually swap out "tech" with "political", in your first sentence, and make everything you said equally true about politics. Because most of what actually happens in politics, starts with passionate talented people, who are creating brilliant new ways to do things better.
The more groundbreaking something new is, the more the businessmen take over. Only in politics it's the bureaucracy and career politicians rather than shareholders and MBAs (though there are more and more MBAs on the political scene as well).
I recently wrote major parts of the digitization strategy for the municipality where I work, and I participate in a lot of multi-municipality "unions" where we're working out how to digitize our future, so I may be a bit colored, but I see a lot of similarities between making politics and creating new tech.
> The most hyper specialized and interesting hackers are also the least likely to have time to waste arguing about the political battle of the day.
I find the opposite to be true. The most intelligent and experienced hackers are not hyper-specialized, but have wide ranging knowledge of computing, mathematics, science, and people. They have strong, well-considered opinions on many topics, including politics.
Spending time arguing about it on Hacker News, probably not, but face-to-face with people they respect, yes.
You'd really enjoy the Chaos Communications Congress. It's something like 20 years old I believe, it's among the best in its niche of security/hacking/thats-great-but-why??-projects, and you won't find a suit there.
It is, however, extremely political, with a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalistic message.
>> You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang
Interesting concept, but, I (and I guess I am not alone on this one) would have found this particular topic extra interesting, and would have generated a few more site-interactions this way (instead of the other way around). But I can understand the gist of it...
Yeah, that's the point. People like you would stay, people who want cheap news discussions would leave.
Besides some minor experiences start-up world is the third worldwide phenomenon that I participated in while it grew. It was really exciting, a lot of fun, a lot of stories to tell, a lot of experiences made. But there is no reason to be sad about that it's over. It will happen again. Another topic, but it will happen, and it will be just as good and for the same reasons.
Also, it wouldn't be as good if it would stagnate at some point. I am/was also part of communities that stagnated, some since long before I was born. It's not the same level of engagement, not the same glory, not the same amount of brave, smart people. So if HN stagnated on a smaller level it wouldn't have been as good either.
For me I really found the best approach is to take it like a surfer. There are good waves and bad waves, but each one will end. Ending wave just means it's time to get ready for the next.
There was a nice long essay that looked at that same phenomenon from the context of underground music that gradually shifts in tone as it gets more popular, until the particular genre now names simply a kind of pop music that isn't really what it started off as. Sadly, I can't find a link to it, so I'll be grateful if anyone can provide one.
Still, politics are probably important and if we could engage in politics with non-techs with amazing efficiency, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too - address the political issue in 5 minutes at the start of the conference, then get back to business.
> opening the floodgates on politics will have the cost of reducing the utility of HN
I'm not apolitical, far from it, but that doesn't mean I want all the spaces I use to be politicized. And when HN does veer into politics, it almost always lowers the level of both insight and courtesy several notches from discussions of other topics.
I'm relieved to see politics stay tangential, because I think the alternative is not HN gaining insight on politics but losing it on everything else.
I think that it's more about politics and investors/advertisers not really clicking. The rest I just don't see, we already opened the flood gates to stuff like discussing "another trivial update of this piece of software a bunch of us use". Most of the comments aren't technical, and it's not like anyone ever got downvoted for telling an anecdote about their child or their parents, and "X is awesome" is exactly as valuable as "X is shit". Yet one is allowed, the other isn't.
> Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home
What's the hacker angle? There isn't one. It's interesting to people who care about politics and for people with dollars in their eyes. Amazon being "in the industry" is enough. How's that interesting? Maybe it's the idea that having a lot of users or commanding a lot of investments makes something intellectually interesting, a notion that is as widespread as it is mediocre.
All in all, I often feel the best analogy to some HN subcircles is the beam breakers in Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Don't think too much about it, just do what feels good, and just avoid what scares you, nevermind how that feeds into what disfigured and forced people into settling for such a life to begin with. Gotta keep those attention spans short while pretending to be deep.
For every 10 stories about people labouring under psycho bosses for years there's one of someone standing up to them the second they violated boundaries. The opposite ratio would be a start, and people who don't do that in their life I genuinely have no business and no politics to discuss with, and I don't care for their rationalizations of their weakness and accomplicehood, either. I read and comment because different people write and read here, too.
> "political battle of the day"
That doesn't require you to not think or respond deeper than that. How many "0.001 release of the day" posts trigger people into tirades about general programming principles? How much do we learn from that? There is no consistency here, either, and if you find one interesting, why don't you find the other even more interesting?
If people understand intellectual curiosity, why don't they understand the combination of intellectual curiosity, a moral grounding, and a will? Maybe because those who don't have it can't possibly accept that they are indeed the weakest link. It's like when we assume attractive people are dumb -- we wish! Sometimes they just have and are everything we do, and then some.
The HN that had Erlang day was a lot less moderated, and people posted about politics at will. The new, heavily moderated HN is the one filled with the same bland reposts of today's stories from top 10 news sites that are on every other aggregator.
What makes HN so great is that when a topic is discussed, often someone with direct participation in the topic is somewhere in the thread, to give an inside view.
What I miss about mixing HN and politics, is that HN doesn't have politicians who can pop in and say 'oh hi guys I wrote this bill feel free to ask me some questions'.
(I'm not saying nobody on HN participates on politics, I remember reading an interesting post about someone who ran for governor(?), but those posts are rare).
For example, a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides, people who write some controversial bills, people who take part in lobbying, and even senators. This approach has really opened my eyes to the political process and I have heard many well formed counter arguments which made me reconsider some of my positions.
I cannot say I have ever experienced this on an online forum.
Personally I do not enjoy seeing politics posts in HackerNews, similarly how I don't enjoy seeing them in /. or /r/programming. Specially because they are usually US politics and I live outside that country.
I definitely enjoy my share of the circus that is happening in that space. I watch CNN usually in evenings while having dinner as a form of "light entertainment". And in the mornings I do have my share of political news reading on my preferred sources.
But when I get to a science or technology forum, I love to see science or technology news and information. Thus when suddenly the majority of items are related to politics, it turns me off.
I live in the US and still dislike political posts, largely because political differences are such a source of hatred. It always devolves into bad Hitler analogies even among otherwise intelligent people. I imagine there are some people who are just annoyed that HN won't let them spread their thinly veiled political hate; I recognize this isn't a charitable interpretation, but it's been so long since I've heard a productive political conversation online, and I've never heard one involving someone as angsty as the OP.
> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides
Planet Money is better than average on this, but is definitely in the NPR bubble from my perspective.
I think EconTalk does the best job of airing different perspectives on (at least tangentially) economics related issues. The host has his own perspective, but he's very candid that he knows he has his own cognitive biases and often invites his guests to enlighten him by challenging those biases. It's also a longer format, so there is more time to unpack issues.
...which is a really good point. I think a lot of shallow political dialogue happens because of a lack of attention and space as much as anything else. Explaining why net neutrality is a big deal in emotional terms takes some technical explanation and some narrative building, for example.
I think what the article tries to say is that everything that has at least two people is political by heart. HN is political. Giving you the option to respond and upvote and flag is political. You doing any of this is political. You are a politician, automatically just by being here and interacting with me.
The article is ostensibily about explaining that technology is political, with the tacked-on truth that HN must allow more actual politics. If HN 'squelches political debate', I'm not sure if this refers to whole submissions, or the posters within threads - submissions get flagged for appearing to be preachy with no real intrigue, posters get downvoted and detached for derailing threads. At first I wouldn't know why this submission was flagged, but now I understand it comes on the heels of a spam of Paris threads.
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That's a big issue. HN has no special insight on politics so the discussions turn into the same old canards and groupthink on Reddit or anywhere else. There's just very little informative or useful about those discussions.
It's pretty often that stuff which is factually wrong but meets emotional needs gets upvoted without a second thought. Disagreement with the notion the world is ending or Trump is literally James Harden and is gonna start the Holocaust (a popular feeling at HN 4 months ago) gets swiftly downvoted because it doesn't meet how people feel.
Every time one of those groupthinky discussions happens it makes HN less attractive to informed discussion.
I'm sitting at -12 in a thread from yesterday in which a guy responded "No offence you don't seem to have much knowledge of post ww2 history" after he was the one who made a weird historical analogy and I more or less copypastad part of a wiki article on the issue. I don't really care about being wrong or losing Internet points, but when stuff like that happens it just convinces me that even really intelligent people would rather agree with their biases over actually debating something. No thanks. It's the kind of behavior expected on r/politics.
I cant find the thread, but last year someone posted something close to 'all Trump supporters are idiots, I don't know how he got so popular,' and someone replied, 'I have a top uni degree, successful career and I am voting for Trump, so start with reassessing your assumptions about Trump supporters if you want to understand them,' and everyone just downvoted him. Nobody asked him anything.
For the record I'm not a Trump supporter, but I can see that when it comes to politics people think emotionally and ideologically, and very few are asking themselves "have I not made any mistakes?" in the same way we do (everyone does make mistakes) when we care about being proficient.
I studied economics and had a passion for public policy and realized how corrupt that all is. There's no moral excuse for anyone to still suffer in 2017--but it persists. People are irrational, greedy, and selfish. Not all, but enough.
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Here's an example.
The parent post was at +5 and now it's in the grey. The downvoters don't bother responding, they just downvote, because differing opinions aren't welcomed.
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> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides
Great tip. The solution to so many problems is to involve challenging opposing points of view.
There is a big problem with the left in America rejecting opposing points of view. "Safe space" and "shut it down" culture, etc. Mainstream media newsrooms packed with only liberal reporters, etc.
But unfortunately everyone gravitates to places of comfort around people with like-minded views, because its too difficult to constantly be questioning your beliefs or challenging someone else.
Good examples are Fox News' Hannity and Colmes and CNN's Crossfire. Both shuttered, and just ended up with replacement shows with one point of view.
I find that more and more Trump people can make the arguments of left-wing people, but the inverse is not true.
I would love to have an open and honest (and civil) AMA from people who are writing these bills. Especially "cyber" legislation.
I personally helped create a government commission in Oakland, California that now decides on privacy topics that go to city council. We need more things like that.
Here's a challenge: how to enable honest AMA for a politician? Every thing a public figure says is read by the media, which gives a very strong incentive for them to not say anything that could damage their public position.
I would absolutely love to get insight into thoughts of politicians and problems they face, but it's hard to trust anything they say on-record, simply because of media pressure.
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There are serving politicians from a variety of legislatures around the world who have accounts on HN and have made comments in the past.
I haven't seen one from the US, however.
I love how this article became an example exactly of what's wrong in politics in general. There is a huge group of people in every political unity, that doesn't care about general consensus, understanding problems, considering different points of view. Yet, these people tend to turn on their political flak cannons from time to time and march into the political landscape like elephants into a porcelain shop (thinking about a funny picture with Trump here).
Many IT guys are like this. They hope their desires are simply well known by everybody and the results ought to be handed to them. That there is a self-responsible process going on that desires not just the fulfillment of a single person's desire but group consensus is just outside their spectrum. They don't even see that it exists.
So instead of discussing about responsibility they decide to use the consesus finding methods like flagging a post to just shut down what is oncomfortable to them, no matter what the results for the group are.
I'm really confused about what could be done with these people. They have the highest amount of participation options anybody ever had on the planet. Yet they don't want to participate. They just want to get fed. And you can't just ignore them because they are so many.
I totally agree, but there are two things to note:
- I think for many the "flag" button is in a grey area between downvote and an actual flag button. I am pretty sure many people use it as a downvote button with the original meaning of StackOverflow's downvote, so it might be partially unintentional and with no ill intention.
- HN should probably implement a downvote for stories, leaving the flag for truly abusive behaviour. Then implement their algorithm based on (Up/Downvotes radius) * (Total votes).
This would probably allow for conversations like this, polarized/controversial but still valid, to remain in HN.
My observation from other communities with downvote buttons is that they encourage more groupthink, not less.
With no downvote button, it's at least possible for a subcommunity to get a thread near the top for a while. Downvotes let the majority suppress these.
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Yes, it is mostly used as a downvote, which doesn't make it always right.
Btw. in fact there was a downvote for stories for some time. But leadership decided to take it out due to it being misused like flagging is misued by some now. At least by calling it "flag" for many people it's still clear that "this is content that doesn't belong on HN, like Spam, ads, sexual content etc".
Hacker News now has the ability to hide stories. This should be the default reaction to stories which one simply doesn't want to engage with, but which are not obviously egregious, rather than flagging them. It also hides comments from those stories.
Maybe better tools like "Dialogue Mapping" with IBIS (identifying Questions, Answers, Pros & Cons on a shared display as a conversation proceeds) can help solve the issue of constructive participation by all parties? For a start, see Jeff Conklin's book on: "Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems".
This is a process. Like every other process it requires people to participate in it. Or does it pro-actively contain methods for near-majority amount of people not participating in it? In that case please make an example or explain it a little more, because it is not obvious. Pretty much all methods I know require participation. Example: What would SCRUM be if nobody writes or interacts with the stories?
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i'm constantly surprised at how many people in our industry have a problem with articulating their own desires / needs in general.
i wouldn't be surprised if the same people asking HN how to get a higher salary are the ones hitting 'flag' on individual posts they don't like. you can't just push a button and get what you want in life.
"The eagle's hunt is direct, straight down to the goal" - Friedrich said.
What he would say today when every eagle's goal is the good cage and feeder?
https://damiravdic.bandcamp.com/track/bog-je-koncept
Damir Avdić - God is concept
________
Everything worth "reading" about ex-Yu wars and world/EU politics one could find in the works of this guy, afaic the greatest artist of 21. century - the position took in 20th century by the Jew is now taken by the Muslim.
What are you trying to say?
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Oh dear. I couldn't disagree more with the assessment of this story's position on Hacker News.
There is a difference between sticking your head in the sand politically and having a forum where people with differing political opinions can come together and discuss ideas in other areas than politics. You can both be politically active AND participate in a forum that avoids politics. Hacker News policy and avoidance of most political issues is precisely right in this regard. I know I come here to listen to stories dealing with computer technology and expert/practitioner commentary on those stories and business people engaged in the business of technology, particularly start-ups. At those times public policy has direct bearing to these subjects, such as patent law or net neutrality, I do expect to see discussion here.
Some here have been saying this has to do with US/Paris Accords. I agree with those topics being purged from this forum. I mean, really! How many readers of Hacker News do you think are on the fence about this subject: probably not zero, but my money says pretty damn close. I would wager that most here not only have already formed opinions on the subject, but strongly held opinions on the subject. If that's the case what possible value is yet another place to shout how right you are and wrong the other guy is at the top of your lungs given the number of other venues for such virtue signaling? I doubt you move the needle in one direction or the other on such terms.
So, what can you possibly achieve by being political in all venues and discussion forums? I suppose you can further entrench the move to ideological purity in all endeavors, further degrade any ability to find common ground with people that don't otherwise agree with you, further degrade the political discourse, and achieve a flourishing sense of tribalism in a large, complex society.
Is politics important? Sure it is. But so is time and place.
I guess jacquesm would like to see a political discussion of the same high quality many technical topics are discussed here. But it won't work - you can't shove politics into a quality tech forum and expect quality politics to come out, simply because political discussions inherently invite low quality. They're rarely about facts, mostly about status and opinions.
Hence, I agree HN should keep limiting political discussions.
That too. There's no necessary connection between 'good at programming' and 'understands politics well'. Or being good at anything else a forum covers and knowing much about the politic world and current situation within.
I mean, you wouldn't necessarily expect a site populated by mathematicians interested in discussing what's going on in their field to give you a good political debate. Why would you expect it on Hacker News?
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> Hence, I agree HN should keep limiting political discussions.
I don't believe that it does, though — at least not consistently. The moderators will periodically squelch some particular point of view, but which they silence and which they leave along, and where, are all over the board.
This is part of the reason I've decided to read HN less (first time in over a week!): I could deal with a mostly-unfiltered feed, and I could deal with a well-curated feed, but as it is I feel that it's just not worth the bother anymore.
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"There is a difference between sticking your head in the sand politically and having a forum where people with differing political opinions can come together and discuss ideas in other areas than politics. "
Yeah, this is what's important here. Hacker News doesn't need to cover politics for the same reason your average sports, celebrity gossip, fashion or gaming forum doesn't need to cover politics. Because people aren't going there for a political debate, and if the site owners and community decide they want to keep strictly to that, they're entirely fine to.
> "Hacker News doesn't need to cover politics for the same reason your average sports, celebrity gossip, fashion or gaming forum doesn't need to cover politics"
Indeed. And when sports forums (e.g. ESPN) start getting involved in politics, then invariably end up alienating half their audience. This has happened with ESPN, which has contributed to its downfall.
I don't want that to happen to HackerNews.
I come here for love of the software craft, not for subjective, divisive political stories.
Right. But are you comfortable with the fact that not all hackers will be on the same political side?
I wouldn't go as far as voting for Trump, but I am one of those crazy ultra-libertarians you occasionally encounter (I support tax cuts AND free migration). There are some well-educated people, even some with PhDs, who actually _did_ vote for Trump (I know a few), and most certainly, there are many Trump supporters right here on HN. Will you be comfortable with that, enabling political discourse?
Everyone wants to change the world, but not everyone is sharing your direction of change.
I don't really care what this <political figure> or <this party> means about an issue, I enjoy the discussions here on HN as they often present well-presented arguments from multiple positions, without appealing to authority or what side in politics means what.
On the other side I do like discussing topics with people with opposite ideologies. Some of the most interesting discussions I've had started with something like "Imagine that machines continue automating jobs and in the future there is only 10-20% of jobs today. What would you do with the rest of the people?".
Edit: I normally take the opposing side of the person that gives the argument just to explore the topic in-depth, so probably people from the left thing that I'm from the right and the reverse as well.
While I agree with what you're saying, allowing politics tends to mean EVERY thread gets a discussion of politics over time.
I've watched a lot of forums gain the axe grinders who don't debate, they fight. Over time, it's simply people yelling at straw men.
I don't come hear to get lectured, and that's what most political discussions and articles really are. I come here because of the creative techy vibe and relevance to things to which I can actually make meaningful contributions. I have a dozen other places to read impassioned rants about the issues and hot buttons of the day. I don't respect nor value those sites because they're junk food. Politics is where celebrity gossip meets sports.
I often read hacker news articles and threads from ten years ago and find value. Go find a political argument that old that isn't as quaint as the things we wrote in our high school yearbook.
Keep hacker news focused on what it does well. Don't create division.
The one problem I see with most people discussing things with "the other side" is that they don't genuinely care, nor would be ever swayed by what the other person says. It's just a game of "gotcha" most of the time and thus unproductive.
Some people are so anti-Republican or anti-Democrat that you might as well be trying to convince a Jihadi to eat bacon or a Catholic to abort a pregnancy or a Baptist to star in gay porn -- or a Mormon to play blackjack -- or an Atheist to become a Buddhist monk. Online forums (and newspaper comment sections) have created such a political balkanization as to make participating nothing more than sadomasochistic entertainment.
I used to care about those sorts of discussions with the "other side," but I've found that the level of discourse has devolved into to some variation of "Trump wants to send people to the gas chambers and destroy the planet" or "Hillary hires hitmen and Bill took a payoff from the Russians." Or, often it's "America is horrible and should be boycotted" -- or some other hyperbolic rant based on an anecdotal news item about a brown person at an airport.
I've got no use for it. I vote, encourage my like minded friends to vote and that's about it. Occasionally, I'll get sucked into a political discussion on Hacker News, but pretty much instantly regret it. I'm ok with the "crowd" disagreeing with my politics -- but I definitely don't relish getting into intense political debates with people here that I'd probably like to call my friends in real life.
Maybe it's my age (I just turned 40,) but I feel like engaging with deep economics and political discussions with those under 25 to be bordering on pointless. There are exceptions obviously, but when a 19 year old college sophomore wants to tell me about business unit economics, tax policy or building permits -- I'm pretty closed minded simply because they're generally citing other people's ideas rather than ideas based on actual experience or original thought grounded in experience. But that's ok. Views change as we begin to see the world for what it is rather than as what we want it to be. Everyone has the right to be wrong -- even me, as rare as that is. ;)
I'll leave you with a quote that is attributed to many people but this version came from Anselme Batbie, a 19th century French politician..
Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.
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There's nothing much to do. UBI is economically impossible with current population levels.
Usually, in times of global economic transitions such as this one, a world war happens. There are no unemployed in wartime.
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We all have plenty of opposing views on non-political matters, many of them quite polarizing, so I don't see why discussing opposing political views would be inherently more problematic or difficult.
Most other views are amendable to facts. Politics, by a) dealing with the most complex and messy aspect of reality, which is human interaction, and b) being very strongly based off opinions and status games, inherently invites bad discussions.
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How does that relate with the blog post?
Leaving politics aside allows e.g. me to collaborate productively with e.g. ultra-left socialist bicycle-driving UBI-supporting people. If we leave politics aside, we can agree to disagree and still work together on something useful. If we will discuss politics, our time will be spend in unproductive discussion without actually changing the world in any direction.
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> Will you be comfortable with that, enabling political discourse?
Yes we should if the alternative is singing "la la la can't hear you" and pretending we were all of the same opinion when in fact we aren't.
Have you seen how the poli discussion goes usually around here? Endless circlejerk where every voice out pf the choir is downvoted to oblivion
Truth is this place majority comes from a verry narrow social bracket, and thus has a very narrow mindset and as such a very small set of ideas keep resonatin
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(To clarify: I think it's important but to stop discussing and acknowledge which other views exist and are widespread and why they are. That doesn't mean I share all views or think they are all equally valid. I personally think Trump was the worst that could happen and the climate action was once again proof of that.)
I am a lobbyist and I work in Washington, so I'm surrounded by politics every day. I think what makes HN great is that it avoids politics, for the most part, and true intellectual stories and debate is able to take place. Politics is extremely polarized, and permeates every aspect of our society to the point of extreme. I prefer an HN sans politics, without incendiary articles and commentary, because I learn a lot more about the world and society that way.
One of the more interesting lines of political inquiry that I think has arisen lately outside of HN, is the question of the actual true affect "hacking" (and I don't just mean in the Security sense -- I mean in the Hacker News "Comp Sci" sense as well) actually had on recent elections around the world. In what way, technically speaking and regardless of your personal political affiliations or beliefs, could US and other electoral processes (and let's just say government in general) have been directly affected by technical means? Maybe there are some good links to technical resources that others could direct me to?
I think the rest of the world desperately needs the Hacker News viewpoint on this, in detailed, non-partisan technical manner. I believe there is some deeper, non-polarized, apolitical (think, "highest bidder") aspect to what is actually happening right now around the world.
Well in the interest of discussing that, I do have some thoughts:
>could US and other electoral processes (and let's just say government in general) have been directly affected by technical means
One could claim that an intrinsic variable in democracy is the "voice" of any one citizen. For lots of years that has stayed stable. If a politically minded individual wanted to affect change, they could only "shout" so loudly.
They could spend day and night lobbying, petitioning, speaking, getting elected, but all that effort is only a constant multiplier. Technology in politics, just like in other areas, can move the needle orders of magnitude more effectively. When any one person or organization can use technology to add voices (apps, hacks, robots, etc), it can exacerbate issues and cause secondary effects that weren't present when 1 person = 1 voice.
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I agree with everything you've said. There's enough politics in everything else; I come here to be a nerd and learn about nerdy things.
Also I've noticed that even though HN tends to promote discussion pretty well on technical subjects, even here political discussions tend to devolve into flame wars.
The irony in this entire thread is that sufficiently broad technical leadership is indistinguishable from organizational politics. It's all about talking stakeholders into doing "the right thing".
I would love to just be able to solve Big Problems by hacking on them, but the more experience I get, the more I find that the biggest roadblocks involve changing minds, not changing code.
Is organizational politics inevitable once you reach a certain size? Any ideas or lessons in avoiding politics in favor of solving problems – short of a mind meld?
The less people are there in a group and the less formal the area, the less organizational politics. The more difficult the problem, the more people you need to tackle it. Problems are made simpler by better tools (and smarter people).
Idea: make more tools reducing complex problems to something tractable by small groups of people. Couple that with freedom of association and let people self-organize.
TL;DR: I think the appropriate thing to do is talking about ETHICS here as that's universal and some times it will involve politics, but not just politics for the sake of it.
From an opposite point of view to this article, politics vary greatly around the world and I'm guessing that by politics the article mainly refers to USA politics. For instance I ignore my country's politics talk since it's too old fashion and USA politics talk since it feels quite pointless arguing/bashing for the sake of it most of the times. I do enjoy a meaningful politics discussion from time to time, normally in person and with someone I trust already.
While I do agree on the big picture--USA is one of the most influential countries, politics there affect all the world--this article seems to be setting the prerogative to get into everyday politics. I do not really care whether or not Hillary or Trump were talking about their cat on Twitter (metaphor) during the elections and for many months after it and it became quite unbearable at points TBH.
So I would say that the things we should continue doing is talking about ethics (especially when it is related with hacker ethics). My short list of rules for HN topics are (the more the better):
- It is about hackers/startup/programmers/IT/privacy/etc.
- It is interesting for a global audience.
- It is something new or happening right now.
- It is noteworthy or at least interesting/geek.
> this article seems to be setting the prerogative to get into everyday politics. I do not really care whether or not Hillary or Trump were talking about their cat on Twitter (metaphor) during the elections and for many months after it and it became quite unbearable at points TBH.
I didn't get that from the article at all, just that we should be discussing politics when it's intertwined with the technology we build and care about.
I am not certain ethics are universal. I think "The Righteous Mind", by Jonathan Haidt, does a fairly good job showing that there are different aspects or flavors to ethics, and that not everyone can agree on which aspects 'count'.
Your comment is political. It adds a point of view to the discussion about politics in HN. It also tries to achieve something (talking about ETHICS). This is politics. No need to talk how US government politics is different from Russian government politics. We can just talk about our politics here.
If you take such a broad definition of "politics", then the word becomes meaningless, since everything is "politics".
'jacquesm wrote about politics as in what politicians in the governments do. This is a particular thing, and I personally believe it's rarely useful to discuss it on HN.
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From my point of view, discussing politics is a waste of time. We don't make progress by discussing the daily musings of the people who appear to wield power in the world.
I'm more interested in the technology that will eventually render their power useless: counter economics.
For me the goal isn't to find the right people at the right time to seat the power of nation-states, but to make it impossible for them to wield any meaningful power at all.
I am deeply interested in politics, governance, and the way humans interact at scale, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in what bills get passed, who gets elected, or what Trump said in a tweet. While these small blips in history do have an impact, I think technologies such as bitcoin, uber, etc., have a much bigger impact on the world because they usurp political power.
Lets all waste time virtue-signalling about things we have no experience or expertise in, that are dominated by charismatic dummies we can barely communicate with, and that we'll have no measurable impact on!
Or we can keep doing what we can do well and has actually, fundamentally changed the world for the better and made us rich.
Well, if you negate what "politics" mean and conflate it with the current politicians star-system, your reasoning holds.
Although I can raise doubts whether it has made the world better, it certainly has made many people rich, at the expense of others. What you said is very political, ironically.
Very solid points, totally agree.
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I'm not sure if I agree with the author. Hackers do care about political issues. My question is whether political discussions over short form text do more harm than good to a community. To me, HN detoxing politics seems more like the librarian enforcing a rule of silence rather than encouraging ostriching. And polarizing topics like politics, especially over short form text, to me, seems like it would destroy that ideal of HN.
That being said, the Internet sure could use a proper forum for political discussions.
Why is the post flaggeg, then?
Because enough HN users clicked the "flag" link, most likely.
I don't think one must devote themselves to politics. However, this thoughtful essay by regular contributor here should be UNFLAGGED. It is piercing, but measured and in line with the ideals here on this site AND the reasonable discussion.
If dang or another moderator could weigh in; this is not how I believed flags were meant to be used. We defend free speech here unless we have a strong reason.
It's tedious bullshit that makes a bunch of mistakes - some of which have already debunked.
In particular it mostakes the reason for the detox. This was only ever about stopping tedious pathological arseholes making the same boring hyperbolic bullshit flamebait arguments that a not particulary bright 16 year old would make.
HN thinks of itself as smart but the political discussion here is normally embarrassingly weak.
> mostakes
> Not particularly bright 16 y/o
I found his write up of the custom Lego sorter hardware design he made to be innovative. With a treadmill and some spare parts he made a classifier and trained a neural net.
Either way; I think your comment is rude. If you don't like his piece-- which again I am not sure I agree with either; use <hide> not flag.
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<personalOpinion> The problem with political or religious discussion is that much of it is irrationally about 'tribes' and self image.
Some positions cannot be easily influenced with mere 'facts' because you're arguing against people's feelings and cognitive dissonance is very powerful.
Bringing politics up on Hacker News will rarely positively influence anyone's opinion but will almost always be divisive and distracting. </personalOpinion>
Sometimes the goal isn't to "convert" people to your political or religious views. There is immense utility in reinforcing that there are intelligent and congenial people (who deserve the benefit of the doubt) that disagree with you on important issues.
I think pushing "controversial" discussions to the edges of polite society has been shown to make us more culturally ignorant.
I'm sad the posts about USA withdrawing from the Paris deal all got purged fro the front page yesterday. Yes, some political issues aren't relevant on HN, but this I think was.
Edit: Kinda ironic that this post is now having the title [FLAGGED] and being dropped from the fp as well. Edit2: Still flagged but back up, interesting
It is ironic. It was briefly at #1 but seems to be dropping again now.
No HN only allow political ideologies or narratives they agree with. The moderator team do not hide that they are SJW's.
As another example, currently HN's narrative of choice is how Uber is literally the worst thing since Hitler and you can't go a week without seeing 3 or 4 top-voted links bitching about Uber. Perhaps some people like being able to conveniently travel from point A to B without caring about what some whiny keyboard warrior hates about Uber this week.
What's an SJW?
Not playing dumb, just interested in what it personally means to someone who applies it to others as a (pejorative?) label.
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I'm interested in politics, I follow it closely and I am a member of a political party. But I don't want to see it here, I don't think HN is a good venue for it.
That's a shame, because the things we discuss here have political consequences, and it's irresponsible to ignore them.
I wouldn't want to see posts strictly about politics on the front page, but I think discussion of political topics that relate to technology and our industry is not only interesting, but necessary.
It's not irresponsible to keep discussions in their right place, of course politics will seep in everywhere but if I want to talk about the US pulling out of the Paris agreement (and I do) then there are better places to do that than here.
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One of the reasons I think that we hackers like to stay out of politics is we feel that politics itself, as a subject, is broken - and we can fix it by computerising everything.
This may or may not be true. In the meantime, computer programmers all over the world are working on computerising subjects that are traditionally used to having political power/influence involved. Pulling the humans out and replacing them with shell scripts, in this scenario, is of course a source of contention.
Fundamentally, governments and politics are broken. Computers can be used to fix them. However, this is one of the most controversial areas of computerisation and - like politics itself, along with governance - a cause of never-ending social strife.
Its almost like something, "ethical", is missing in the equation.
> One of the reasons I think that we hackers like to stay out of politics is we feel that politics itself, as a subject, is broken - and we can fix it by computerising everything.
I agree with the first part, but personally disagree with the second part.
Yes, I find politics broken, but I have absolutely no faith in fixing it in any way. So I hack away on problems I feel like I can solve or at least improve on. This keeps me sane.
Same here. I don't buy fixing politics with computers - not until we take politics entirely away from humans and give it to a superpower AI that will act as a god.
The argument for this belief is this: people keep gaming stuff. No matter how smart your system is, given enough interest someone will hire someone smarter to cheat it. Even mathematics won't save you here, because math is too narrow-scoped. For any theoretically secure system on paper you can find holes in its messy real-life implementation. See e.g. quantum entanglement used to create untappable communication channels being defeated by simply tapping at the classical endpoints.
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We're hackers, too busy helping extract wealth from the population as efficiently as possible.
You do know wealth can be created?
It can but the market is currently showing us this is far less profitable than collecting rents and Phishing for Phools.
There are two different types of politics and we often conflate both. The type that many people hate is "politics the art of manipulating people".
The second meaning refers to actual policies and their effect on people's quality of life. I don't think anyone would have trouble discussing that - that is, if it were somehow magically separated from the manipulation. But often its not.
If you look at the first meaning, things like "detox week" make a lot of sense - its about getting rid of the manipulation so that your brain can process information better again. "Squelching political debate" means stopping discussion that attempts to manipulate, and so on.
Since the tools used for manipulation are currently better than ever before, and we don't like manipulation, I suppose the best approach would be to work on things that expose manipulation and/or defend people from it.
edit: exercise - try to replace the word "politics" with "manipulation" in the article and re-read it. The point that we shouldn't burry our head in the sand still stands, but the reasons why that happens become much clearer.
Politics, from my Norwegian social studies textbook, is defined as "the subject of distributing the burdens and surpluses of society". Nothing to do with manipulation there. The same definition can be used for office politics.
Manipulation only enters into it when people use dishonest means to pull the surpluses over to themselves, and the burdens over to people who shouldn't carry them.
> The same definition can be used for office politics.
> Manipulation only enters into it when people use dishonest means to pull the surpluses over to themselves, and the burdens over to people who shouldn't carry them.
... which is pretty much the exact meaning of the term "office politics". You don't talk about "office politics" when people get rewarded appropriately for their contribution to the company. You only talk about it in the context of e.g. sucking up to managers, backstabbing cow-orkers, taking credit for something you didn't do, etc.
As for the government-type politics, "the subject of distributing the burdens and surpluses of society" is as good a definition as "the subject of distributing land and wealth of a society" is a good definition of war. It's technically true, yet totally misses the important and problematic aspects of it.
Definitions are a way to draw a broad-stroked border in thingspace, so that you know the general area in which the meaning of a word lies. Nothing more.
Thats a fairly naive way of looking at it. Modern politics is all about manipulation (mostly emotional manipulation) from all sides, even those that fight for just causes. Simply laying down the facts and research about what we know is not enough to change people's minds. Instead, political messages are crafted to have emotional impact: the goal is to cause people to feel empathy, outrage, shame, fear etc depending on the circumstances.
That's an interesting and enlightening perspective. Thank you for sharing.
Have you read the famous book How To Make Friends And Influence People? I found it changed my definition of "manipulation" substantially. In a democratic society, distributing the burdens and surpluses of society is an exercise in persuading people.
--A bit of a Rant---
I would argue that politics have infiltrated tech too much already.
Don't believe me, try being a open, vocal Trump supporter or conservative at a major tech company in Silicon valley. You will be labeled a hateful, racist (fill in your favorite derogatory term) based on your political beliefs irregardless of your actual actions both at work or even in your personal life. Most people who are conservative are afraid to talk about their political beliefs due to the very real threat of losing their job.
Look at Larry Garfield with Drupal. In the course of things stuff went as far as people in the Drupal association actively trying to ban conservatives among other things.
The ruby community is just as bad. Rails Girls, Rails Bridge and later on tech404.io banned a woman because she was conservative https://code.likeagirl.io/thoughts-from-the-editor-172e93ecc.... Then there was Opalgate where a community diversity leader tried to get a key contributor banned over his personal conservative beliefs.
At this years Lambdaconf a black, first time speaker and military veteran, who grew up dirt poor in the projects, but pulled himself up by his bootstraps was blasted by a group of people because in his personal life he believes in the red pill, specifically, in his own words seeking the truth, not being anti-woman.
As a moderate I really don't need to be concerned about someone's personal beliefs work with people or to even have a friendship with them. People are messy imperfect beings and there are many shades of grey with people and beliefs even when they hold views that I'm against. The only time that becomes an issue is if someone acts on it. IE: they steal from the company or murder someone etc. but that is not what I am talking about here. In all of the cases I mentioned here, these people did not act inappropriately in a professional setting. They didn't harass people, try to convince people about their personal beliefs, make sexist statements etc..
People who dedicate their lives to parsing out complex political/moral issues have a tough time doing it. If I go to a tech event I'm there to talk about tech not a political conference. The irony is that if people on all sides of the political issues have a place where they came come together and see someone as a human it also may be more effective than the division that the politicization of tech has been creating. Could that open us up to some bad, maybe, but politics being combined with tech are causing a lot of damage to the industry and people already. More importantly its not working. ---Rant over--
We can argue all we want, but it is clear that in 2016, blocking one Twitter account could alter the course of history.
Yes or it could have the opposite effect. What I think is that a lot of people feel hated upon from the rest of the society.
In my country there is a political party that has been excluded from a lot of public things, other politicians telling them they are fascists, racists and just any kind of slur basically. They were even excluded from a party where Saudi Arabia was invited. Just think about that.
Now, they are the second largest party in the country and well on their way of being the largest. They had everything to gain being the underdogs and their opponents has been their best ad for gaining trust and votes.
Fascists are excluded from public discourse in many societies, and I'm not positive it makes the situation worse in any respect. People still supporting them no matter what are typically like-minded bigots rather than some sort of libertarians sticking up to authority.
If they had done that, that would have just played into his narrative about the media being against him, along with vindicating a lot of accusations against twitter for "shadowbans".
Lets say, theoretically they block that one account. What would be twitter's recourse if the POTUS decides to Gitmo their CEO/developers/prod engineers in retaliation.
I read it as: Blocking that one account would have blocked Trump from becoming president.
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Let's start with the techno-essentialism that many in the tech world depend on for their mental well being: Yes developers impact the world, no they do not impact them as much as TV (still), comedians and most other fields of science. Dumping movies, 0days, user databases online, developing some new prediction market with whatever cryptocurrency doesn't change that. Still, I completely agree one should be aware of the ethical implications in the code they write.
Relevant quotes from article:
> and that hackers, more than any other profession, create the tools and the means with which vast changes in the political landscape are effected.
> The ability to influence with disproportional effect on the outcome of all kinds of political affairs compared to someone not active in IT, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to pull on very long levers, far longer than you’d normally be able to achieve
> Between ‘Wikileaks’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica’ it should be more than clear by now
stop this. Go back and look over CA's marketing material. They brag about taking Ted Cruz from a field of 20+ into 3. Not exactly a winning pony. And I'm sure there were plenty of other analytic companies that would have used it to their marketing benifit if their pony got further instead. The "we predict you better than your mother with just 300 likes" is a line people already wanted to believe. Someone just made a good story for us to bite into it.
Still, I do agree "everything has a political dimension"
We are, right now, influencing each other through a filter. A filter designed by Paul Graham and friends with some values in mind. For instance, there is no picture of each other, no reference to sex, nor race. That prevents many prejudices from being activated. That is impact.
If actions speak louder than words, infrastructure, that which dictates which actions are possible at all, speaks much louder. Developers are building new infrastructure all the time, for every action and human need. Right now I can buy groceries online, get a remote job, and find a date on an app. That is techno-essentialism.
The future belongs to the hacker in much the same way that medieval Europe belonged to the knight and the bishop. The power of the computer is obvious to anyone that isn't living under a rock, naturally, this brings many fakers, if you focus on them it all seems like a bubble, because you are focusing on the bubble. Treat yourself better and focus on what pervades. The Times They Are A-Changin'.
Does it ever occur to people who want to introduce explicitly political conversation to a project, that a "lets focus on the task at hand" policy might be for their own good? That bringing the political dimension in might chase away contributors with whom their interests were temporarily aligned?
I can understand bringing up politics when the topic is something like deliberately using psychological manipulation against their users. Because if you think it's morally wrong, your interests were never even slightly aligned, and the goal is to be off-putting. Hopefully in a way that puts people off of what they're building, rather than putting them off of venues where you can converse with them.
But using that case as rhetorical cover for bikeshedding a minor slight that occurred in the context of an otherwise noncontroversial piece of software? That is why people hate "politics."
(I wish I had the link to where I saw this argument presented first, but I'll guess my poorly rephrased version will have to do.)
Political discussion tends to be of a fundamentally different type vis-à-vis technical discussion. Discussion mechanics like voting and flagging (particularly apropos here) which work well for technical discussions are often...lacking...when it comes to political ones. This is literally what much of the article is complaining about.
If someone is pounding in nails with a screwdriver, I might suggest that they use a hammer instead. That doesn't mean that I think nails are beneath me.
"The ability to influence with disproportional effect on the outcome of all kinds of political affairs compared to someone not active in IT, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to pull on very long levers, far longer than you’d normally be able to achieve comes with some obligations."
If this is true, then "some obligations" would almost certainly include a reluctance to abuse those long levers or alienate a large swath of users. Power ought to be used responsibly.
Back to reality, though, the reason why hackers and other tech-minded folk are averse to politics is the exacy reason why they're hackers: because politics is about as far away from the hacker ethic as possible. It'd be like asking a racecar driver to take up an interest in gardening; yeah, some NASCAR drivers can probably grow one hell of a vegetable patch, but it ain't exactly something one could or should expect them to do.
Hackers would rather focus on being immune to politics. It should be no surprise, then, that they tend gravitate toward things like cryptocurrencies and other technologies resistant to governmental control (or providing a means for such resistance).
Are you kidding me? It's not that I'm not political, but this isn't a place for doing anything with politics, it's for hacking and talking about that. Go away with this crap.
Politics is OK to get into but I skip over any comments that directly provoke flame wars. I don't flag articles but I sure did flag this. And I deleted a personal insult from that first part. What are you thinking??
It's not that politics don't matter, it's that political discussions are not just useless - they're harmful.
Political discussions almost always become emotional, rather than intellectual, discussions. They work on the wrong part of the brain.
Virtually everyone takes absurd positions and then viciously attacks their fellow human beings who take a different absurd position.
I never saw an article that was both flagged and still on the homepage...Didn't know that could happen. Badge of honour really.
I would guess moderator influence here. And it's reasonable to keep it on the front page, since it doesn't contain anything flag-worthy.
Explicitly talking about politics is exactly what everyone who doesn't have any access to long levers is doing. Using those levers to accomplish something doesn't necessarily look like "doing politics". It might instead look like writing the bitcoin whitepaper, or running some tor exit nodes, or just improving wikipedia.
Politics divides us. The more we can do together whilst holding opposing world views the better.
If the left didn't excommunicate anyone they disagree with maybe there would be more a chance to have reasoned political discussions, but so far, anywhere online where there is a left-wing community, all opposing viewpoints are silenced. See Reddit, etc.
I'm yet to see a political discussion among people not dedicated to that or with no in-depth knowledge that actually accomplished[1] something. Several (hundreds) of posts/comments asserting opinions before dying out, or turning into a flamewar of insults, doesn't do much to change the world, as far as I see anyway.
With that in mind, I don't see the point of promoting even more (it's not as if there isn't plenty of it already) political talk in HN.
Is it important to be aware of political ramifications? Maybe, and that's why I personally follow several general news publications in my RSS feeds and not only tech blogs. Is it important to discuss it? Following what I said above, not, in my opinion.
[1]: Even among knowledgeable persons, most of the accomplishment is swaying people from one side to the other and that can be good or bad.
In many people's view just being broadly aware of political situation around you is not enough anymore, they seem to believe that you need to have a strong emotions about (certain) political subjects, you need to take actions... even though for the most of time they don't do anything constructive about it either, except for venting off the frustrations on twitter or with friends over a beer. Which is perfectly OK, I do it all the time, but you need to be aware that some people just don't get that much emotionally involved in politics as you do. And that it's perfectly OK, because not taking active part in politics is also a form of politics. IMHO one should be free to choose his role in the society, without being forced into one or the other by peer pressure.
I tend to think of politics as resource arbitration. Say, you have limited resources (as we all do) and there are too many contenders who want to settle this without resorting to any sort of violence, then you need pretty much politics.
Technically, a kernel scheduling algorithm or packet forwarding algorithm are politics too (hence they're called "policy"). The problem is that the real world is so messy and complex and has too many variables unlike CS stuff that we can hardly reach any sensible solution in a timely way. In theory we can tackle on politics in a somewhat objective manner but it's typically waay harder than any software project.
See the book: "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making" by Deborah Stone for an exploration of this issue of resource arbitration and politics.
One simple example she uses is how do you divide up birthday cake? Equal pieces? What if come people arrive late to the party after you start cutting the cake and giving out pieces? What if some people are full but others have not had dinner yet? What if some people don't like the pieces with chocolate icing?
While we can be "objective" within a set of established priorities, we can't be objective about designing a set of priorities. Albert Einstein wrote on this in "Science and Religion" about how science can tell you about what is and how it is all connected, but it can't tell you what should be.
One other point Stone she makes is that when people are on the outside of an organization they want transparency of the decision making process -- while then the same exact people move to the inside of an organization they suddenly have many reasons why they want decision should be opaque. "Yes, Minister" has a great comedy episode on that called "Open Government".
The problem with politics and a great many other things is that talking about it is just talk. The vast majority of these problems are so outside the scope of any one's frame of reference and that creates two problems. Even the most educated of all people are only able to say "it's complicated" and most people only have opinions. It's glib to say that it will just turn into FB with everyone spouting their own un-educated opinions. But the reality is that unless you have actionable YES/NO type ideas, no one in the tech industry (or any other group) cares much about opinions other than their own.
I think this title would be so much better without the ironic voice (or whatever the english term should be for saying one thing but meaning another).
Something like "All technologists should care about politics" is so much more meaningful.
"Sarcastic" would probably be the best fit. Good point also.
two things, firstly don't confuse hackernews with hackers as a group.
secondly and the most important is that politics posts here usually devolve into flame wars, and people don't like that.
Finally this submission has already been flagged, I notice.
There are two claims here that should be considered separately.
1. Hackers are reluctant to acknowledge that their work has political ramifications. I believe this is true, and a problem.
2. Politics should be discussed more on HN. This is what most in the comments are disagreeing with, and I think with good reason. I like that HN avoids politics for the most part, but I'm also very glad to see someone point out that too many intelligent and technologically-inclined people insulate themselves from taking questions of values seriously.
The topics of impact of tech on society, and of ethics in technology, are something that I too would like to see discussed more. Separated from politics as much as possible, per your point 2.
Even the Snowden leaks seemed not so important to me. Unless there is good oversight of who views what as long as there is due process, I don't see any reason to view those things as politically charged.
Honestly I prefer having a nihilist point of view about politics in general, having a minimum amount of trust towards separation of power, always weighing the pro and cons, trying to guess what public opinion wants. It's much more freeing to see voters as children expecting things.
Geopolitics are much more interesting honestly.
The tools we create can be used for both good and evil. It's not my place to decide who can and can't use the tools I create and what they can use it for. Frankly, I simply don't care at all about any kind of politics, which is why I got into programming in the first place.
And if the author doesn't like that, than that's just too bad for them.
> It's not my place to decide
You are still responsible though.
"It's not my place to decide who uses the torture devices I design. My job is only to make them as painful as possible."
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got a problem in your design specs, buddy. Torture devices aren't supposed to cause pain, they're supposed to generate compliance.
Now you also have to consider your market segments. Some folks--we'll call them the Jack Bauers--need to maximize the compliance per time unit ratio. Sure, those devices are probably going to be painful. And expensive. So good profit margins there.
But also consider the compliance per energy unit ratio. Your basic oubliettes and music-blasting oubliettes fall into that category, along with emetic-laced meals and gratuitous bureaucratic nonsense runaround. That kind of customer is looking for something cheap, almost by definition. So maybe we look at that like a subscription service.
...wait. The torture device was a metaphor, wasn't it?
So let me point out the problems with your metaphor.... ~
What kind of geek doesn't at least temporarily lose sight of the big picture while obsessing over the cool and interesting details?
I make kitchen knives. People use kitchen knives to kill each other. Am I now responsible for these deaths?
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The German army leaders thought straight this way.
This directly led to the 2nd World War.
Just curious: Why I am downvoted here?
Any person with a little history knowledge would be able to say that everything is correct, I stated.
But people don't know about history any more, since they think, we are so different today.
We are not -- but who does refrain to learn from history, is bound to repeat it.
Now go on down voting me, and refrain from learning! This generation just builds up the ingredients for the next downfall of humanity.
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I'm intrigued - so you're open to all any approaches from wealthy blackhats? You'll work, no questions asked?
Technology development does directly affect trajectory of where the humanity go as the whole. Yes.
But I think that HN shall be the place where we can discuss how AI moves us from post-industrial to post-human world for example rather than particular fluctuations of the trajectory (a.k.a. realpolitik).
I'm pretty sure a lot of my favorite blogs on political subjects I discovered from reading hacker news, so im a bit skeptical of the premise. What I see get (mostly) rejected here is outright political activism -- but it doesn't seem like the place for that.
Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
Maybe someone could build a forum that enforces civil discussion on political issues, either with automated or manual moderation, but Hacker News' moderation isn't nearly strict enough.
> Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
It's interesting that you think so, because this very discussion is extremely political, though perhaps meta-political.
I think Hacker News may be unique in that political discussion can take place in a technical forum.
The main barrier to thoughtful discussion may be the HN points system.
I suspect that many insightful posts are not written due to self-censorship (fear of losing points). It's completely irrational of course, the points are meaningless, but when they are lost it can cause some distress. Nobody likes to lose a game.
> Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.
Hacker News does not disallow, and but for a brief experiment never has disallowed, political discussion. This non-existent ban does not, therefore, explain HN's quality.
By "disallow", I'm talking about the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics ...
and most people's willingness to support these guidelines with downvotes.
> too busy to improve the world
I would say I'm just busy trying to improve the world.
Politics is driving people away from the Google homepage.
Hackers don't bother with politics because they understand that it's the people who change the world and not the politicians. Politicians' job is to get re-elected, everything else is irrelevant.
Agreed, but not entirely - people in position of power do have a theoretical opportunity to make some meaningful change, but they seldom make use of it (often exactly because they focus on being re-elected).
The way I phrase it is usually this: if you want to change the world, politics is waste of time. It's one of the least efficient ways of helping, because you'll end up stuck in constant battles over trivia, status and, well, office politics. By the time you wind up in position of actual power, you'll likely be up to your ears with various deals, and you won't be really helping society anymore.
(Corollary: I don't buy that the higher up you go, the more power you have. Looking at the dynamics of political parties, it's very rare someone will let you achieve position of power if you've not proven again and again to be open for deals and preserving status quo. My current belief is that usually, the higher you go, the less actual agency you have.)
Politicians are people, they definitely are changing the world and affecting people's lives. If you care about your society, the world in general, then it is relevant.
I think the question isn't whether it's relevant, but whether it's an efficient way of doing things.
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Showing no interest in politics is like having no self-preservation instinct. You, as a hacker might hope that your work will change the world someday, while the politicians are busy changing the world to their liking right now. So it is better to keep an eye on them.
Coverage of political machinations is pointless, but information on political outcomes is invaluable - there is a massive difference. Chomsky has said the only paper that tells the truth is the Financial Times, in part because you don't make money with lies, whereas most news is designed to push an agenda and obfuscate anything real.
Understanding political outcomes is very different to listening to political debate/punditry/noise, and learning, for example, that certain subsidies are ending is not the same as reading political arguments on the environment, and they shouldn't be confused.
Knowing that Trump is president means one can predict certain things - the Paris accord ending - but not others, for example budgets are far less fungible than people think, and a lot of the budget of any nation is kinda locked in, so a lot of the noise on funding cuts and changes is unlikely to come to fruition. If you read a lot online/watch a lot, how do you know which of the multitude of BS will come to fruition?
I reckon if more news focussed on "this is the debate, these are the likely outcomes, these industries would be affected in these ways", then reading more would be invaluable. OTOH, Covfefe coverage? I'll Pass.
It may be difficult to improve the world if you neglect politics.
>THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" ...
Next time read the license.txt
You guys, what would be the crucial ingredient in "socdem" vs. "libdem" diff that makes you so angry when someone compares it to "angular" vs. "react" diff?
You're downvoted because you're exactly right. People on here generally can't handle inconvenient truths that include themselves. Never trust a person who can't rend their garments.
> This generation
No. Resoundingly NO! These smug clowns can't speak for anything and anyone. They're not even a generation, just farts in the wind. Even just 1% of the people paying attention outweigh them easily, and at any rate, the world belongs to those who genuinely care about it. Period, anyone who disagrees can come fight me. Think less "no child left behind" and more "Noah's Ark"; they had their chance, they made their choice, let's not be held hostage by them. At the very least, let them queue after those who are not ungrateful.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14469497 and marked it off-topic.
> Period, anyone who disagrees can come fight me.
Can I flag you? Yes? Oh, there's the link. I just flagged you.
You see, this is why some of us want less politics on HN. Because every political topic inevitably turns into people doing the thing you're doing here - assuming that those who have different views than you are "smug clowns", instead of trying to figure out why their views differ from yours.
> Can I flag you? Yes? Oh, there's the link. I just flagged you.
And you are holding speeches about tolerance??
How tolerant about different views are you? Or are you just misusing your power?
So much about the "tolerance of the self assigned tolerance watchers".
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I fear, you are right.
Every time, I speak out for the truth on HN, I am down voted continuously, only half-hearted tech-blabla is suffered here.
What adds up hat HN: Any discussion about important future stuff is instantly penalized by the system here. I really regret to have registered at all.
Just doing geek-stuff and enjoying the live as techie is just to hollow for me. It really makes me sad.
> Every time, I speak out for the truth on HN, I am down voted continuously, only half-hearted tech-blabla is suffered here.
Not every. Be precise. I checked.
> Any discussion about important future stuff is instantly penalized by the system here.
I disagree. Just browse the front page history if you don't believe me. There's plenty of discussions about important future stuff that's hanging on the front page every week. It's just that we have a strong quality expectation here, both in terms of posted articles and the discussions they generate.
> I really regret to have registered at all.
> Just doing geek-stuff and enjoying the live as techie is just to hollow for me. It really makes me sad.
And I agree. It's hollow for me too. Personally however, I find politics to be one of the least effective and least efficient way of contributing to betterment of the world. Many people on HN disagree with me about that. But either way, lots of people are interested in things outside the tech sphere. It's just that when people are interesting in changing things, they're interesting in actually changing things - and not being sidetracked by ego-based flamewars.
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It's strange to admit this, because I'm sure the OP doesn't share my worldview on most topics. But as a National Socialist I completely agree that everything has a political dimension. The code we write touches the lives of so many of our people. We should keep that in mind while we write it.
Attempting to segregate one's work from the wellbeing of one's volk is a sign of a sick spirit.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470251 and marked it off-topic.
I actually am a National Socialist. Does that warrant being plucked from a thread in and of itself?
Let me get that straight. You consider yourself a pro-active Nazi?
Please don't feed trolls.
Nazi is a slanderous term. I am a National Socialist. Because I believe that members of a volk should take care of one another.
That HN flag's this post but not some VC B.S. about company valuations is ironic. Can we call a moritorium on posts entirely about finance and money as well as posts like this one here about politics?
Hackers have nothing to do with politics.
Just as much as whistleblowing and exposing fraud, espionage, or illegal activities has nothing to do with journalism and transparency. Let alone politics.
In general, software has nothing to do with anything but software itself. Take encryption: it has nothing to do with privacy, which has nothing to do with with surveillance which has nothing to do with politics.
Also - Startups also have nothing to do with the economy; Automation and design has nothing to do with the industry.
And while we're at it: Science has nothing to do with politics. That's why politicians ignore climatologists, physicists and biologists.
FeelsBadMan, I got it though ;)
It's like conventional currency vs cryptocurrency. If you couple the two, given enough market size for each, volatility couples as well. No need to go through the meanders of algorithms or blockchains.
(Coincidently, cryptocurrencies are just another target for some hackers with deep consequences for any economy that trusts them.)
Some things cannot be ignored, or seen as independent. They are stuck together since their conception.