Comment by Someone1234
1 day ago
Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
But how do you even begin to discuss that Tweet or this topic without talking about ideology and to contextualize this with other seemingly unrelated things currently going on in the US?
I genuinely don't think I'm conversationally agile enough to both discuss this topic while still able to avoid the political/ideological rabbit-hole.
You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.
My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.
My interpretation of that is that I’m required to assume good faith on behalf of other commenters. So, if someone makes the same argument as the government, I’m supposed to assume good faith there, but nothing requires me to assume good faith on behalf of the government. So I can say that this is obviously a shakedown without breaking the rules.
"Assume good faith" does not mean "extend an unlimited amount of good faith to demonstrably bad-faith actors".
On the other hand, pretending the government is acting in good faith is probably acting in bad faith at this point.
careful, youre going against the party line worker
>Assume good faith.
This is more for “assume op is not a troll” rather than “assume Donald trump never took part on Epstein’s parties”.
I’ve never taken it to apply to anything other than the interaction with other commenters.
I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.
Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.
What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.
So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?
> Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
Everything is politics and "ideology"
Everything is political. All of our tech exists within society, and the actions of the government shape the incentives of every actor and the framework we exist in.
HN likes to pretend otherwise, especially when it's inconvenient.
Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.
Tell me, oh sage, how it was possible to become a hacker before "capitalism" created the computers needed to do so? And no, hacking was not "an extremely political and ideological movement", it was (and is) the a[c,r]t of going down as deep the rabbit hole of whatever the was to be hacked as time and the hole allowed to see what lurks there. The term was eventually co-opted by the media - not "capitalism" - to identify those who broke into networks and computers but that does not need to bother you. There have been and are those who combine - usually anti-authoritarian - politics with hacking but they were and are only a part of the whole.
Don't you ever get tired of spouting that grade school "muh capitalism bad" pablum, of being what Lenin supposedly called a "useful idiot"? Also, who are the "we" who you think should "take back" the word hacking? In what way would this be "taking back" instead of "taking over"? If you think it should be "extremely political and ideological" it would surely be the latter. Would your definition of hacking have room for those who dared to venture beyond your "extremely political and ideological" boundaries or those who just want to hack without needing to wear the right buttons, pins and clothes?
Signed, a grey-bearded hacker.
The hacker philosophy did not even start with computers, it started with rail models and lock picking. Read a book every now and then.
And please don't fall in the trap that capitalism created things. Science and engineering creates things. Capitalism makes them more accessible, at a price that is often heavily confounded by externalities.
1 reply →
>Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.
Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.
A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.
The status quo has been enormously beneficial for the people who own HN, and they would like this to continue.
Welcome to reality. HN likes to pretend politics is something you can just look away from and ignore. That’s a mighty big privilege, which makes sense since HN skews cis-white-het-male. That’s not a lie. It is easy to ignore this when it doesn’t touch them. But now it DOES touch them, and you’ve just discovered what every oppressed group in history has to live with: politics doesn’t just go away if you ignore it.
If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.
I don't know which HN you have been using so far, but this particular site discusses politics all the time when it comes to Trump administration.
Please at least try. There are already enough contributors here "qualified" to talk about politics.
Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.
I appreciate your restraint, and keeping this a high quality discussion space. As a political dissident myself, I don't mind some threads going political, I expect them to. The best ones are when there is a lot of disagreement or debate. As long as its not in every unrelated thread....
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