
Hacker News or Political Garbage? - jillmore
WTF?  What does the Corona virus or Climate Change nonsense have anything to do with tech?  There are other sites for political topics.
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danso
Both coronavirus and climate change present potentially seismic shifts, if not
existential threats, to human society. Are you really incapable of
understanding how technology is relevant and intertwined to human society?

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Ghjklov
You either deal with it now or deal with it later once it unfolds and
collapses one by one the things that make your day-to-day life feasible that
you take for granted. Luckily, I'd say the people here in tech are more
insulated from the impact of CV/CC due to the potential of remote work (can't
remote into a job involving physical labor), so that gives them a fighting
chance. But it's not a chance to hole up and pretend nothing bad is going on,
but a chance to prepare and even make a difference.

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MetaRapid
Reminder, "Hacker News" is not about tech. From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
> evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or
> disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
> probably off-topic.

Ten years ago, this could have been an incredible forum to discuss the
emergence of coronavirus, as it has the potential to affect economies and
societies around the world. It no longer seems appropriate here, as there is
little civility and open conversation here.

It's sad this doesn't happen anymore.

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AnimalMuppet
What's on topic is whatever hackers find interesting. Well, most of us are
interested in not dying.

And I don't see how the corona virus is political.

~~~
mindcrime
_What 's on topic is whatever hackers find interesting._

Yep. At the end of the day, that is the standard. Which has the unfortunate
side effect of permitting the Eternal September to set in here.

 _Well, most of us are interested in not dying._

And yet we all _are_ going to die, unless some of the more radical ideas of
Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, etc., become reality. I can see how discussing
the latest research into radical life extension stuff here makes sense... but
most general health/nutrition/wellness stuff feels like it should be off-topic
to me. Now, some story about a cool new DNA sequencing technology being
invented to help study viruses, or something like that, that makes sense to
me.

But in the end, the community will be what it decides to me. All one can
really do is go along for the ride.

------
smacktoward
It must be awesome to be able to file away big, direct threats to the lives of
huge numbers of people (including everyone who reads HN) as "just politics."

~~~
vixen99
Doesn't HN site guidance allow stories about politics, or crime, or sports if
`they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon` and `gratifies
intellectual curiosity`?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
mindcrime
Yes. But the guidelines also say _If they 'd cover it on TV news, it's
probably off-topic._

An awful lot of what gets discussed here, IMO, falls into the "generic story
that would be covered on TV news" category. But that's just me.

~~~
danso
Which of the current top 15 HN front page stories would be a typical TV news
story?

1\. Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates (letsencrypt.org)

2\. GitHub Facing Downtime (githubstatus.com)

3\. Goodreads Data Pipeline (github.com)

4\. Why the Gov.uk Design System team changed the input type for numbers
(technology.blog.gov.uk)

5\. CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital
says (thehill.com)

6\. Things about the new Firefox browser for Android (blog.mozilla.org)

7\. Japan's PM Asks All School to Temporarily Close (nhk.or.jp)

8\. Hasura raises $9.9M Series A to simplify GraphQL for developers
(techcrunch.com)

9\. New improvements to IPFS Bitswap for faster container image distribution
(ipfs.io)

10\. Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths
(worldometers.info)

11\. The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM (engadget.com)

12\. Pen testers mom breaks into a state prison and infects wardens computer
(wired.com)

13\. The Simpsons in CSS (pattle.github.io)

14\. Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output (benhoyt.com)

15\. Rome: An experimental JavaScript toolchain (github.com)

~~~
mindcrime
A snapshot of which links happen to be on the front-page at any given time
doesn't tell you anything, really, vis-a-vis the point I was getting at. The
front page ebbs and flows constantly, stories that aren't on the front-page
still get discussed, and not every front-page story draws the same amount of
engagement.

~~~
danso
Absolutely. So take a peek at the most active discussions and the "best" (most
upvoted) lists:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

There's a lot of CDC/Cornoavirus in the /active list, and almost none (so far)
in the /best list. And I suppose this is begging the question a little, but it
doesn't seem out of place for coronavirus to be a big topic in /active. The
first community transmission was just reported in the Bay Area, which means
there will be a potential imminent impact to the daily lives of HN's biggest
audience. Nevermind the already existing impact of travel and tech events
being cancelled worldwide.

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, I mean, on the Coronavirus thing, I understand why people here are
interested in talking about it, and I'm not going to complain too much. Heck,
I've been active on some of those discussions myself. But in general, I do
feel like HN has "drifted" over the years, to be closer to "talking about the
same stuff that's on CNN" site, than the hyper-niche techie/startupy/sciencey
site that it was.

Of course there's still plenty of tech|startup|science stuff here (and
"coronavirus" arguably falls into "science" anyway) and one can always ignore
the stuff they don't find interesting. _shrug_

