Should HN be tech news and discussions only?

It should, but it's impossible: the line between politics and tech is blurry, everything is political to some extent.

We already have lobste.rs. I would not mind if flagged/dead got removed from active but I understand why they are kept. Flag and hide political threads which are likely to derail you.

The shitty stuff rarely survives the race to the front page so you could probably start by avoiding "/newest". As of Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:06:17 GMT, there is only one irrelevant item on the front page… and surprisingly little AI, which is quite refreshing.

I wish

Answer: No.

Reason: 1. Our tendency to compartmentalize developments, be it social, cultural, political or technical, results in governance that let things rot and escalate. When the crisis becomes big enough, the Political Value of Time comes into play, aka we don't have time for plebs rights.

2. Without understanding of context, tech will misfire. A lot of problems only exist because we are conditioned to NOT take the bigger picture in mind. In media, in policy, people try to handle things as context-free phenomena. For example, western democracies have/had a very narrow focus on foreign threats. If an adversary is bombing you, than we can talk about defense, because: kinetic threats = mil. defense. Simple, but that is exactly our weakness:

  Economic sabotage      => you will be lucky if there is any joint action over gov. branches
  Political infiltration => uhm, we haven't thought about that. Lets pretend 
                            nothing happens.
  Disinformation campaigns, bribing influencers, sowing discord 
                         => uhm that is maybe something for the other department

I do understand the will to escape, but imho tech people should not flight reality; they should not lock themselves in a cave of ignorance. We don't have that luxury, especially as tech is the enabling instrument of authoritarians. Reality is complex and we should face it.

Tech has it's political side. Try having a discussion about Tesla.

Anything that satisfies one's intellectual curiosity.

Political news will affect technology in one way or another. Chat Control in Europe shoven down out throats. Venezuelan oil and a war excuse for it in order to distract from Epstein (and to avoid news on Tesla being really behind BYD on sales). Further wars in the Arctic because of shipping routes. Unless some permafrost virus kicks out both armies fast and some ceasefire happens for the good, because that would happen.

And vulcanoes, too; if some biggie erupts in the Canaries or some Asian place, that would kickstart some really big tsunamies or something worse. That would be news in HN too because it would affect shipping too, if not literal industries in California, China, Russia or Japan.

I agree with you, although I did reply to that post. I believe the topics should be at least tangentially aligned with tech.

Tech is entwined with politics, and sad to say, an enabler of its worst actions, but that is a choice that people make.

Prove to me that DOGE hasn't planted backdoors and time b0mbs in critical government systems. And when Vance takes over, his pals Thiel and Musk will be running much of the show. BTW, both are immigrants.

I wouldn't mind a built-in filter facility. Other forums have them. Mainly, I use several devices to access HN and filtering means vary on my side.

Techie participation in authoritarian, privacy-robbing and murderous projects is a choice. I worked in aerospace, strictly in defensive projects, and departed the aerospace business per the customary cycles. Bush senior actually cut the defense budget. I worked for university, and per economic cycles, left that. Politics not involved? Very involved.

Great stuff lives past the home page, which I never read. Just checked, maybe one is of interest, whereas the daily scan turns up 10 or so, and I forward a couple a day to friends. I finally found an auto-pager that works on latest, so I can finally create the daily local/searchable digest. No slight on Algolia.

As for popularity, I can't read really long threads. I just scan "best" now and then to see if a goodie slipped past my scanning.

I grew up just post Hiroshima and Nagasaki and spoke with someone last Thursday who survived Hiroshima in the womb. Open science and free and open source software mean a ton to me, as liberating, the opposite of surveillance, control and giant databases. The more that government and tech oligarchs have them, the less free we are. [0] What Technology "wants" is liberation, not capture and control.

[0] https://fluidself.org/books/science/what-technology-wants

I wish it were. I don’t like politics or ideologies.

You don't have to click on it. I don't understand why some people want to stop others from discussing a topic just because they don't like it. No one is forcing you to read the news or the comments, so why deny others the opportunity to discuss it on HN?

lobste.rs does it right. literally only tech. people make excuses but lobsters doesn't have that problem. it's only this way because it's moderated to be that way.

Have a way to tag political posts in the same way other webpages have a way to tag NSFW posts, and have an opt out for posts with the tag?

But then you'd have to stop all the anti-EU and anti-UK stuff too. Is that really a price worth paying?