You can be as sorry as you like, however:

1. The original HN mission was to discuss “anything that piques our intellectual curiosity.” That is often technology business, but not necessarily.

2. The very word “hacker” implies a certain culture that has ALWAYS been highly interested in anti-authoritarian subjects. News and politics involving freedom of speech, freedom of journalism, and so forth are nearly always close to the heart of the traditional “hacker culture.”

I disagree. We should have conversations about how our software is used, even if it's a divisive topic.

You could argue that the divisive topics are those most desperately in need of discussion...

It’s too bad that even on hacker news, opposing viewpoints are often times downvoted into oblivion so that only one side of an argument is presented.

I’ve often found that the people who preach tolerance and say they are accepting of differing viewpoints are in reality, those who practice it the least.

HN isn't restricted to tech stuff, it's anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity. This doesn't post doesn't qualify.

Why?

Click the "Guidelines" link at the bottom of the page

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What to Submit

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.

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So, with respect to politics, is this a new phenomenon? If we think, "No, this has been going on forever," then this story would be inappropriate. But if we think it's something new that is part of a very new phenomenon in the form of the Trump Presidency, then this would seem to be just fine.

It's a judgment call.