I come to Hacker News to see people talk about technology, innovation, trends, start-ups and tiny projects that pop up that do things that seem so obvious in hind-sight, but are in fact really clever. This recent news about WikiLeaks and Assange I feel don't really fit in any of these categories.
The Hacker News Guidelines [1] may be open to interpretation, but it does explicitly state:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
and
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There is a bit after the first quote that states "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon," which I suppose is where we disagree. Nonetheless, if you and others feel it fits here, I'll respect your opinions.
If that was what this post was about then you'd have a point. Wikileaks and Assange's private life are almost entirely orthogonal IMO.
I don't see you complaining about things being 'off topic' in those threads.
This sort of argument should have a name (I'm sure it does) - "but gov, you didn't complain last time I cleaned your windows badly".
Oh and one more thing: topic, topic, topic topic.
How I look at it is that you are never going to be reading all the articles on the front page right? So if this doesn't interest you it is as simple as skipping it. If one day there is 15+ of these type of grey area links on HN, then that will be a problem, but I just don't see that happening.
On the whole, Hacker News is a great place, arguably the best of the news aggregation sites on the Internet. Even people who disagree with me here have upvoted other excellent submissions and posted excellent comments, so I'll at least thank them and the community as a whole for those.