The guidelines don’t completely rule out politics, and in this case the topic is of interest here since it dovetails with other political issues of long-running concern in the HN community: who owns devices with outside service dependencies, right to repair, etc. The question of whether someone who physically controls an ECM pod can configure it feels a lot like the question about whether John Deere can prevent a farmer from configuring their tractor’s software or an IoT vendor can shut down a service without providing an alternative.

One area where this is especially of interest is everyone considering their dependency on U.S. products. If you live in a country under military threat, questions like what happens if the first strike against Canada involved a malicious Chrome or Windows update or holding back a patch for a vulnerability the NSA wants to exploit is quite an interesting problem.

What's "politics"? Any policy enacted by the US government? That's not how it used to work here.

From the rules:

> Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

The US killing trust in its export of arms is definitely a new phenomenon. It breaks with +80 years of policy.

All startups in SV will now have to consider if they will have an export market at all.

Which non-US companies would now like to be dependent on whatever export restrictions that Trump might make up in the future?

Given how pervasive politization has become this would suggest that strict adherence to any "politics is off-topic" rule would necessarily involve making the site permanently read-only.

The guidelines seem just vague enough to allow for suppression of topics that the oligarchs are touchy about while appearing reasonable. Tech is inherently political.

"Most" != "all": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13531909>