Why can't HN be HN without the politics/prism stuff? I mean, it says right there in the guidelines that it isn't.

I don't flag stories when they're part of a wave story like NSA (what would be the point), but I try to be pretty religious about flagging off-topic stories in other cases, and political stories are universally off topic.

Stackoverflow & friends remain steadfastly anchored on the technical side, but in the end everything is political - technology not the least.

not really. Entries in /r/programming must contain code, for instance. I enjoy all the "Show HN" and weekend project stuff, there are no such things in that subreddit

That's /r/coding you're thinking of, but reddit has a bunch of tech/dev communities (for example /r/webdev) that might be closer to what you want.

Join the GitHub Archive mailing list or read this page for updates on latest GitHub projects (for days when HN has its political mood swings)

http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b6...

https://lobste.rs/. But it's a pretty small community and is invite-only. (Existing members...an invite would be appreciated :) )

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No, because this community was designed by influential people, attracts even more influential people of similar interests and professional savvy, and is maintained (despite some users' thoughts to the contrary) much more efficiently than most other forums. The only well known forum that's more strict and efficient in terms of staying on topic and not devolving into trolling would be Stack Exchange.

Tell you what, why don't you strike out on your own and make a new community? You can make a splinter group like programmers.stackexchange did with Stack Overflow. You can even make it clear in your guidelines that the only things you can discuss are:

• algorithms and data structures

• languages and frameworks

• technology news involving at least one startup

• weekend projects designed and deployed by users

• news in any of the hard sciences

You can also make it clear that

• politics

• techish things but really more like politics

• blog posts not including code

will be vigorously flagged and shot down. Try it?

I'm sure all of this will die down in a day or two and HN will return to links to GitHub and stories about VCs. This only happens once in awhile, the last time being when Aaron Swartz committed suicide.

The prism incident is only today's matter, but I've always found HN main page quite boring while there are a lot stuff I like in the newest submissions