There's a population of maybe 50-100 people on here who are obsessed with the subject, and they're spamming every thread with off-topic NSA posts on the theory that they know better than everyone else what people should be talking about. It's no different than any other form of trolling, and it should be managed accordingly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361558

A news headline about the Apple iPhone event, completely overshadowed by NSA speculation. The first threads spans 1/2 a page to 3/4 a page and is entirely argumentative speculation with no real benefit to the discussion.

I for one, just wanted some discussion about the phone moving over to 64-bit architecture. But, no, NSA speculation (read: not even new information, rehash) took over.

EDIT: Also, in before -- yes, I know I can scroll down the page. But the point is that in principle, you shouldn't have to scroll down half a page just to find the meat that's actually relevant to the discussion. It's not like we're saying the NSA news is unimportant -- just don't hijack threads that are about other things with obsessive privacy speculation when there isn't any empirical evidence or information to offer. For example, Apple's fingerprint scanning TouchID could be compromised...or maybe not. We don't know. But let's not destroy entire threads speculating about it.

The fact that a news headline about the Apple iPhone event got overshadowed by NSA speculation should tell you something. It should tell you that the NSA is fucking everywhere now, in everyone's life, and knows - or can learn - virtually everything.

This should worry you. It should worry you SO MUCH that you should be thinking about it all the time, and you should also be talking about it in every single context that is even remotely relevant to NSA's perpetual and eternal spying efforts.

I don't know about you, but when the true extent of the scandal was revealed, my modus operandi changed completely, including the way I live my life and the way I communicate with people. I moved all my data overseas. I encrypted as much as I can. I stopped posting jokes on Facebook that could even remotely be construed as suspicious by an over-zealous NSA agent. At work we use Microsoft Office Communicator, and even there I am censoring myself when it comes to non-work talk with co-workers because I have no idea what kinds of backdoors could be installed on its server software.

Right now when I evaluate new technology, the first and foremost question on my mind is this: can the NSA use this to spy on me? Therefore it made me very happy that the top comment in the iPhone 5S story was about the NSA. That is the way it should be.

The fact is, a lot of stuff we talk about is being influenced by the NSA, in a very negative way. The solution isn't to ignore it and go back to talking about the cool shiny color of the new iPhone.

One question: where does it end? I cede the point that Apple and the iPhone are part of tech news. So is the NSA. So they could conceivably be on topic together, especially with regards to privacy concerns.

My friends and I have a fantasy football league running through Yahoo. Yahoo could have backdoors from the NSA! I could be putting my entire online identity at risk by participating in fantasy football.

That's all speculation. I have no proof, just like the fingerprint TouchID theories had no real proof yesterday. Do I tell my friends this?

Instead of enjoying fantasy football, do I interrupt my friends' trade and persistently warn them about the NSA? When they tell me I'm being annoying, that they know already, that they heard me the first ten times, and that I am not offering any evidence or proof, just paranoid speculation, do I begin afresh in my spiel, like some crazed zealot touting Jesus on the street who can't let his friends just enjoy fantasy football? Do I make the sole decision that they need to hear this because I know what's best for them?

Like I said, I get your point. I understand that this is an important, sensitive topic. But again, some of us like Hacker News to aggregate tech news without NSA news necessarily being in front of our faces.

The perspective that I have to read about the NSA instead of the iPhone moving to 64-bit architecture because you know what's best for me is dictatorial. I understand if the democratic system of Hacker News demonstrates this is what the majority cares about, but at least you'll understand our perspective as well. Believe me, we get yours.

I would say that the reasonableness of that discussion would depend on the sort of otherwise private information your participation in fantasy football compromises.

Does this fantasy football program encourage you to install a phone application that requires far more permissions then a fantasy football program has any business requiring? Then perhaps a discussion about privacy is warranted (I mean, assuming we were discussing Yahoo's fantasy football program in the first place).

Does this fantasy football program just let you use a psuedo-anonymous handle and doesn't ask you for anything personal anyway? Then the discussion is probably a distraction.

Smartphones have a unique/unprecedented amount of access to our personal lives. Discussions about smartphones and privacy should be considered natural because of the properties that smartphones have. If other things share similar properties, they'll get that discussion too.

(As a non-smartphone example, I recall some discussion about privacy and the Xbox One and its (at the time) 'required' kinect sensor.)

  my modus operandi changed completely
    the way I live my life
    the way I communicate with people    
    I moved all my data overseas
    I encrypted as much as I can
    I stopped posting jokes on Facebook

</suddenly realizes humor helps prove Tom's point>

Given how the NSA has turned the table on conspiracy theories--proven many wild theories actually or plausibly true--those of us who would like to cast conspiracies with a healthy dose of doubt need to keep an open mind to even those theories that strike us as outlandish.

I am personally strongly opposed to flagging submissions. I have written elsewhere [1] that I find flagging a measure of last resort. It bothers me that so many people flag submissions as if it were equivalent to a downvote. It's not.

However, with all of that in mind, some NSA threads cause my brain fatigue. They generally make me sad about the deeply immoral state of the US government and the undermining and impotence of technology. I can only take so much NSA-caused despair. I don't have a short attention span, but honestly, fully comprehending how much we have been hurt by the NSA is a deep emotional burden. Sometimes I need a break.

So for those times when you too need a break and want to just think about technology, I'd recommend installing a collapsible comment user script [2] to allow you to just hide the NSA sub-threads until you're in the mood to dig into that fray.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6293034

[2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037

pilif has an average karma score of 7 and that post got a ton of replies and obviously a lot of upvotes. Those three factors are what led to the top spot on the comment page. If you're going to try and convince "us" not to hijack threads with baseless NSA speculation, then you've got to persuade the users with high average karma scores to not make such comments.

Edit: for the record, I welcome NSA related comments on any and all posts. Very, very few of my friends are willing to discuss anything other than the details of Snowden fleeing the U.S -- it'd be sad to see the 'ignore it until it goes away' mindset also happen here on HN. I'm willing to trade an inane iPhone incremental vs revolutionary argument for speculation of potential NSA abuse of a phone feature any day, and I'm willing to bet a large amount of other HN users do too.

> and is entirely argumentative speculation with no real benefit to the discussion.

Like a chat by the water-cooler you mean. I would love more Snowdens and leaked documents to come out. Unfortunately there aren't at the moment, so we are left discussing what is there. Talking about the future, the implication to US businesses, implication to what it means for this country, the Constitution, privacy, and so on.

I understand that is not interesting for most people, especially non-Americans. Well c'est la vie, a good majority of HNers are Americans.

The rage and indignation about this is quite strong (and it should be so). These revelations, have shattered the perceptions many have been brought up and believed in for most part of their lives. It is hard to deal with that so well you get lots of discussion.

You have the downvote button, click it if you don't like the topic. But stomping your feet about hoping maybe moderators will notice and will start pushing Apple related stories higher might not work.

Discussion on articles of one topic being completely overshadowed by tangential other topics is a problem with the way HN's commenting system works (Reddit does this much better, folding certain comments away, based on votes and nesting level), not at all specific to the NSA discussions.

It happens for every topic on HN that receives a lot of mindshare over a longer period of time. It annoys me there too. Thankfully I have a bookmarklet that allows me to collapse threads on HN :)

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

I'm saying the subject itself is technical, but I think it's worth pointing out two things:

1) The conversation surrounding it is still more technical here on HN than almost any other community on or off the web.

2) The subject and/or conversation surrounding it need not be technical in the first place to qualify as a legitimate HN post (though we know this will greatly increase the number of people that don't wish to view the content).

>and they're spamming every thread with off-topic NSA posts,

This is a perfect example of where you should flag comments, as opposed to just flagging links to NSA stories on the front page. No argument there.

>but most of the discussion on HN is Frist Post and Natalie Portman/Hot Grits with a veil of legitimacy.

Getting back to point #2 above, this is OK. There plenty of users on here that are not experts enough to comment on the technical intricacies of some of the information, and it runs the full range from slightly out of the loop to ignorant of the technical details. But there are intellectual (and yes, political per the HN FAQ) responses that are valid to voice here. Some of the technical users on here may find it low value, but I'd argue it is extremely important nonetheless, but most importantly, squarely on-topic per the HN FAQ.

My two cents anyway...

Certainly some of the discussion on other threads should be filtered. But the moderation on stories themselves appears to be heavy-handed right now. Many significant new stories aren't making it to the home page (see above).

A proposed solution: If the reason for this in fact flagging, and not moderation by admins, then perhaps showing the guidelines and possibly requiring users to give a reason for flagging might reduce the number of wayward flags. The official guidelines for flagging are: "If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link"

That's how this should be decided - would/does the ensuing conversation stick to the technical or entrepreneurial aspects of this submission? In particular, does the discussion devolve into an, "Everybody's got a valid opinion" kind of discussion? If so, drop it, and drop it fast. [0]

There's this mistaken notion that, just because a person works with computers for a living, or owns a computer related business, that their opinion on ANY political topic related to computers is a valid or even privileged one, when that's absolutely and demonstrably false. This crowd is a technical crowd, not a politically savvy crowd.

People talking out of their wheelhouses should not be promoted.

Edit:

[0] - http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Wanted to cite where I got this idea. This essay informs heavily on what I believe HN should be about.

There is a ton of content here that is non-technical and relevant. Steve Jobs death covered the entire front page, there is policy and regulation, general startup stories, stories of developers in need, etc. Those all get an equal opportunity - so why is there a technical requirement now and only within the context of stories that are related to, dare I say it, the NSA?

The thing is - the very foundational components of everything posted here, technical or not, can/could be impacted by news around this topic. Like I've stated before, it's not that I want more, but I don't want the stories to be buried. I want the good stories with good content and relevancy to have a fair shot.

Your comment around people talking out of their wheelhouses is highly subjective and seems to me, personally, to be rather ignorant. If you constantly stated things about iPhone hardware, but were not a hardware engineer for Apple then you shouldn't be able to comment with that line of thinking. People can talk about whatever they want and people who don't have foundational expertise on a topic can, and do, contribute positively to topics outside their wheelhouse. In some cases those people bring new and interesting perspectives.

Unfortunately the political perspective has irrevocably been tied to the technical one for now. Take what you can from it instead of touting on a soap box that you know better what other people should be talking about and what content should be on HN than the next guy.

HOWEVER, this is not the only website on the Internet. There's nothing special or novel gained from posting these stories to HN. No one here has any extra or particular insight into these stories.

Please read the essay I linked to. In a conversation about iPhone hardware, a person making a comment will be stating facts, with conclusions and verifiable information. That person is either wrong or right, with little grounds for confusion or grey-area. It's not up to how I feel how many hours of battery life the iPhone is going to grant a user.

Political discussions and religious discussions do not have the benefit of this rigor. Everyone's opinions end up being treated equally, even when they're absolutely not equal. It's a terrible place to try to conduct an intellectual discussion, and I'd like to see this place maintain its reputation for a high level of discourse.

This is currently the first comment on the latest Snowden development (nontechnical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369472

Compare this to another submission comment (technical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6367943

The nontechnial comment provides me nothing but an individual's viewpoint. I can't take that anywhere, I learned nothing except that one individual thinks something, and I'm in no way a better engineer or entrepreneur for having read it. The technical comment, however? Now I have a better understanding of the submission as I've gotten an alternative (slightly different use-case) implementation. That's what HN is here for.

I want things I can walk away from HN with, as I'm here to learn. Nontechnical Snowden stories, as it turns out, aren't stories which provoke any kind of interesting comments on HN, and are therefore interfering with a person's ability to use HN to learn and grow effectively. Therefore, they should go.

I agree that HN is useful when you can take something away from it, learn from it. However, in all fairness, the essay you linked to says nothing about a strict guideline about "technical" discussions. It's also not addressing this grey area where technical problems, that are not verifiable, and are tied to government all intersect. To me that makes this topic not a closed case of binary true or false regarding it's place on HN.

That's why I like HN though, there are a lot of smart people to discuss these sort of issues - technical or technically related.

If you're just arguing a level of degree, then that's a non-starter; the HN admins are the arbiters of degree, and will decide which discussions to keep around and which not to. That's how it's always been. In fact, this whole discussion is at least partially moot, given the fact that this very poll was created by a user. There is no indication that the people in charge of HN care about this issue, at all.

HN is useful because the commenters are highly knowledgable in their technical field, and the comments these people leave and the discussions these people foster are unlike anywhere else on the Internet. These technical people are not useful for political commentary. Politics is hard, and HN turns into an echo chamber very quickly. It's useless, and should therefore be stopped.

Good luck in your quest for a binary reality and acceptance of the current state of affairs based solely in the fact that an ideal should be preserved for reasons of technical merit alone. Unfortunately for you political commentary will continue, especially along the lines of this topic, and if it is pushed into submission I would gather the majority would call it out for what it is.

This isn't about my life outlook or my political views or if my daddy loved me when I was a kid, it's about the flood of nontechnical stories being submitted, and the worthlessness of the subsequent comments sections.

What you don't seem to understand is that nothing on HN is going to change as a result of this poll. HN admins are holden to no one, they act independently of HN users.

I do, however, enjoy coming here very day and reading the opinions of that subset of the population. That's why I continue to upvote NSA-related threads and voted "I wanted more."

They are equally relevant to worldwide "hackers" as US-only politics.

One of the most interesting articles I've read from HN was about citrus fruit and polar exploration. Real enlightening stuff. If you've got good kite-surfing articles, submit them.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912)

I don't think it's wise to do that, but I understand why one might think it a good idea.

Not in the slightest.

I checked the definition of "privilege" - a special right, immunity - and I have no idea why you think I communicated that at all.

All I said was that I enjoy reading the opinions of the Hacker News population on topics that go beyond startups/technology.

Incorrect. See the HN FAQ. Political discussions are allowed (saying only that most are discouraged implies that certain ones are. If there ever was one, this is it).

I hope you can see the distinction.

Hang on - there's a big difference between saying "not all political stories are off topic" and saying "this political topic is on-topic".

Many of the NSA submissions are clearly off topic and have no purpose for HN.

I'm saying both.

Perhaps one submission should contain the sum of political discourse on the topic, and all other submissions should contain the technical discourses.

This is what I would like to see less of... the pointless name calling. Saying this is no better than someone else saying "ignore those paranoid people with tinfoil hats." Not everyone is at DEFCON 1 over this. Some people are just as informed/intelligent as the others yet make the decision that they are not concerned (or just less concerned). It doesn't mean they are simpletons with short attention spans.

I see this community as being uniquely qualified and positioned to discuss the technical aspects of these issues.

When knowledgeable people have a discussion in public about an important topic, there is opportunity to educate or be a resource to, people who have the power to effect change. Creating that opportunity is a good thing.

The people who have the power or opportunity to effect change in the U.S. government are probably not here among us today, but they're a Google search away from finding the thoughts and opinions of a large collection of thoughtful and well educated technologists.

I'm happier knowing that.

And wake up and smell the coffee here. Nobody cares what you, me or the rest of the "tech scene" thinks about politics. It's the pathetic arrogance of people in the "tech scene" who walk around acting like they are the only enlightened ones and they are somehow uniquely qualified to educate people on the subject.

And remind me again why they should ? What because there is money in technology ?

Great. Next time I am looking for help fixing my car I will ask a florist.

Currently? You're right, they don't. That is the problem. A problem that is not solved by saying "shut-up about politics and go back to your programming caves you nerds."

Why is it important that they care? Well, here is rayiner's comment that I am thinking of:

""Wahh wahh we're too busy running a business to make our voice heard in Congress, wahh wahh."

The cost of a successful lobbying presence is measured in the tens of millions of dollars a year, which is chump change for an industry as big and influential as the tech industry. Heck, construction companies have a much more organized and effective lobby, and they basically make no money at all (see the article on the front page about their 1% margins). Really, it's not that much money. Raise it on Kickstarter or whatever.

There is a bizarre mental block/persecution complex/"I'm going to take my balls and go home" phenomenon at play in the tech industry that's makes no sense to me. Silicon Valley isn't a special snowflake and Congress isn't going to divine its needs and tend to them. You've got one side telling Congress that absolutely everything needs to be patentable to keep the Chinese from stealing all our technology, and nothing but deafening silence in response. What exactly do you expect to happen in that circumstance?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935469

Until nerds produce something that changes the political game.

PGP, Bit Torrent and Bitcoin are three examples.

There is nothing inherent in being a maker that gives said maker any special understanding or say over political aspects of the tools that maker creates.

And no one knows why Bitcoin was created. No one's sure who created it, and that person certainly hasn't provided any concrete motive. I don't know enough about PGP to say the same, but don't try to shoehorn a tool into your argument just because you don't think I'll notice.

If guns can have lobbies, surely PGP can as well.

A tool does not care why it was created. A hammer won't refuse to bash in a skull because "that's not what it was built for".

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg099...

As for PGP, Phil Zimmerman was even clearer in his intentions [2]:

[2] http://www.pgpi.org/doc/whypgp/en/

Technology is a response to politics as well as a catalyst for political change. To attempt to "de-politify" technology as a matter of course is like castrating a prize bull.

It also distracts from good technical discussion. For example, when the new iPhone was announced, instead of an interesting technical discussion of the merits and problems with biometric authentication we get "OMG the spooks are going to steal your fingerprint"