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.