Well, the fact that HN changed might be true, but you might want to read the guidelines again:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Having this sort if insight about the legal implications of practicing some religion in Saudi Arabia might be relevant to some people here. Anyways, we will soon know if this is "HN worthy". Upvotes and downvotes are here for a reason.

I'm usually very inclusionist about what's appropriate for HN, but this thing has absolutely no place here. Even from a sociological point of view the article doesn't offer anything of value. We already know that Saudi Arabia is a deplorable place, however, that's not what the SO question is about.

The argument that hackers sometimes are devout Catholics (or Muslims for that matter) isn't enough in my opinion to justify this as a piece of interest.

It's worse than politics, it's religion. These topics are a magnet for defective behavior and threads like these have little chance of being productive.

What do you have to do to get downvote permissions?

Talk about random Saudi Arabia facts and so and so's blog on how great broccoli is?

I am kinda happy to know about expatriates on stack exchange, since I current am a Canadian expat. So... the system works I guess.

I found it interesting and it brought to my mind something I hadn't thought about before. Isn't that what HN is for? New, interesting stuff?

I go elsewhere for constant stories about the US government's overreach and other social commentary. This site used to have mainly deep technical stories, now it is mainly used to soundboard about how awful the NSA and government is and the like. The site has become really a lot less enjoyable since then IMO.

Well, the world have a lot of people, and some of them post stuff on HN. Then some other people vote on them ;)

Start a more focused site?

I'd go.

Fix the expired pages issue.

everything is politics.

Please go back to reading Cheeseburger or (Insert 'geek' blog here). In the real world developers travel for their work, often visiting places with down right frightening laws! (Dubai, Saudi, Africa; You get the picture)

I'd imagine this story is of high importance to any developer (Even non Christian ones) as it highlights just how careful you need to be when traversing that neck of the woods.

At first I thought you made this account just to do drive-by ad hominems, but looking at your history it seems that assumption was wrong.

I'm not sure you fully realize what you're doing when you write stuff like

> Please go back to reading Cheeseburger or (Insert 'geek' blog here).

You have absolutely no business to come here and 5 days in tell people to go fuck themselves. My primary complaint isn't even the fatuitous nature of that comment, it's the intent behind it. Someone might have expressed an opinion you don't like - and I get that you might feel your religion isn't getting properly respected - but that's no reason to attack them personally.

Next time, please just leave that attack out.