IMHO this has a very direct impact on many internet start up (and not start up) businesses, as well as touches on the very important subject of legality and ethics of data collection and privacy by government as well as businesses.

Not only that, but HN will also usually post the very best possible links to big news stories that affect the HN audience as they break, which is a great feature of this website.

Whlie this may not be a huge story, it will likely be the talk of the day tomorrow.

The Patriot Act (and policy in general) can have a serious impact on software companies for sure.

However, this is a politically charged thread clearly aimed at drawing interest/support for an individual candidate. This is not supposed to be permitted on HN.

A thread discussing the potential issues caused by the Patriot Act is much more suitable for the front page than this.

Is that not what Paul is discussing on the floor? I mean, he's discussing the consequences of building backdoors right now.

It would be wise, I believe, if a discussion here on HN about this were to be informed by what the actual policy makers are saying/thinking.

Well it _is_ Rand Paul on the floor, how else would you like to phrase it?

I've got no political interest in this either way, since I'm not American. So consider it an outsiders view when I say that I think it's not unreasonable to mention the person who's taking the action.

People and businesses have moved their data away from USA-based companies because of worries about privacy. The outcome of this bill will directly affect the ability of US tech companies to attract overseas customers.

At this point 65 users of HN are thinking otherwise.

edit: I didn't downvote you

That doesn't necessarily matter. It's well established by now that communities tend to upvote things they "like", not specifically things that belong. We know there's a large overlap between users of HN and Libertarians, which in itself is fine, but it doesn't mean this type of discussion should be occurring here.

If you don't give any merit to a majority vote, why should relevance be given to your singular opinion? Seems like a double standard honestly.

I think you're missing the point entirely. I'm not saying my opinion matters, I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website. I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.

> I'm just pointing out that this thread is definitely not supposed to be on HN, as is defined by the rules of the website.

The applicable "rules" (actually, they are labeled "guidelines" [0] for good reason) can be viewed as either supporting or opposing it.

Specifically, one could view it as on-topic as falling within "anything that good hackers would find interesting." (Section 215 surveillance clearly has a special interest within the "hacker" culture, which is more plugged into it than the general population), or as probably off-topic because "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

> I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.

You are positing your interpretation of the application of rules which are fuzzy and inherently subjective as "fact", and where the only things in the rules that would support your conclusion are hedged with "most" or "probably". Your suggestion that the HN guidelines can reasonably be read in a way in which the topic here would be unequivocally, factually off-topic is an untenable argument.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- under "What to Submit".

The only fact here is that this is on the front page. However your opinion is that it shouldn't be. By the majority vote, you are wrong.

No, the rules state that this post should not be here.

You're conflating opinion and fact. Please stop. Majority vote does not dictate fact. HN is not a "anything and everything can be on the front page of the community votes it as such" site like Reddit is.

What rule is this violating? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is on-topic, which clearly enough "good hackers" do given the upvotes. The "most stories about politics" clearly doesn't say "all stories about politics", and this one has a lot of relevance to the tech world.

Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.

> Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.

I'm actually replying to a discussion started about flagging.

By complaining that the submission is inappropriate:

GlickWick: I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.

Which was in reply to a question about why the thread was being flagged. This was not an unprompted complaint about an inappropriate submission, this was a reply to a question.

You were still breaking the rules.

That is not true. If a user asks a question about the rules or the validity of a post/flagging, it's fine to discuss.

You don't like the fact that I'm criticizing this thread, which is fine, but stop trying to cherry-pick silly reasons to discredit what I'm saying. It's having the opposite effect of what you intended anyways.

Yes it is.

That is just your opinion. Rules are clear on this:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

As you can see, no additional caveats are listed. Therefore you, by responding to a comment which was about incorrect flagging, complained about inappropriate submissions, directly violated the rules.

Your last paragraph is basically just ad-hominem.

I'm ending this "discussion" here and will not be reading your inevitable further comments.

Weasel your way around the point all you like. Again, "What rule is this violating?" Specifically, please.

> Weasel your way around the point all you like

Please don't be personally rude on HN.

You're right that the rules do not exclude all politics, only most. GlickWick is right that upvotes alone do not determine HN's front page and about the weakness of the voting mechanism in general.

They (Sen. Wyden and Sen. Paul) are going over backdoors in encryption right now.

As does discussion of San Francisco real estate prices.

HN has long been a bastion of Ron Paul fandom, going back as far as the founding of the board. So there's backstory here.

I don't support either political party, and the odds are great that I will not vote for Rand Paul.

However, as a technical person living in a democratic society I _am_ interested in the factors that change public policy, whether it's a RP filibuster, a Snowden leak, or a public move on policy by Wyden.

Perhaps if the tech community pulled together, somebody like Wyden could cross the aisle and make it a bipartisan filibuster. Whether you like either guy or either party or not is immaterial. The important thing is to try to get a little momentum here. The system is totally hosed, and we've got a long way to go to get it functioning again.

> HN has long been a bastion of Ron Paul fandom, going back as far as the founding of the board.

I don't think that's accurate. Fewer than ten Ron Paul stories got much traction here in eight years, and most were either tied to more popular topics (SOPA, Snowden) or skeptical: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ron%20paul&sort=byPopularity&p...

Similarly, I doubt that the interest in the current post has much to do with partisan support for a candidate. Given the community's interests, it is more likely because of what he's talking about.

Apologies. It appears I remember this discussion with pg and paul -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76469 -- but not the fact that it was about reddit, not HN.

It certainly felt to me like during the 2008 election that there were RP stories all over HN. Wasn't the case though. Odd.

I agree that public policy that impacts software is very relevant to HN in general. However, this post is clearly meant to draw focus to supporting a political candidate specifically.

A thread about the cons of the renewal of the Patriot Act without the obvious Libertarian political candidate undertones would be much more fitting for the front page of HN.

Yeah, this is a live stream of a political speech by a presidential candidate. I bet we wouldn't see any complaints about flagging if this was a flagged live stream of Hillary Clinton talking about immigration reform.

That stuff doesn't belong either, and you should flag it. Not entirely sure what the point of this reply was. Are you saying that we should post irrelevant things across the spectrum to get revenge on people who post other irrelevant things?