Great! Another important topic of discussion derailed by HN's garbage algorithm.
It's #20 now but you can always tell when a post is doomed to oblivion by comparing the upvotes-to-time ratio to other posts on the front page. Unless the mods save it, this should be gone in a few minutes.
I don't like the ideas in most of these comments so far, but I still don't want to suppress this discussion. Let people show themselves for who they really are and what they really think, for good or bad, because we're never going to make any progress unless a discussion can actually happen.
When I submitted this, I didn't think of it from a "political" perspective. To me, this issue transcends politics and reveals a part of human nature that is beyond the definition of politics. I thought it would prompt an exploratory discussion of the matter and of human nature.
Unfortunately, many events which in reality exist with or without politics (like race-based hatred) are tagged with the political label. This also makes these events harder to discuss in an objective manner because an element of partisan thinking enters the fray: "does my party support this or not?" vs "do I believe this is right or not".
EDIT: There have been many front page posts about the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China. Is that considered political as well?
Of course the topic of Uighur's genocide is political. It's even -extremely- so.
That you seem to not percieve it so underlines your misconception that any issue linked to the human condition could possibly not be.
"Everything is political" should not surprise you, it's not a new concept.
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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
It's #20 now but you can always tell when a post is doomed to oblivion by comparing the upvotes-to-time ratio to other posts on the front page. Unless the mods save it, this should be gone in a few minutes.
I don't like the ideas in most of these comments so far, but I still don't want to suppress this discussion. Let people show themselves for who they really are and what they really think, for good or bad, because we're never going to make any progress unless a discussion can actually happen.