Text version:

https://abc7news.com/post/bay-area-software-rep-lost-176k-sa...

That may be a huge goal of activism, but activists do not get to control what other people want to do.

Activists wanting something is not synonymous with that thing being a good idea. It just means that someone wants something out of you could be good, could be very bad. No different than a sales person trying to get you to buy something.

People on HN are happy to talk about the internal politics of distant nations, so long as the name of the distant nation is Israel or Palestine.

Not wanting politics on HN, need not imply support of the status quo, or even a lack of interest in politics. It can simply be a different belief about the purpose of online forums.

I read about politics all day long in many different places. My belief that HN should be relatively free of such stories is not because I believe I can detach myself from politics, but because I believe topic based forums are more valuable and useful than “anything goes” forums.

Allowing politics on HN doesn't mean discussing politics in every thread. If it's a story about someone who improved performance of their system by using Rust then sure there's no need to bring anything political. But threads about Nvidia, Tesla, encryption, internet blackouts, social media, startups investments, etc, all warrants political discourse.

I wish that were true, but in my experience so far, it isn’t.

Not only does politics and general stories crowd out everything else over time on other sites, there are HN submitters who seem to be trying to accelerate this.

During the war, when HN was getting Israel-Palestine stories constantly, I started looking at the submission history of some of the submitters, and some of them were just pushing these types of stories every day for months and months.

So yes, I think allowing politics will eventually mean being dominated by politics and general interest.

Globalizing the intifada means pushing an agenda everywhere, including on HN, on posts where it is relevant and on posts where some obscure or conspiratorial connection can be made.

If HN is going to allow accusations to be slung against groups of people it has to allow others to respond, and that sets off endless debate amongst people who will not be changing their minds on the matter but will repeat the same argument on the next post.

Every Israel Palestine story was like that. Just hundreds of back & forth exchanges of fire that could be copy pasted from the last story, along with copious complaints that HN was censoring them even though the story was on the front page. Just a complete waste of time, and very dishonest & unserious people.

The use of Rust is already political!

No, it doesn’t work that way.

The sound of children playing is a normal part of human life, inseparable in fact from life.

The smell of cigarette smoke is neither.

Only because you're defining one as normal and the other as abnormal.

It is possible for the human species to exist without cigarette smoke, and doubtless for at least part of our history it did not exist.

It is not possible for the human species (or any form of mortal biological life) to exist without children.

If you want to try to define the latter observation of reality as “abnormal”, fill your boots.

There are lot of holes in your argument:

- civilisation is currently more at risk from overpopulation than depopulation

- just because children need to exist doesn't imply they need to exist in apartment buildings

- just because children exist doesn't imply that they need to play outdoors on balconies

- just because children exist doesn't imply that there can't be limits on how much noise they can make, and when

etc etc

You’re not going to win the “children in society” are abnormal argument. If you don’t like children, leave society.

I remember when I was young and edgy, and thought dunking on parents was simply sharing hard truths.

Boy am I glad I grew out of that mindset.

Yes.