How is this hackernews?
replies(5):
If you read some of those past explanations and still have a question about our general approach, let me know what it is. As for this particular story, I turned off the flags on it because it clearly counts as SNI (significant new information - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
* as has the question "how is this hackernews", of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
I think there's an intellectual interest here, but the line is very blurry with politics. It's probably as blurry as the articles posted about US being a surveillance state, cryptocurrency articles unrelated to the technology itself, etc.
Obviously most of what gets discussed on HN is relatively unimportant in the world. If that weren't the case, HN would simply be a current affairs site, which it isn't. At the same time, that doesn't mean every political story is off topic here—the guidelines already make that clear by their use of the word "most": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's a long and pretty consistent history to how HN handles the question of political topics.