No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world
Jacques M,<p>Presumably, you have read through the comments of the referenced thread[1].  If so, your essay omits a perspective about politics dicussion that many HN participants have.  I'll attempt to summarize that position:<p>1) Yes, politics is extremely important.<p>2) Yes, politics <i>touches every subject</i>.<p>3) Yes, HN readers perform technical work in programming and hardware that affects politics, and vice versa.<p>4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of <i>emotional</i> comments instead of <i>insightful</i> ones.<p>5) The overall <i>net effect</i> of political discussion on HN is <i>negative</i> and we'd rather not have 1 of the valuable 30 slots of the front page taken up by a political story (e.g. "Trump denies climate change.")<p>To reiterate the points above, it does not mean "climate change" is unimportant or that HN posters are <i>"burying their head in the sand"</i>.  That's a 1-dimensional caricature of the people who'd rather get their diet of political discourse from somewhere else besides HN.<p>Therefore, it's possible to <i>simultaneously</i> hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN.  Your essay doesn't address this perspective.<p>[1]  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404</a>