I agree with the politics ban, but the big problem is always going to be that, well, politics and life are technically inseparable. We must try to factor them into separate buckets, but it's not going to be possible in the general case.
Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.
IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete political threads. Then the definition of politics will be subjective. That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme. What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective action if the experiment starts going wrong.
In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.
Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.
IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete political threads. Then the definition of politics will be subjective. That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme. What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective action if the experiment starts going wrong.
In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.