As a security consultant who does a lot of privacy work, I found this article quite interesting (not enough depth for my liking, but interesting nonetheless).
That it has been flagged due to the one-week political hiatus is exactly the sort of thing I feared would happen when the hiatus was announced. I don't wish to debate the reasons for the hiatus itself, there are arguments on all sides to which I am sympathetic, both intellectually and viscerally.
What should be open to debate, however, is a matter of definition: What is (what are) politics? What constitutes a political topic?
The hiatus was announced without a sufficiently clear operational definition, IMHO. (It's a bit like the old arguments against pornography/obscenity: I cannot define it but I know it when I see it.)
I come to HN for interesting articles of appeal both intellectual and professional. Even with its echo chamber and nuclear downvoting, HN is still has the best signal-to-noise and highest value of any news aggregator I've checked. Since my work involves the intersection of security, policy, privacy, and governance, articles such as these are welcome in my feed.
Without a clearer definition politics, all we need is for someone who works outside a particular field deemed largely non-technical to assert that a post is political, and BAM! it's gone.
Like this one might end up being, despite the fact that fundamentally privacy is major unsolved issue of our technical era, an issue that has exacerbated by the very technology embraced by the bulk of us here on HN: This technology makes it possible to expose and share private information, whether as a direct and desirable effect (photo sharing) or as an indirect and undesirable effect (vulnerabilities and the like).
There are business opportunities here (privacy-protective services and systems) and there are stones to throw and derision to cast, for companies that services that fail to take privacy and security seriously.
That such a topic can run afoul of a loosely-defined hiatus is to me very unfortunate, a sad if not terrible side-effect of a well-intentioned but ultimately poorly defined decision.
Yes by all means, though the phrase "hold him to it" sounds odd to my ears. You're talking about giving us what we asked for, which I appreciate, especially since you don't agree with the idea, which I respect.
I also appreciate your including the qualifier 'this week', because that's a critical detail and one thing I learned yesterday is that there's a risk of it getting lost in the shuffle. We don't want this to go beyond a week, least of all if it was a bad idea in the first place.
I think that the detox week reeks of the terrible practice of faux "safespaces" and the inclination of technical people to not be as politically involved as they should be and simply deny the importance.
That said, it's not my website and if they want to try this for a week, we can. At the end of the week though, I expect that we'll have a discussion about it and hash out if it was a good decision or not.
(Im really hoping they'll release a list of posts that were flagged as part of political detox, so we can talk explicitly about which parts we think are good or bad to ban.)
That it has been flagged due to the one-week political hiatus is exactly the sort of thing I feared would happen when the hiatus was announced. I don't wish to debate the reasons for the hiatus itself, there are arguments on all sides to which I am sympathetic, both intellectually and viscerally.
What should be open to debate, however, is a matter of definition: What is (what are) politics? What constitutes a political topic?
The hiatus was announced without a sufficiently clear operational definition, IMHO. (It's a bit like the old arguments against pornography/obscenity: I cannot define it but I know it when I see it.)
I come to HN for interesting articles of appeal both intellectual and professional. Even with its echo chamber and nuclear downvoting, HN is still has the best signal-to-noise and highest value of any news aggregator I've checked. Since my work involves the intersection of security, policy, privacy, and governance, articles such as these are welcome in my feed.
Without a clearer definition politics, all we need is for someone who works outside a particular field deemed largely non-technical to assert that a post is political, and BAM! it's gone.
Like this one might end up being, despite the fact that fundamentally privacy is major unsolved issue of our technical era, an issue that has exacerbated by the very technology embraced by the bulk of us here on HN: This technology makes it possible to expose and share private information, whether as a direct and desirable effect (photo sharing) or as an indirect and undesirable effect (vulnerabilities and the like).
There are business opportunities here (privacy-protective services and systems) and there are stones to throw and derision to cast, for companies that services that fail to take privacy and security seriously.
That such a topic can run afoul of a loosely-defined hiatus is to me very unfortunate, a sad if not terrible side-effect of a well-intentioned but ultimately poorly defined decision.