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Even a year ago, when Trump was posting claims that he was a king, etc. these things got removed, even though there were obvious implications on the tech indust
by lynndotpy 10mo ago
Even a year ago, when Trump was posting claims that he was a king, etc. these things got removed, even though there were obvious implications on the tech industry. (Cybersecurity alone makes more political assumptions than it does on the hardness of the discrete logarithm, for example.)
I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.
I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.
I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.
We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".
- jacquesm 10mo agoI think HN should just add another tab: Politics. That way the need for flagging goes down and everybody gets what they want. The main reason why you would want to keep politics off HN is because it turns would be friends, collaborators and people that respect each other into opposing factions (just like religion does). But in the end IRL that would come out anyway so better to have it up front. So I don't think it makes a difference in the long run.