Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.

But how do you even begin to discuss that Tweet or this topic without talking about ideology and to contextualize this with other seemingly unrelated things currently going on in the US?

I genuinely don't think I'm conversationally agile enough to both discuss this topic while still able to avoid the political/ideological rabbit-hole.

You can't discuss this topic without broaching the idea that the government is acting in bad faith — that they don't actually believe that Anthropic is a supply-chain risk and that this action is meant to punish the company. But this is in the HN guidelines regarding comments:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

If a commenter who supports the government makes the same argument that the government is making, the guidelines tell us to assume good faith.

My conclusion is that any topic where a commenter might be making a bad faith argument is outside the scope of Hacker News.

I've been on hn for years and I see this kind of sentiment raised all the time. It is not my understanding of the guidelines.

Politics and ideology are not off topic, provided the subject matter is of interest, or "gratifying", to colleagues in the tech/start-up space.

What's important is that we don't use rhetoric, bad faith or argumentation to force our views on others. But expressing our opinions about how policy affects technology and vice versa has always been welcome, in my observation.

So, what do you think about the US government's decision, and why?

> Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.

Everything is politics and "ideology"

Everything is political. All of our tech exists within society, and the actions of the government shape the incentives of every actor and the framework we exist in.

HN likes to pretend otherwise, especially when it's inconvenient.

Being a hacker used to be an extremely political and ideological movement. Then capitalism came along and bought the term. It's about time we take that word back where it belongs.

I don't know which HN you have been using so far, but this particular site discusses politics all the time when it comes to Trump administration.

>Topics like this are where I struggle with HN philosophy. Normally avoiding politics and ideology where possible, created higher quality and more interesting discussions.

Our whole society runs on technology. All tech is inherently political.

A "no politics" stance is merely an endorsement of the status quo.

Welcome to reality. HN likes to pretend politics is something you can just look away from and ignore. That’s a mighty big privilege, which makes sense since HN skews cis-white-het-male. That’s not a lie. It is easy to ignore this when it doesn’t touch them. But now it DOES touch them, and you’ve just discovered what every oppressed group in history has to live with: politics doesn’t just go away if you ignore it.

Please at least try. There are already enough contributors here "qualified" to talk about politics.

If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.

I appreciate your restraint, and keeping this a high quality discussion space. As a political dissident myself, I don't mind some threads going political, I expect them to. The best ones are when there is a lot of disagreement or debate. As long as its not in every unrelated thread....

Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.

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