Band together (e.g. private mailing list) with like-minded people and upvote each other's submissions until the culture has changed.
EDIT: Hey, that's the only reasonable answer to the parent's question so far, as far as I can see. I don't like the idea either, but it's a reasonable idea, downvotes be damned!
That's how it seems to me too. This was a very popular post, so most people here don't seem to share your views on this issue. Rather than blustering about how the site has gone to hell because so many people see travel as a legitimate part of startup life, and getting more hacks in the software to penalize the topics you don't want to hear about, maybe it's time to accept it.
There are about a 100 better sources of political discussion than Hacker News. I've only been here a couple years (lurking for the first 1.5) but I feel like the noise is really drowning out the signal for me.
So I have to disagree with you here, Jon. I care about politics, I really do, just not much while I'm here.
We shall see. Looking elsewhere in the thread, most of it is international people having a really great discussion about the issue. And it seems to me that they're very interested in talking about the issue and agree with me that this and related topics as a big part of entrepreneurship.
You are getting downvoted for being so strident about something that comes pretty close to contradicting the site guidelines. It is not in fact true that popularity controls what stories are germane to HN.
I think you may think this nerdy Glass Bead Game of connecting the dots between arbitrary subjects and "entrepreneurship" is a compelling argument, but some of us have been here for many years and have seen too many different subjects --- Egypt! the TSA! Unionization! Ron Paul! The War! Red light cameras! Gitmo! Fighting in middle school! Peak oil! Corporatism vs capitalism! Apple murdering the web! Taxation! Censorship on Twitter! Global warming! Homophobia! † -- justified this way.
When you write a comment that acts shocked-shocked! that anyone would question your judgement about exactly how strongly connected a topic is to HN, you run the risk of making people feel like their intelligence is being insulted.
Keep something else in mind. There are people who vote on the front page. There are people who comment. There are people who vote on comments. Some of these groups overlap, but they aren't the same. Most HN'ers would probably agree that the latter two groups are responsible for the site's character more than the former. Which is a long way of saying: nobody's too impressed with the score on this article.
Next time you start feeling the outrage welling up in you about how people are bitching and sniping about stories that most people on HN seem to like, keep in mind: Paul Graham has been having to punch in manual filters to suppress some of the most "popular" stories on HN. He did it for Egypt and he did it for the TSA. The way you want to believe this site works is not how the site currently works. Thankfully.
† Take a guess how I came up with that list.
PS: Because you have a software security background, I'm atypically interested in finding out a little more about you. I'm also a fast reader. It may interest you to know that fully half of the top 10 pages of your best-ranked comments here are political, and that's not counting your takes on DRM or how "bubbly" the startup scene is. Everyone wants HN to spend time covering their favorite issues. I'd love to spend more time talking about cooking and whiskey.
Thanks for the detailed response, Thomas. My perception is that the community here is very selective which rule violations result in downvoting -- there are some great examples throughout this thread.
In terms of on-topic, stories related to barriers that entrepreneurs face, and the difficult tradeoffs we have to make as part of working in this field certainly seem to be within scope of HN. Interesting new phenomena are explicitly within scope and there are some truly remarkable things happening at the social network level with the grassroots resistance to the TSA -- and with so many key players in the security and software engineering communities taking an active role.
> Next time you start feeling the outrage welling up in you about how people are bitching and sniping about stories that most people on HN seem to like, keep in mind: Paul Graham has been having to punch in manual filters to suppress some of the most "popular" stories on HN.
I'm not outraged ... depending on the day, it's a combination of bemused, disappointed, and entertained.
> It may interest you to know that fully half of the top 10 pages of your best-ranked comments here are political
Good to know! Sounds like there's even more support here than I realized for my political stories. Is the story about my significant other, AWK code, and Brian Kernighan still number one?
If the story had been written in terms of a barrier faced by entrepreneurs --- as a war story from someone actually operating a company, as many of us here do --- it wouldn't generate the same enmity.
Also, please keep in mind that there are two factors influencing our perceptions of stories: first, the story itself and how strongly it adheres to HN; and, second, the comment threads the stories have been shown to generate in the past.
If somebody blogs about the challenges of being a Seattle-based entrepreneur who is boycotting flying (or getting harrassed at airports) because would you see that as on topic?
> the comment threads the stories have been shown to generate in the past.
Stories about the TSA have been shown to generate a lot of antipathy from you and your friends in the past. So is your argument that this should give you veto power in the future?
It's ironic you'd say that, because the opposite is true about me and the TSA threads; I'm the first to admit, I too took the opportunity to bay at the moon about the TSA on HN. I wish someone had called me out for doing so then.
I don't know what "veto power" you think I have here, but if you click around the site, you'll find a document that pretty well spells out what is and isn't on-topic for the site. The person who really does have "veto power" here is Paul Graham, and he's been having to use it lately; he buried Egypt, and he buried the TSA.
EDIT: Hey, that's the only reasonable answer to the parent's question so far, as far as I can see. I don't like the idea either, but it's a reasonable idea, downvotes be damned!