I don't think business is off topic seeing as this site is half about starting a business

Economics effect those businesses so in a particularly bad week esp. one in which events that haven't happened to the great depression transpire you are going to see some stories about it.

What political news are you talking about? The only posts even remotely politically related was the Palin e-mail story and that was about a vulnerability in Yahoo's password recovery system. Something people writing their own might want to keep in mind. If it had been a sports star who's e-mail had been compromised would that be a "Sports story"

1) Political articles creep in

2) Political articles draw more of the politics crowd

3) Voting power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total votes

4) Submit power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total submits

5) This leads to a slow but steady increase in political articles

6) Go back to 1)

This is not a self-correcting system. It can and will happily veer into irrelevance because there are far more politics/reddit type users out there on the internet than there are hackers on HackerNews.

Hence why we need to apply conscious control to it, not just "submit and vote more".

It is madness to expect the same action in the same circumstances to bring anything other than the same result.

Since this is an entrepreneurial community, this information is significantly more relevant than the 20,000th person asking what to do to start learning LISP.

  TTTTTT HH  HH     A    NN   N  KK   KK     YY   YY OOOOOO  UU  UU  !!
    TT   HH  HH     A    N N  N  KK  KK       YY YY  OO  OO  UU  UU  !!
    TT   HHHHHH    AAA   N NN N  KKKKK          YY   OO  OO  UU  UU  !!
    TT   HH  HH   A   A  N  N N  KK  KK         YY   OO  OO  UU  UU
    TT   HH  HH  AA   AA N   NN  KK   KK        YY   OOOOOO  UUUUUU  !!

Can we please have the real hn back? I miss it so much.

(Please, let's talk more about programming, less about everything else.)

This is wrong. TDD may or may not be useful. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, but in my experience it has been used in a "cargo cult" approach to programming. The last startup I spent significant time at was eventually destroyed because they hired an "Agile/VP" of engineering. He then hired a bunch of guys who could do "TDD" but didn't actually know how to write software.