Actually, this was a case of HN being ahead of the curve. I re-upped micahflee's original post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875476 as soon as I saw it yesterday, and it spent 18 hours on the front page.
At 6pm yesterday this update came out, which seems to have gotten more public attention, but HN had already been discussing the original in-depth article for quite a while by then. What to do?
The story itself is on-topic. The question is whether the update (the current submission) should be counted as a follow-up [1] to the earlier thread, or whether it should be counted as significant new information (SNI) [2], and thus have its own thread.
On HN two articles count as the same story if they would lead to substantially the same discussion. That's pretty clearly the case with 43875476 (the original thread) and 43890179 (this update). In such cases we merge the threads, as tomhow mentioned, so as not to have a split discussion.
But it's clear that there's community demand to discuss this story today. Since "well actually we were ahead of the curve" is no way to speak to a hungry beast, we're going to re-up the original thread, so discussion of the story can continue on the frontpage, and pin a link to the update article to the top of that one (tomhow already did this), so people can read both.
Hacker news is about tech news. Political hacks are absolutely included within that. Personally I’d love to read HN users knowledgable thoughts on the topic, the community here is very well qualified to make points others won’t.
