Specifically you’re supposed to flag anything not within the guidelines[1]:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The first two of these apply to "tech" companies, so you might include them in "hacking and startups" (though hardly under "intellectual curiosity"). The third is purely political and is definitely something that TV news would cover. But it visibly strikes a chord with HN's readership. The fourth is also political; Wikileaks involves email and web pages, but what doesn't nowadays?
Maybe you find that all of these should be flagged too. Maybe only the third one, I don't know. The weasel wording with "most stories" and "probably off-topic", in practice, allows these through, which is why I said that there is no (let me add: clear, explicit) rule against political submissions.
The problem (which I think you seem to be acknowledging) is that as I've pointed out in the original post, the lack of clarity seems to end up in a mysterious (arbitrary? biased?) view on what is ok to cover.
Yes, I agree that the lack of clarity leads to these ambiguities. I think it would be impossible to formulate really clear rules on what sort of politics is accepted. People definitely want to discuss "politics with a tech angle" stories, like ones concerning Uber. Many people also definitely want to discuss "very important pure politics" stories like this one, or RBG's death, or paternity leave. At the same time I think most people don't want HN to turn into a "general politics is just as accepted as tech stuff" kind of discussion forum. The line will always be very fuzzy. Maybe the difference between RBG's death and her possible replacement is that RBG has already had a huge, concrete impact on the (US-centric) world, whereas her replacement's impact is speculative at this point.
