I wasn’t commenting on the suitability of this kind of thing on HN, more on the sane-political-discussion-bootstrap problem.
I mean, here in Soviet Russia politics can and will do you whether or not you do politics, and it is indeed tech people, who seem to be the most eager to pull the separate magisteria trick with “politics” and “interesting stuff I care about”, that have been getting hit by that fact more and more often in recent years. Humans gonna hume, human life is political, and “politics is dirty” is as damaging as it is self-fulfilling (maybe not immediately, but over a couple of generations...). If your corner of the world affords you the luxury of ignoring that, I can only look on with envy.
But to go from this to “political discourse belongs on HN” is a leap I’m not interested in making on defending. Whatever my opinion on that (I’m not sure) I don’t have the power to make or help it come true in any case, and idle bitching is only satisfying in very small amounts. Somewhat relatedly, I don’t feel that cultivating strong feelings about the state of a discussion website that is completely owned and maintained by a single investment company is likely to be good for my social health. It’s a good place, and it will continue to be until it suddenly isn’t, and there isn’t a single thing I can do about it. (Been there, done that.)
Getting back to my original point, my actual hope is that a good-enough witch filter could be built without mentioning object-level norms, solely on meta-level ones like “don’t shout down or shame people you disagree with”. Certainly the quality of moderately large political discussions on HN (which exist, whatever you or I think about them) seems to be pointing in that direction. (The experience of some other places, e.g. the SSC subreddit and comment section, seem to point to other possible perils of that approach that are not avoidable by changes local to a single venue.)