unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
and
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic
Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."
Comments
Well there are two qualifiers there:
and
Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."
(For the record https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged shows zero entries for me.)