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How is this article considered to be ontopic for Hacker News? From the guidelines page: < On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That in
by monksy 11y ago
How is this article considered to be ontopic for Hacker News?
From the guidelines page:
< 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.
- dang 11y agoI'm pretty sure that both the topic and the story gratify the intellectual curiosity of quite a few good hackers, so the lines you quoted are the answer to your question. Certainly not all of us are interested in this, but that's true of nearly everything on the front page, so the standard can't be that tight. Articles on divisive issues are often so tendentious that the threads inevitably become flamewars, so users have gotten in the habit of flagging them. That's ok in some cases, but we don't want it to become mechanical; the purpose should be to foster quality, not exclude topics. So it becomes important to keep an eye out for the exceptions. I think this was one.