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It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https

It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi... Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something. It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.

pohl 8y ago
Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?
- peacetreefrog 8y ago
  I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.
  - pohl 8y ago
    HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.) Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow: 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
crispinb 8y ago
1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.

pohl 8y ago

Non-technical? Do you think maybe the cause of insect collapse is related to something other than a tradeoff that came along with the use of pesticide technology? What's your hypothesis?

peacetreefrog 8y ago
I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.
- pohl 8y ago
  HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.) Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow: 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

crispinb 8y ago

1. It's not 'this story' - it's a stream of new stories about collapses of insect populations in different ecosystems (a part of the wider stream of stories about ecosystem breakdown) 2. As for motivations for submitting the stories, I can only speak for myself: ecosystem collapse is more important and interesting to me than tech. I live in ecosystems (indeed I have nowhere else to go), whereas I merely make a living from tech.