The problem is that as we allow more non-topical articles to be voted to the top of HN, we lose cohesion. You can go anywhere for Wikileaks news, and as iuguy

The problem is that as we allow more non-topical articles to be voted to the top of HN, we lose cohesion. You can go anywhere for Wikileaks news, and as iuguy has pointed out, reddit is probably one of the best/easiest places to find such news. You could move along to the next post, but what happens when all the posts are off topic? Where will you go for the news you once found on HN? HN is like a subreddit, if someone were posting /r/funny to /r/science, and 50% of /r/science was jokes, /r/science would lose a lot of its value. Whether or not this belongs on HN I will leave to others to decide, but iuguy was saying that off-topic material devalues HN.