I don't care much for these meta-discussions, but I think there's an interesting issue here, possibly worth pursuing a bit. First, let's separate the wheat fro

I don't care much for these meta-discussions, but I think there's an interesting issue here, possibly worth pursuing a bit. First, let's separate the wheat from the chaff. We're not talking, in this case, about personality-blog mountebanks, or sycophants. Nor are we talking about blogspam (under any definition I can imagine.) Nor, finally, are we discussing any "over-literal misunderstanding of what constitutes off-topic" or "the letter of the law". What is at stake here is "what satisfies one's intellectual curiosity?" Because that is the guiding principle at play. For me, this article definitely fit the bill. The idea of taking a 360 degree panoramic photo is nothing new, but to take it over a period of 24 hours was (in my estimation) a brilliant masterstroke. To me, it showed the kind of "hacker" approach that we tend to admire around these parts. Now, as you say, you and I have both been around here for quite a while, so it surprised me a bit that we have such different estimation about what makes for a good HN submission. I think that explaining flags is a good thing. But saying "does this really need to exist here instead of on Digg/Reddit/Fark/etc?" isn't really enough for me to understand the nature of your objection. I get that it might not satisfy your intellectual curiosity as it does mine, but is that really worth a flag?