The most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community positive, is this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/

The most important thing, besides the general desire to keep the community positive, is this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. 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. Reddit, on the other hand, has the following guidelines: Submit a link to anything interesting: news article, blog entry, video, picture... The HN community is built around a particular standard. Reddit's official standard is the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator is "Impeach Bush" and "Funny pic [nsfw]", then that's going to dominate. Unfortunately, I've already seen Hacker News change over the last year (less programming-related content; more general business news). I'd love a gentle nudge back in the hacker direction. But it's still the best social bookmarking site at the moment.