There is no requirement for HN submissions to be journalistic, so I don't know why you were expecting that. What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hacker

There is no requirement for HN submissions to be journalistic, so I don't know why you were expecting that. What to Submit 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.