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You say that, but there was a big thread on Val Kilmer on the front page this morning...

• kubb 2y ago
  He died, I'm fine with making an exception for it.
  • milesrout 2y ago
    Why? He isn't relevant to HN at all. Is every celebrity death newsworthy on HN now?
    • kubb 2y ago
      Maybe he was significant to a lot of hackers. The death was also untimely, which reminds us to cherish the time we have. Many of us are in our 50s or 60s.
• bee_rider 2y ago
  This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like, pick your battles. Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right? If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.