4 ms·

why is this on HN?

• sounddust 18y ago
  The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot 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.
  • biohacker42 18y ago
    I've always found the above troubling. It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news. Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?
    • sounddust 18y ago
      Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology). As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.
      • Silentio 18y ago
        I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always high minded and interesting. Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside posts about hacking more specifically.
        • coryrc 18y ago
          "things like this article" are exactly why reddit is no longer the way it once was. You will destroy HN with your wish.
          • gaius 18y ago
            So flag it.
          • pg 18y ago
            Not true. This article could easily have been on Reddit in the first year. What ruined Reddit was (a) an influx of 14 year olds, who (b) were allowed to continue to behave as they had on Digg or wherever else they came from.
            • biohacker42 18y ago
              But wasn't the influx of 14 year olds driven by general interest articles, which very slowly got less interesting and more general? How could that slow boil be prevented?
              • pg 18y ago
                I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments. It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve politics, but were instances of it.
                • pg 18y ago
                  BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.
                  • LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    • a-priori 18y ago
      Unusual and interesting perspectives on the world's cultures in my mind definitely satisfy the criteria of intellectual curiousity.
    • pg 18y ago
      I've always found the above troubling. It's been the definition of on topic for about a year and a half, and the site's still fine, so it seems to work.
• theoneill 18y ago
  "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • biohacker42 18y ago
    In his defense, I don't think he was suggesting it's either spam or egregiously off topic. What bothers curmudgeons like me and him is the gentle slope towards Everybody News.
    • michaelneale 18y ago
      I was worried about that over 6 months ago, and in that time it hasn't got worse then it was then, so heres hoping it stays that way ! (just a single data point, but its something !). Do you think it is "sliding" over time? Or are you just (rightly so) being vigilant ?
      • biohacker42 18y ago
        I do have a subtle feeling it's sliding but that's very likely just my paranoia.
    • Scriptor 18y ago
      Also, the title of the submission is poorly worded, suggesting that the Arab producers were asking the question.