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Uh, so, I usually really hate comments about how an article isn't related to HN, but with this submission and the one about China on the front page, I felt like
by kyro 18y ago
Uh, so, I usually really hate comments about how an article isn't related to HN, but with this submission and the one about China on the front page, I felt like I needed to write one too.
I sort of feel like I'm looking at the front page of CNN or the NYT when I see stories about national legalization of drugs and the problems in a nation's infrastructure.
I think some of us have taken the guideline of 'stories that are interesting to hackers' to a bit of an extreme. It's almost become 'ok, some hackers take drugs, this story is about drugs, it should be interesting.' I still think that stories submitted should have a basic level of hackishness to them. As someone who'd consider himself a non-hacker, I find more hack related stories to be much more interesting than any of these Time/etc. articles, and I come here to read them because I wouldn't have been able to find them elsewhere, whereas these globally related articles are relatively easy to come by.
So, flag. And the other one.
- phugoid 18y agoI don't mind a _handful_ of non-tech articles. I'm more interested in the comments: what do smart tech people think about this or that? Then I add my own comment, and the smart bit gets cleared. Ah well. In any case, I assume the point-based algorithm is sufficient for moderating which articles should reach the front page.... Just my two cents' worth.
- swombat 18y agoWe've really had enough marijuana threads already. And past experience has shown that they lead to no useful discussion whatsoever.
- radu_floricica 18y agoUpvoted. The problem is not that this article is not interesting: it is. But this is a site for a different kind of news. But there are many places (reddit, digg, slashdot to name a few) where you can read about this, and very few places dedicated to "hacker news". Not only that, but the proportion of hacker/non-hacker new is heavy on the side of non-hacker. So in order to keep this site useful it's very important to keep it on topic. Otherwise it would become a good site, but no longer unique. Edit: also flagged btw. Complaining is ok, but it's good to remember from time to time there is a button for this kind of thing.
- anigbrowl 18y agoA reasonable point. Then again, drug use is arguably the primordial hack to your own wetware, and drug policy indirectly says something about how the state approaches individual cases it might not understand - consider the history of PGP, or whether Linux would have been developed in the US. So I vote for relevant, although only very peripherally.