If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I might agree that this may not apply to all

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I might agree that this may not apply to all threads about this subject. But it also doesn't apply to so many things that are regularly posted here and nobody ever hears a peep about, often minor iteration of some shallow cosmetic "technology", and generally ads thinly veiled under bad writing. I mean, if the standards are that low, why not simply declare that humans are biological machines, and therefore all human interest stories are technology stories? But don't pretend there is consistency and actual adherence to the guidelines, I just don't see it. Maybe the problem is that it would require us first to define "good hacker". What is that? I'm thinking of the Chaos Computer Club guys, or Cult of the Dead Cow, not of Silicon Valley. But surely that isn't it, so what is it...? I would love to see a "main section" restricted to big ideas or questions, instead of news of the day, something that strictly tries to adhere to those guidelines -- but I would still want to have an area where we can discuss Snowden, or some random thing that existed for ages predictably being converted to js now, in a format that is purely focused on the words, and with people that are generally extremely smart. And if we can't do it here, I wish we could make that place, instead of just shutting up whenever it gets remotely serious.