> The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting
How are we defining "good hacker" ?
> It doesn't include most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Can a "good hacker" be curious and intellectually satisfied by political stories even if they don't include new phenomenon?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the article. However, if we're saying, "this is on topic for HN" or "this is off topic for HN" it seems weird to have a definition that is 100% dependent on one's lived experiences and what they individually find interesting. Maybe someone really really likes cat pictures because of the color or makeup of the fur, or the instincts of felines. Maybe someone finds geopolitical discussions about surveillance states to be intellectually uninteresting because they feel helpless to affect reform. Or they feel most startups are void of substance and rely too much on VC funding and thus are not intellectually interesting.
I guess I'm looking for a bit more of an enumerated "this is acceptable" and "this is not" as opposed to "you'll know it when you see it."
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.
dang|11 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
By the way, if anybody wants a hit of meta, it's astonishing how precisely the last five paragraphs there still apply.
mkal_tsr|11 years ago
How are we defining "good hacker" ?
> It doesn't include most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Can a "good hacker" be curious and intellectually satisfied by political stories even if they don't include new phenomenon?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the article. However, if we're saying, "this is on topic for HN" or "this is off topic for HN" it seems weird to have a definition that is 100% dependent on one's lived experiences and what they individually find interesting. Maybe someone really really likes cat pictures because of the color or makeup of the fur, or the instincts of felines. Maybe someone finds geopolitical discussions about surveillance states to be intellectually uninteresting because they feel helpless to affect reform. Or they feel most startups are void of substance and rely too much on VC funding and thus are not intellectually interesting.
I guess I'm looking for a bit more of an enumerated "this is acceptable" and "this is not" as opposed to "you'll know it when you see it."
Thoughts? Thanks!
enraged_camel|11 years ago
diestl|11 years ago
[deleted]
apostate|11 years ago
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.
CmonDev|11 years ago
canadev|11 years ago
roghummal|11 years ago
dang|11 years ago