I did not know these existed. The enjoyment I get from spending time reading HN (even the new links) is you learn something new, be it a new algorithm, software package, business story, or a dang cool snowball.
Thank you for not self-filtering and posting this.
Really, HN? As someone who is already only interested in HN for hacker stuff and not entrepreneurial stuff, please please do not add articles about snow donuts on HN!
Edit: Or I don't know, maybe create another HN style site for Quite Interesting news?
"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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
We've been through this over and over again. There's Hacker Hacker News on top of Hacker News that's using Bayesian Filters (as far as I understand) to display technical topics only: http://hackerhackernews.com/
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports"
This is clearly a non-exhaustive list.
"unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"
This phenomenon, as pointed out by the article itself, is not new.
Moreover, it is not interesting to hackers for any reason other than being generally interesting.
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
This is exactly the sort of thing TV news would cover.
Yes, I was wrong to submit that comment according to the rules. I flagged the article, but when it has already reached #2 you know it's not coming down.
Hacker News died a little bit more yesterday in accepting that _Off-Topic_ article.
Oh, I didn't notice that. Still, the source code is available on bitbucket at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/ so there's nothing stopping anyone relaunching it.
Seriously, the #2 and #3 right now are a review of Atlas shrugged and self rolling giant snowballs, there is the 'giant crystal cave', a pr piece from a british adult(ery) site and a wsj piece on 'terror'.
However, I don't find it interesting because I am a "hacker", I find it interesting because I am a person, and people are likely to find this interesting - it has nothing to do with whether you are a "hacker" or not.
When I visit Hacker News, I want to see news that is interesting, sure, but also related to hacking or entrepreneurship.
There are lots of interesting things in this world and like I said, it could easily make up enough content for another HN-style site. One that I would visit. When I wanted "generally interesting" news. As opposed to "Hacker" News.
Thank you for not self-filtering and posting this.