I've been told that Hacker News is "Anything of interest to hackers." This is on the front page, therefore it must a posteriori be of interest to hackers, musn't it?
Personally, I wish the criteria was more like "anything of interest to hackers in their capacity as hackers". I'm interested in politics, religion, lolcats, and baseball, but I'd prefer not to see these things overrun Hacker News.
I think you have to acknowledge the distinction between things that are interesting to hackers as hackers and things that are interesting to hackers as members of larger sets (airline passengers, citizens, or bipedal meat robots).
Just because most hackers find candied bacon interesting does't mean they want to read about it on news.yc; they can subscribe to the bacon subreddit for that stuff...
...I think that's more a hope than a definition (though you're probably just being sarcastic.) Anyway, I don't see why this story is prompting the !HN rigmarole. Bumbling government screwing with technology they don't understand in the name of protecting us sounds like HN to me.
Why? If you consider yourself part of the HN community, and you find it interesting, then by definition it belongs here. Isn't that the case?
FWIW, I disqualify myself from judging whether things belong on HN or not. Many of the articles I used to think were not HN have been proven by popularity to belong here, leading me to the conclusion that I am not a hacker since I do not find them interesting when I am reading "Hacker News."
p.s. Now I will be sarcastic: ESR has stated that "Hackers do not place double quotation marks outside of punctuation."
You're (I'm not directing this entirely at raganwald, as it applies to many of the arguments made) assuming that only Hackers are capable of voting and posting.
I generally agree, and think this article should have made it. But the argument of 'Only articles interesting to hackers will make it to the front page' fails at the part where we assume that only people interested in Hacker News are doing the majority of voting (The Digg factor kind of forces me to think that when the Digg-ers show up, they'll reshape any news to fit their idea of "news" - see Reddit).
