Yes - There is a combination of technology, new businesses, entrepreneurship, and new trends in society. There's also some development challenges, and recognizing a new market.
I'll agree with a previous poster - slashdot, digg, have pretty much dropped off my reading habits - HN, NYT, and techcrunch (and sporadically groklaw and salon.com) are now my web distractions. Not every article can be about erlang.
I don't know: HN is rapidly replacing my feed reader; and I think the news is interesting in its own right (may not have anything to do with "hacking", but still).
I think that there are reasons that this article should be here, but "but still" is a terrible one. That's the kind of attitude that causes sites to decline in quality like Digg and Reddit. Criteria have to be rigidly enforced or things will go to shit.
Things go to shit when criteria are rigidly enforced. You can't define 'hacking' or 'entrepeneurship' and any set of criteria attempting to do so will require liberal interpretation to allow everything of interest. The result is necessarily that some stuff is not of interest. The only way to be sure everything is of interest, is by not allowing anything.
The shittiness of a social news site has nothing to do with the any sort of enforcement or criteria for a topic, or even having a topic at all. Rather, things go to shit on a social news site when the community is composed of people who can't (roughly) agree on what they like to read.
To regurgitate an old adage I heard from a Dungeon Master: "It's not the game that's fun, it's the players." We're here to share links and talk about stuff, not to "post" and "comment", blind and deaf, into the void. As long as we all like one another, the site is good. When we attract a group of people we don't like as much, and those people attract people we don't like at all, then the site will suck, because those people won't be sharing and talking about the same things we want to share and talk about.
Struck a nerve, all I was saying is that this article is not really interesting compared to what normally makes the front page of HN. I think the fact it has to do with Marijuana made people just up-vote it. If you actually read the article, it is the equivalent of two dudes talking about opening a bake shop.
