Its stories like this why I come to HN. HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit, but you can't survive on a diet of just high risk investing weirdness.
> HN may have started as interesting stuff for the Silicon Valley VC circuit
Oh, no no no. It started as a way for pg to read more interesting things, literally about anything. Byzantine coins and cat prints in medieval manuscripts are two that I recall from years past. The site has always been for intellectual diversity above all else. Keeping that going is the thing we care about most.
In other words this article is 100% certified original Hacker News, and it warms my heart (freshly grateful to still be attached to the rest of my body) to see it at #1.
You don't have to come to HN exclusively. I like the idea of HN or any other website being focused on single-theme. If I want to read about startups and tech I come to HN. If I want to read about something else, I go else where.
I enjoyed this post very much but I would be very sad if posts like these became more frequent over here as I wouldn't have a good source of startups and tech anymore.
This sort of article, with its's well written, amusing, compellingly "human" narrative is precisely how startups should be writing their blogs. It's exactly the sort of thing founders should be reading to learn the subtle and nuanced art of writing. It's very relevant to HN; not in content perhaps, but definitely in style.
> 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.
I never thought of Techcrunch to be about tech and I don't think it covers the aspects of startups I care about. When I say tech and startups, I mean programming languages, software and great hacks a startups use to scale and build their business. Not Series A rounds and acquisitions.
You're right when you say there has always been more to HN than tech and startups but I would says they are the defining aspects of HN.
Regarding that line on the guideline you quote, I really wish it would be changed. It is literally used to justify the admission of anything since how could you argue with someone that something is not interesting. It's a completely subjective and useless method to define what's on-topic. But that's just my opinion.
I checked it out, very interesting. The front page was very different than what I was expecting -- I like that. Would it be possible to get an invite directly from you, or should I request one via the site?
>Your invite should arrive no later than July, 2026.
HAH! I had a good laugh about that one.
>Seriously though, want in today?
>Just send out a quick tweet to help others discover Snapzu and as a token of our appreciation we will bump you to the top of the list and send you an invite code within 24 hours
Once upon a time http://www.metafilter.com/ but I've not been there in a long long time to say for certain it's like it was, but for obscure but interesting that was/is your place
I was a regular visitor for a long time, but as Matt's segued it into (as he himself put it) "a gateway for social justice activism" it's become far too heavy on the pitchfork-rallying.
I just visited and unfortunately the content right now doesn't seem to be all there.
And, while I don't describe myself as a "social justice warrior", but a skeptic, seeing this (mostly upvoted) comment regarding the admins kind of turned me off, especially considering the replies.
>These admins are super nerdy, have low self-esteem, not to popular with the ladies, are slightly autistic (on the spectrum) have little to no social life, and have generally weak personalities when it comes to social issues. I can spot these guys a mile a way. So when you team them up with a feminist who is telling them they are awful oppressors, some of them are going to buckle and just ask "OK, what can I do to help?" And that's where this PC/feminist/transgender agenda gets codified into an actual company course of action or policy.
Voat gained a lot of its members when it was hailed as reddit without as much admin intervention. A few months ago there was a concern among some reddit users that admins were deleting posts that criticized reddit's CEO; there are also some conspiracy-theory level accusations that admins were deleting posts in line with "SJW" ideal (when I say SJW, I mean the conception of SJWs held by the people who frequently complain about them).
As a result, many of the members of voat are the types of people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to things like being civil on the internet. They are the types of people who obsess over reddit's current CEO Ellen Pao, or who hold opinions which they defend with "free speech" in the way described by this comic[1]. Honestly, in my opinion they're just assholes.
