I thought the GP's comment was on fleek!

Seriously, though, his use of the word hack was obviously intended to disarm the GGP's implied argument. It made me chuckle, and I think was a good word choice despite it's "tedious zeitgeistiness".

I know you are, but what am I?

Why all this negativity ?

The guiding value here is intellectual curiosity, which is gratified by running across things that are unpredictably interesting. HN has never been just about startups and tech. It's also about Byzantine coins, medieval manuscripts, Nabokov's butterfly expeditions, the tomb of Queen Esther, T.S. Eliot's letters, and Jim Henson's coffee commercials. Pee-wee Herman? Why not, if there's an interesting aspect to the story?

Stories that take us off the beaten track into the wild are the rare earth elements of HN, and we can never get enough of them. There's a strong tendency for everything to homogenize on a small number of hot topics. Those are exciting, but to let them crowd out the quieter, odder material is not how to optimize HN's long-term interestingness. We think it's great to have stories on the front page that defy expectation, and we consciously moderate HN to protect those when we see signs of community interest in them.

Of course people disagree greatly about what counts as interesting, but hey, if one oddball story bores you, another may hit the spot. Keep HN weird.

While I understand that everyone has their own idea of what should and should not be on Hacker News, must everything be regulated down to the gnat's whiskers?

I know everyone's afraid of the conversations deteriorating to the point that they no longer want to come here, but you can go the other direction with that too. You can regulate it so much that no one wants to come post or read.

I think there's a reasonable balance between the two (where that balance lies is something that many will surely disagree about also -- :-D ).

And, for the record, I could have lived without the Pee Wee Herman story also.