Important world news, which is why it's on cnn.com and pretty much every other news site out there. Pretty much irrelevant to hackers.
- Vote in Pakistan. They've got nukes...
- Kosovo independence has important repercussions in Europe and elsewhere.
- A big tax scandal in Germany, one of the world's most important economies.
- Obama just announced some kind of protectionist tax plan to 'keep jobs in America'.
just to grab a few...
The other problem is that it doesn't pass the "make me smarter or inform me of something I didn't know" test. It's a piece of information I already knew, as did anyone else that is in any way connected to TV, radio or other news sites.
With that said, your point about how widely distributed a story is elsewhere is an interesting one. I'm not sure I completely agree - the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo wouldn't have made it onto Hacker News under this criterion, for example.
Part of the reason for wanting stories like this to appear on Hacker News isn't so much to be informed of the existence of the story, but rather for the quality of the discussion provoked by the stories. There are certain commenters whose opinion of Castro's resignation I'd far rather hear than some talking head on CNN.
However, I think that commentary on MS/Yahoo is far more relevant here than anything about Castro can possibly be. Indeed, Castro commentary is very likely to lead down the reddit road.
As somebody who enjoys this community a lot, I want to know that if 1,000 people start posting random URL's tomorrow, that not only would software filters stop junk from getting through, but that the community would step up and moderate itself because, albeit this is Hacker News, algorithms are never perfect: we are going to have to use our brains to make sure the site is still focused (or re-focused) regardless of how interesting an article might be.
On the other hand, there are good signs this may not necessarily happen to Hacker News. It's very possible that Digg, Reddit, and newcomer social news sites will be enough to satisfy the needs of most users. This site could be like a chess club in that it's open to everybody, but most people wouldn't care.
At the same time, one has to admit that if a social news site continues to address every topic on earth, it could get to the point where as the content becomes more similar to that of Digg or Reddit, there would be an exponential increase in new registrations daily of users looking for the next big thing. These users would then vote up new types of stories and change the site in a very short time. I think I read that one can't grow a team by more than 25% in number per year, or one will have a team that has lost qualities of the existing group--this is likely a major factor in retaining consistency and focus for this community, too.
Hum... we don't want to digg too deep down the reddit hole?
Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?
It's your choice not to follow other news sites. Something like cnn, bbc, etc... is a much better place to stay abreast of current events than yc.news.
It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.
Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.
I'm positive at least 20% of the stories do not appeal to each person, but the stories in that 20% are different for each individual (see what I mean?)
Lack of interest towards a subject matter in an individual at a specific time doesn't necessarily denote lack of suitability for the subject for HN.
Personally I'm getting quite irritated at the need to eyeball-scan the news because I'm rather keeping up with the new articles so I visit often but I always have like 15 stories I already decided I wouldn't check out...
But from a reading perspective once I read a story (and maybe some of the comments) from the front page I no longer care about it. Something I'll want to follow the comments (but to make that easy an option to see which stories have new comments instead of having to squint at the number of comments would work better anyway).
So usually over half the stories on the home page are links that I don't care about (either I upmoded them or want to ignore them and don't care to follow the comment thread).
Maybe this forces people to follow the new stream (of which an RSS feed would be extremely helpful).
It means the watchdogs will bark when crap stories try to infiltrate the camp.
Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would rather have a hacker news which is focused on hacker-ish stuff.
I don't see what the problem is with taking this kind of story elsewhere.
It's not a bad story or uninteresting, just that first this one...then a Musharraf one, then another one about the US primaries, and on and on. All of them more important than the regular fare here. And after a while, the value of the site is diluted in terms of its original purpose.
(BTW, even though I disagree with you, I upvoted you because a 0 or a -1 is more than enough to indicate disapproval).