Because not all of us are robots that only care about making our computers beep, boop and flash?

Calling it general entertainment pop culture misses the entire point of why it's interesting and honestly, it's quite self limiting to have such a perspective.

Try to open your walls up a bit man and soak up the complexities of culture and the laws we live in.

It's a case of a new(ish) publishing medium having effects beyond just entertainment.

I have to fight the hipster in me too, but Serial is an example of something that is deservedly popular. It was very entertaining, yes, but very informative. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about criminal justice.

There's even a tech angle: As a former engineer for a wireless phone company, I thought the explanation of how technical data is used and abused for securing legal convictions to be mind blowing.

>I'm a bit at a loss as to why general entertainment pop culture news is interesting to hackers.

Because hackers are people, and by definition a significant proportion of people are interested in pop culture.

But that does bring up a good point that "anything that good hackers would find interesting" is perhaps not the best guidance for what's "on-topic" on HN.

For me it's interesting because getting to the truth in a complicated case is like debugging to find and fix a single specific bug in a large codebase. But I'm also weird in that debugging is one of my favorite parts of the development process.