"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot 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 agree with you. I've been banging the drum of content diversity but I feel that old Digg/reddit submissions that are no doubt interesting to hackers is something that will detract from the value of the overall focus, which is mainly geeky-startup (at least that's what I see) stuff.
Great app. Simple, probably not that much behind it, but conveys a lot of data directly into the user's reptilian brain. Makes me wonder how I could incorporate a technique like this into my own apps.
Oh, and the content was interesting, too.
beyond any other obvious reason as others pointed out, the rise and fall of empires is something totally revelanD in the startup world.