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Comment by bvod | Hacker News Reader

I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page?

Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.

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You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1]

"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."

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.

The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News.

I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see, it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many articles from mainstream sources.

I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment when the ratio was bigger.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

It continues

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Also from the guidelines:

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

user: bvod

created: 447 days ago

karma: 94

Some sincerely-intended, friendly advice...

Whilst I understand it's possible that you may have contributed more to HN under a different username, your complaint would be taken vastly more seriously if it came from an account that had a solid history of posting quality articles and comments of the kind of which you've said you'd like to see more.

This community is only as good as people make it through their article submissions and comments, and it's up to all of us to do our part.

And as others have pointed out, the flag link is there for stuff you don't think belongs here.

That's the thing... you've become a good engineer already so you can't get anything out of low hanging fruit anymore.

This is an engineering article.

Edit: if you're an engineer and you disagree, then you're the kind of engineer who's more likely to accidentally convince millions of people they are about to die and you are exactly who should be reading this kind of article.

I second you. Important engineering / tech related articles don't make it to front page, and something's that's absolutely unrelated often does.

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