Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredoliveira | Hacker News Reader

I'm definitely hoping for that the community (not just Paul Graham - why should he, regardless of how much I/we respect him, dictate direction) drifts towards A (as it has recently). Lets put it this way: you're never going to be skilled at anything if you stick only to things that hackers (our definition of it) find interesting, and not the general population? If you imagine a Venn diagram of,

  (news for us) V (news for the general population)

You'd still stick to just the very left? You'd be leaving out fair amounts of science, mathematics, arts, communication. That means that you'd be biased but more importantly, limited. Why should you ever want that?

View on HN

Is HN the only place you get news and information? It is one of the few places (specifically community sites) I can get news relevant to programming and startup culture. That's not to say there is no place for some of the stuff further to the right, but maybe not stuff we might find by going to cnn.com. The lack of "Sub-HNs" means that if we want to keep HN's utility in terms of sifting info and news on the internet, we have to keep a tight focus.

Let me clarify (I'm being down-voted for stating my honest opinion which is in itself quite sad. I did not troll, nor was I disrespectful): I never said we should talk about the whole scope.

I certainly do not want to read news that would be to the far right of that diagram. But there are a number of soft skills you do acquire from sometimes leaning on the intersection between "hacker news" and just "news". I don't believe we should limit HN just to the very left because we'd miss those. That being said, this is HN and I don't ever want to come here for CNN content - that's why CNN.com exists.

I think you are being down-voted because your statement seems to imply that a person could not get the other news from anywhere else. I would like to see HN as just or predominately the far left of your diagram. I see news about everything everywhere, but I highly value the niche I see here and cannot find anything like it anywhere else. I'd like to see it not diluted.

FYI -- I did not down-vote your comment. I rarely ever down-vote anything on HN.

Why? Because I don't want to talk about arts, communication, general science, or politics with a bunch of pseudonymous, arbitrarily-selected laymen online. Putting that here covers up technical news and discussions that I am interested in reading (discussions frequently conducted by actual experts in technical fields, and which, unlike general news, I can't find at a dozen other websites.)

There's a point, here.

The are only two differences between political discussions on HN and political discussions in any random moderated forum.

1) The posts are shorter.

2) Most of those involved in such discussions think that the (almost-always) bog-standard partisan/ideological arguments they advance are somehow more insightful because they're smart programmers, entrepreneurs, or just geeks in general.

Because there are other sites that already serve as sources of general news. I come here looking specifically for "hacker news".

what is "hacker news"?

via the Hacker News Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

So hacker news is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Which can be quite general news.

Don't forget that && though. Off-Topic: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

So yes, things that gratify one's intellectual curiosity. But typically if it suggests a new trend.

By way of example (of what I think not what the rules are) YOU may find articles on high frequency trading to be intellectually satisfying. The majority of HN may not. A few articles as the trend emerges will be generally interesting to the whole crowd here as an emerging trend. But after that it is probably a very specific area of interest that is much less of what we all want our front page filled with.

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