Strange history of the "Utah War"

smithsonianmag.com

3 points·cmcginnis··6 comments

This is Not Hacker News.

I thought it was interesting. Practically none of this was included in the cleaned up version of US history I got taught in school.

Hey! That's what I was about to say. Actually, my exact comment was about to be, "This isn't hacker news no matter how you look at it, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless."

Somehow we'll need to find a balance between what is interesting but isn't hacker news - sometimes, non-hacker news is interesting enough to deserve a place here, although most of the time it isn't. Or maybe we can just say, for the sake of safety, that anything non-hacker related is inappropriate? Not sure about that.

"Hacker" is pretty broad in the context of this site so I think it's safe to say that any non-hacker content is worth actively avoiding. Dilution is the biggest challenge facing the site right now.

From 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."

I like that definition, and I also think that the above article satisfies it. The only problem is that not everyone may find the same things interesting...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com