Time capsules unearthed amid Christchurch, NZ devastation | Hacker News Reader

Time capsules unearthed amid Christchurch, NZ devastation

tvnz.co.nz

27 pointsdotBen9 comments

I live in Christchurch. Sometime over the next few days I'd like to post a quick writeup detailing the significant role that the web and social media has played following the earthquake, if anyone is interested?

Also worth mentioning, a group of New Zealand developers have launched http://www.appappeal.co.nz to raise funds for the victims of the quake. Your support and tweets would be greatly appreciated.

Can you change the title to correctly say "Christchurch" instead of "Chirst Church"?

My bad, I'm sorry for that.

While this may certainly be interesting for a few people here, it is most certainly not "Hacker News", Ben.

"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."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I know the guidelines well, and knew this was in there. I guess my threshold for things "good hackers would find interesting" is higher than this particular story. (I suspect - or rather hope - that that is the case for the majority of people who still visit HN, too). Also see:

http://al3x.net/2011/02/22/solving-the-hacker-news-problem.h...

I agree that this is interesting, but I think it's just as interesting to a wide audience, and has nothing specific to hackers or hackery. The guidelines also say:

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

In particular, I've seen the same story from several sources now, and hence I feel that it's not specific enough for HN.

My opinion only. FWIW, I haven't flagged it, although I have been tempted.

I actually submitted the same article--didn't see this one. (Clearly) I think it's relevant. Granted it's not about YC or node.js but it is about things that are are more interesting to the HN demographic than to other demographics. 150yo visions of the future, secret compartments, and tragic luck to reveal them. Would it be picked up by TV news? Maybe. Would some of the other articles on the homepage (HBGary CEO resigns)? Yeah.

In my defense... I submitted it because I thought it was a bit like an easter egg -- something the engineers hid for someone to later find. It doesn't appear anyone knew they had hidden the time-capsules so I I just thought there was some hacker mentality in there.

I take the "covered on TV" point - although I don't watch TV and so have no idea. And anyway, this happened in New Zealand so I doubt the US TV media would even care to cover it :(

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