Hacker News Reader

Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

Why is this here?

It’s completely off topic for HN.

See the guidelines[1] which define on/off topic as:

> 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.

This article did gratify my intellectual curiosity, and I don't think I'd see it on TV news.

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

On-topic guideline essentially allows everything, rendering off-topic guideline moot. Could have been avoided by defining "a good hacker" but that's missing as well :)

>Could have been avoided by defining "a good hacker" but that's missing as well :)

Given that it's his site, his forum and his rules, I've always assumed "anything that good hackers would find interesting" loosely correlated to "anything Paul Graham would find interesting."

It's usually a measure of similarity to the mods, not pg, i.e. whatever dang thinks is interesting goes, if you are not "a good hacker" like dang - too bad for you. Although I do remember there was a pg article not so long ago that was so dumb and nonsensical it was flagged off the frontpage only to forcefully reappear a few hour later.

I don't really mind dang making those sorts of editorial decisions, since it's more or less his job. At least dang seems open to a greater breadth and depth of subject matter than many people's narrow minded view of what should be relevant here.

That said, "good hacker" as a qualifier is as frustratingly elitist as it is maddeningly vague.

My interpretation is that "good" is meant to delineate from "bad". E.g. this isn't a forum for sploits, warez and script kiddies. Reading how others interpret this is curious to me, as I joined with zero knowledge of this pg guy and personally tend to weigh his various opinions on merit.

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