Well, I was completely unaware that HN supported polls. This is a pleasant surprise.
Evidence that no one reads the FAQ! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
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What to Submit
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.
What would be the catastrophic consequences of this guideline if HN started a TV channel with news that would "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"?
Turns out you could confirm this suspicion with a poll.
After seeing my comment that just had '1' in it, I figured it out.