[flagged]
A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
In the USA, 8-track was always less than half vinyl singles sales, compact cassette exceeded 8-track's sales by 1980, and 8-track was dead by 1982.
Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.
By 1980, 8-tracks were relics being displaced by cassette.
This was more awful than just the marginal fidelity of a perfectly aligned 8-track machine.
By your logic, literally anything from the '80s is appropriate for this site, which is obviously not correct lol.
And? Doesn’t make it on topic.
> A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
I hope they struggle to sleep at night.
Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.
I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.
> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).
Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.
>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. 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 - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.
I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.
>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.
The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.
>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.
> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.
> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence
There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.
> I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.
I'm well aware, but I still do it on principle.
And no matter your view on the subject, a pop singer dying is not a topic that is capable of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It's about as banal as things get.
It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.
It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".
Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.
Total: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Northeastern Portugal
Partial: Northern North America, Europe, West Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_...
Guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, (...) If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- 19 Years after the first superscalar CPU, the CDC-6600
- 10 Years after RFC-675, the first TCP version.
- 14 years after the first ARPANET nodes where connected.
- 1 year after Hopfield Networks, paving the way to Boltzman Networks around two years laters, demonstrating how neural networks could learn to solve complex problems.
- The same year Kunihiko Fukushima developed his work on the Neocognitron for visual pattern recognition, a percursor for future work on Convolutional Neural Networks.
- 3 years before first papers on Backpropagation in neural nets.
- First paper on Reinforcement Learning with reward signals (Baron, Sutton and Anderson)
- 3 years after first smalltalk release.
- 2 years after IBM launched the PC.
- 1 year after 3Com launches the first Ethernet board for the PC.
- 1 Year after Sun Microsystems foundation.
- Unix and C 15th anniversary.
- 6 years after the first commercial relational database.
- 11 years after the first vector processor (Cray-1), arguably the great-grandfather of all modern GPUs
- The same year Borland released Turbo Pascal.
- The same year Apple launched Lisa, and one year before the first macintosh.
- 2 years before Intel launched the 80386 cpu.
- 2 years before C++ first commercial release.
Yeah, hardly a relevant year for us to discuss its culture on HN.
If you're younger and you missed out on this, then I'm sorry. The older I get, the more I realise that the best of all the years really have gone by.
I've been learning to play an instrument over the past year or and and we did one of her songs in the class.
So no, she was not forgotten by the time of her death.