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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Ok I might be downmodded to hell for this, but hey I can afford the karma and this needs to be said so here goes,

I believe this article shouldn't be on Hacker News. At what point does "interesting to hackers" become "interesting to some subset of people and has nothing to do with hacking per se"? Yes yes hackers get married/have relationships too so this is possibly of interest to them, but then everything in the world that concerns life is possibly interesting and should be posted on HN.At which point there is no difference between HN and say reddit. At least reddit has subreddits.

My heartfelt wish is that these junk articles don't make the front page of HN. So what's next on HN? raising children (hackers have kids too) , home decor (hackers have homes too), politics(hey, hackers vote), sex positions (hackers have sex too ( ;-)) and are possibly interested in "hacking"/evaluating positions) ...

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The rules about what's on topic explicitly say that articles don't have to be about hacking. They just have to be interesting to the intellectually curious. An article on any topic could be if it was sufficiently insightful. This one seems pretty insightful. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's certainly not a junk article.

pg said

" This one seems pretty insightful. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's certainly not a junk article."

fair enough. differing perceptions and all that. I think (note: I think) it was a trashy article, not worth my time I spent in reading it (which is my working definition of "junk") and I don't want to see such articles on the front page so I did my part by (a) flagging it (b) explaining my thought process.

It is upto the rest of the HN community to confirm or reject my perception. And I am completely fine with that. I can always start reading from teh second article from the top :-)

PS: I noticed that the article disappeared from the front page("Dead" ed) and then came back a few minutes later. How does that happen? Just curious.

Your comment brakes the rules, the article is within their bounds.

Of course it is not worth anyone's time to read your bitching about this article's relevance, especially considering someone or another posts your same urgent insight on every tenth article that reaches the front page. I really wish you all would stop.

"Your comment brakes the rules, the article is within their bounds."

I assume you meant "breaks". You are completely right. Here is the guideline I violated.

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. "

While I am not sure, if this guideline is a good one, using a forum such as this implies acceptance of the rules. I was ignorant of this guideline, but the fact remains that I have violated this guideline twice. Once by mentioning the inappropriateness of a submission and then my mentioning I flagged it.

Apologies to everyone. I'll be more careful in the future.

Would be kind of nice if the "flag" link went to "approved" after a moderator deemed it worthy. That way we wouldn't keep flagging it after we know the mods had already reviewed it for worthiness.

" I noticed that the article disappeared from the front page("Dead" ed) and then came back a few minutes later. How does that happen? Just curious." The article was killed because enough people with high enough karma to flag, flagged it and it probably came back to life because pg judged the article to be interesting

@gromm. Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering if the code somehow "self corrects" or it needed explicit human intervention.

"The rules about what's on topic explicitly say that articles don't have to be about hacking. They just have to be interesting to the intellectually curious."

Frankly, I think that's a mistake. <opinion>We get screwed more often than not with this rule. There's regularly boring, offtopic articles that get to live because of it and it's seldom the case that an offtopic article will turn out interesting. And even in those rare cases, I can't help but this this is Hacker News, not Intellectual News.</opinion>

Didn't we have an article about how children should be praised for working hard and not for being smart? I personally thought that was a great article too.

I appreciate having articles about hacking relationships and parenthood on HN.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

I think the article you refer to was another article on the same body of research, but I like this article as a best first introduction to that topic.

Think of it as a specification for a marriage debugger. Feel better now?

BTW I read the whole article with interest even came to the site hoping for an article telling me about someone trying to develop iphone apps in Haskell.

As a hacker, I needed to read this. Marriage can be tough when you have your head in a macbook 16 hours a day.

Well for the other subjects I don't know but for home decor, I hope to ask people here to review my startup in this field (home decor and interior design) when we launch :-)

That said, I just finished reading this article and found it quite good and interesting... So it's not really hacker news material but on this kind of subject, it's definitely one of the better articles out there

Wouldn't the same argument hold true if you substitute "marriage" with "web apps"?

Yes it would. Along similar lines, I don't know Haskell and have no time to learn it now and so dislike all Haskell stories. But that's a lesser problem than marriage stories (which, incidentally, I actually liked). Let me explain why with an example: The kind of people who like Haskell are much more likely to like Python or Hadoop - things that I am very interested in. So there is a very likely payoff to tolerating Haskell stories. I doubt there is a similarly strong correlation between people interested in stories on marriage and python or hadoop.

If 3 of the top 5 stories on HN were about marriage, childrearing and politics (all topics relevant to many hackers) for a significant amount of time, a Joe random with no interest in hacking and lots of interest in 1 or more of the above who just happened to drop by would be very likely to stay and contribute more stories of the same nature and none about hacking. Soon HN will be very little about Hacking.

All of this ignores active killing by moderators but we really don't want to get to a stage where moderators have to kill stories with any regularity. Self regulation is the best kind.

I upvoted the article as a gut reaction after reading it but what you say is true. In trying to make HN a great filter for all kinds of articles we risk losing a great filter for tech/entrepreneurial articles.

And as I've been ranty about such in the last day, that's actually a pretty big deal. It's not just that it means that there are more articles to ignore, it also means that:

- We're missing other news about startups and hacking in the precious space that is the front page.

- People that come here for startups and hacker news begin to question the worth in coming here.

So, I'll repeat the two-pronged battle cry: flag inappropriate stuff, head to the "new" section at least once a day and vote up stuff on hacking and startups.

And I'd like to say just one thing:

Do whatever you want to do - vote up or vote down whatever you want to vote up or down.

Thank you

I'm glad you proved yourself wrong. This seems to be a community that accepts its niche and is open to questioning content quality.

This is simply the worst "marriage advice" I've ever read that wasn't trying to be funny. Skip it.

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