Hacker News Reader

Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Great example of something that does not belong here. A social political issue with absolutely zero to do with tech or hacker news! Why is this getting upvotes?

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I believe you're wrong here. HN is not just about tech. It has always had room for substantive articles about anything interesting. Is this article substantive? I'd say it's surprisingly so, for such a short piece. It contains a mix of anecdote, data, and history. I learned three or four things I didn't know, and I've read occasional stuff on this issue in the past.

The graph alone is worth the visit.

Economist is also a quality news source. I'd rather have articles from the Economist make the front page over sensationalist/uninformed tech articles from The Register or similar sites that lack substance.

A wider variety of topics also occasionally spurs an HN denizen to start implementing a solution, even a startup around the 'non-hacker' stuff.

From the official FAQ [1]

>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.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We need more articles about people winning the VC lottery and less about the wider suffering in society....

Social issues are issues which affect society. It doesn't concern you that there are people who haven't received treatment for their mental health problems making them a danger to themselves and society? It doesn't concern you that money is being wasted while cumulatively cheaper and more efficient solutions exist? What sort of hacker are you if you aren't seeking out more efficient solutions to existing problems?

It concerns me. This discussion should not be on hacker news. These opinions are not mutually exclusive. Flagged the story.

> This discussion should not be on hacker news.

Ok. I'll bite. Where should it be? What site provides deep discourse into these topics in an intelligent manner?

If the person you're replying to is going to flag it based that vague criteria, they might as well flag much of the front page. One should start finding better articles and submitting them if they believe HN is lacking what they perceive it to be proper content.

I will vote something up is based on the quality of the article (whether it's technical news or not), if it has not already been submitted recently and if the article will lead to an informative/intellectual discussion. If it only has one of those criteria, then I'm less likely to upvote it when there's other articles that meet two or all three criteria.

For the record, I (the commenter you're referring to) do flag a lot of what's on the front page. In the vein of introspective disclosure, I recently found myself flagging an article PG submitted and other that tptacek did, so it's likely I am missing some of the nuance in the guidelines.

I can't say I contribute much to the site in the way of links though. Usually, by the time I find something I think would be valuable here it's already fallen off the top end of the new page and doesn't get much discussion. Either I don't have the infrastructure in place to find stuff interesting enough to submit, or thus far have just had some unlucky timing. Honestly though, you're right. I just don't submit very much.

Thanks for your reply. I agree there's quite a few things that I would flag myself if I could (I coincidentally lost the ability from flagging too many in a short amount of time). I would ask for it back, but I am afraid I would lose it again and honestly, it ate up a lot of time I could use for something else. In lieu of that, I just try to upvote new content more that has substance.

In terms of actual content: um, The Economist. I don't think Hacker News is a particularly more valuable bellwhether of 'valuable content' for non startup/tech-related stuff than the publishers themselves (I'd say NYT, The New Yorker, and The Economist have a much better signal-to-noise for general things.)

In terms of 'deep discourse': honestly, the level of discourse in HN comments on things that are outside the traditional purview of the site is not particularly deep. I've found that if you want deep discourse about a topic X, you should seek out areas where there are many people very knowledgable about X.

plastic.com used to be a good place for such, though I fear it may be running out of users.

> What sort of hacker are you if you aren't seeking out more efficient solutions to existing problems?

Well right now the top story is how blink has been removed from Firefox, so...

I am happy to see this sort of story on HN mostly for the potential discussion amongst such a broad variety of (generally) very intelligent people.

Given that it's accurately described in the headline, it's easy to avoid for anyone not interested in the discussion.

As heartwrenching and important as the issue is, yeah, kill it.

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