Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tsagadai | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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...

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.

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