When I wrote "Don't Fly During Ramadan" (#3 post), I anticipated it'd get a few hundred hits from my friends if I was lucky. I almost didn't even post it to HackerNews, until a friend told me I should.

....Boy was I wrong.

That aside, it's sad how many of the top posts are negative in some way, even if you exclude the death announcements. The exact count depends on whether you consider things like PG banning SOPA companies to be "negative" news, but only a small handful of the top 30 links are truly positive (eg, Light Table).

It's also interesting how many (or few) of the posts are technical in their nature. I believe I count two that are completely non-technical (mine, and the other one about the TSA), and three or four that are about software that people have built (Meteor, etc.).

The rest are "in the middle" - mostly about people important to the tech community (Dennis Ritchie, Aaron Swartz, etc.), or about political issues related to technology, but not talking about the technology itself in any depth.

This pattern continues even if you look beyond the top 30.

I wonder if this has changed over time as the HN community has grown - perhaps in the morning I'll try filtering out posts less than X days old and see how that affects the top results.