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Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting (particularly "very interesting")?

In my opinion something is on-topic if most hackers would find it interesting, and most non-hackers would not. Otherwise you might as well just drop the "Hacker", and call it "News".

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Very true, but then much of the marketing and entrepreneurial fluff that gets posted here is neither news, hacking, or especially useful from a business standpoint. A few people treat HN as their personal viral marketing vector.

I believe the referenced story qualifies under that metric. In part, it's revisionist history -- and thereby anti-mainstream. And I very much doubt that the TMZ crowd would even be interested in parsing stories told from such a business/technical perspective. But that's neither here nor there.

In all actuality, I do sympathize with the rational for your proposed metric. I'm just pointing out that the nuance and angle of a story can push something distinctly into that category in cases where simply reading the title might lead one to have a "Not HN!" spasm.

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