Weird thing for hacker news
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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Proper usage:
* This app is so easy, my mom could use it!
* This article is easy to follow and avoids too much jargon -- my grandma would even understand most of it!
... you get the picture.
> HN lately reads like newsclippings sent to me by my grandma
which continues to propagate the insidious, ageist and sexist assertion that older women don't get high technology.
As per the posted policy when I joined HN, this would have been topical. (It has changed since.) "Anything that would be interesting to hackers." I don't mind at all if the occasional pop-sci article comes by, so long as they don't all do so unfiltered.
Ironically, this comment and the one it replies to are distinctly against the moderation policy, as per my understanding.
How? I don't recall any change. Or are you referring to Startup News, the predecessor of HN?
What you call "off topic" has been very much on topic for HN for a long time. The guidelines clearly say what is on topic, and it's more than "start up stuff".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
That sentence has been in their since, well, ages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Of course we do moderate topical content on HN. But an article on the history of hypotheses about menstruation is hardly topical.