Ask HN: Does HN not cover breaking news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does HN not cover breaking news?

1 pointdaveloyall7 comments

There is a current news event I am interested in.

As a discerning consumer of news, I was interested to see what the HN community has to say about the subject.

But, there are zero live posts about the topic.

I know that HN doesn't cover politics...

But, doesn't a news story cease to belong to any one category once it becomes the number one front-page headline across the USA?

Was I wrong to look forward to reading comments from Baltimore hackers this morning?

View on HN

From the guideline: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> 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.

This exact question turned up in reference to the Sandy Hook school shooting. A few of us asked why it was so prominent on HN given then guidelines, and in particular I said:

    Yes, this is important, yes, it's newsworthy.
    No, it's not "Hacker News".  It's all over the
    news, and there's nothing specific about hacking,
    or start-ups.  It's not even of "deep interest"
    in any real sense. It's tragedy, pure and simple,
    and then it becomes politics.[0]

PG replied (in reference to the guidelines you quote) with:

    Note those words most and probably.

Another accused me:

    Try on a little human emotion and sensitivity for
    size: this isn't your site to police.  Even pg has
    pointed out the precision of the wording which you
    seemingly ignored.

I usually stay out of discussions about on-topic/off-topic now. There's nothing to be gained. I just flag things according to my own criteria and move on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922380

Link to HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451652.

If you think it belongs here, just submit it.

Please consider that things highly specific to a single country or non-technical/non-scientific links may be downvoted.

Submissions cannot be down-voted, only flagged.

Another name for a similar mechanism.

Similar, perhaps, but not identical. For example, on comments, flagging has a much more drastic effect than a simple downvote, so keeping the conceptual difference clear is useful.

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