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.
By these criteria, the posted article would seem to be an edge case. I lean toward the "on-topic" side, because it isn't just reporting some routine disaster -- rather it touches (quite deeply, in my view) on the nature of how we really come know about important events that affect our daily lives.
And because this information damn well should have been covered on TV news, around the time it was known to investigators. Why it wasn't is, in my view, certainly a valid question to ask.
> 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 is about politics. It is off-topic. You can argue how the rules are written, but as they currently stand, this is off-topic, by definition.
I think you need to review the definition of the word "most", and then read the section on what is on-topic, as well. When you do, you'll realize that there is no black and white objective line, and that's by design.
You are wrong, because this comes up ALL THE TIME, and the simple answer is that it's not off-topic if enough HN members find it interesting enough to upvote.
It literally says, "politics is off-topic" in what you quoted.
That's very plainly not what it says.
Twisting the words around (when the direct quote is just a couple of centimeters above your reworked version, for all to see) doesn't exactly help your case, either.
BTW it's kind of weird you would claim that "politics is off-topic", when it only takes a few seconds to dig into your own comment history and pull up stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455942
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.
By these criteria, the posted article would seem to be an edge case. I lean toward the "on-topic" side, because it isn't just reporting some routine disaster -- rather it touches (quite deeply, in my view) on the nature of how we really come know about important events that affect our daily lives.
And because this information damn well should have been covered on TV news, around the time it was known to investigators. Why it wasn't is, in my view, certainly a valid question to ask.