Hacker News Reader

Comment by xsace | Hacker News Reader

While a cool and nicely illustrated article, I fail to see how it's relevant to HN.

Just out of interest: what do you think is on-topic for HN?

Also, from the guidelines.

> 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.

Well you just said it: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" and not "Anything that anyone would find interesting".

And how does one determine whether the upvote button was pressed by "a good hacker" rather than "anyone?"

I'm a hacker, and I found this interesting. What now?

If only there was a way people could vote on certain stories based on if they felt the article was interesting or not.

Oh wait.. /s

Read again,

I said it IS interesting ... to anyone.

You see the content drive the audience and then the audience drive the content.

Too much broad interesting articles and it's not Hacker News anymore.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of the guideline. In set theoretic terms, "good hackers" are a subset of "anyone". Thus, something that's interesting to anyone is by definition interesting to good hackers as well, and is therefore fine. The problem arises when there are too many submissions that are not interesting to good hackers. That's what keeps this community from becoming just another StumbleUpon or Digg or /r/news. If it's not interesting to most "good hackers", it's off topic. If it's interesting to "anyone", to include "good hackers", then it's fine.

What's the difference?

The difference is the audience.

While I found this article interesting in itself, it's something that can be interesting to anyone, regardless of its background.

While harmless at first look, this can be an issue if too many content fall into this category.

Then you end up with a reddit clone instead of HackerNews. I'm here to see hacker news, not interesting stuff for anyone.

"good hacker" is a subjective term and an obvious True Scotsman. It might as well mean nothing more than "your interests correspond to the interests of the moderators."

The HN guidelines allow for articles of general interest to the community, which this falls under.

For me HN is about keeping up with the present and seeing into the future.

The future is a trend line drawn from the past through the present and projected forward in time.

Now look at this article again and project the role of Islamic power and culture into the future. Scary shit if you ask me.

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