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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

The guidelines quite clearly state that HN stories don't have to be related to tech/science:

http://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."

on the other hand:

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Now that you know the criteria, I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to whether this story belongs.

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This cheap feel-good fictional story did not gratify my intellectual curiosity.

And it sparked a religion flamewar in the comments.

You know what doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity? Stories about beginner level Vim, or stories about programming iPhone apps. The first because I am a fairly advanced vim user. The later because I don't really care about iPhone dev. Perhaps that means they don't belong HN.

Or perhaps it means that not every story on this site exists for me. Many of the stories here do qualify for my intellectual curiosity. Many stories I would like to see discussion on are not discussed, and many that are discussed I don't care about. Perhaps I should go to every story about basic Vim and declare that they just don't belong here because my intellectual curiosity is not properly being pandered.

Or perhaps everyone should grow up a bit and not chicken-little every story they don't like but which gets major points. It always baffles me how:

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

a statement that implies in itself that it isn't the end-all-be-all definitive rule, gets turned into some sort of hard rule. And that hard rule application somehow ignores the fact that some people find different things interesting, if those things disagree with the reader's personal taste.

> a statement that implies in itself that it isn't the end-all-be-all definitive rule, gets turned into some sort of hard rule

I didn't say that. I just stated it was a shitty emotional story and it didn't find it intellectually interesting at all. Also stated as others it brought up the religious flame war. The comment doesn't say the story doesn't fit HN rules.

You are the one intentionally misinterpreting other people's comments. You are the one diverting the point of this thread to other cases to back your point.

So lets see... discusion:

1. why is this hn worthy?

2. guidelines about what is worthy including statement of intellectual curiosity.

3. counterpoint about not satisfying one specific person's curiosity (and another seemingly unrelated counterpoint about religion)

4. (ignore second counterpoint) focus on intellectual curiosity and how focus of it for one person is not the same as for the group.

How is my reply is misinterpreting? It certainly isn't intentional. Nor is it diverting the thread away from how it is HN worthy. It is an example of how one person's view of what is intellectually stimulating may not match another's.

I honestly found the discussion in this thread far more interesting than comments on almost all vim articles. This counts as satisfying my intellectual curiosity. Including the debate about religion.

Is your strategy to win arguments not by reason but by exhaustion? haha, I'll pass. I have a life and it's calling.

I feel that this article is suitable to HN, not for its actual content, but for the intelligent discussions that eventually spring out of it.

Are you joking? It brought up all the religious fanatics.

If you take such an ex post facto rationalization, you must conclude that there is nothing out of bounds for HN as long as it spawns an intellectual discussion. We could have an intellectual discussion about a blank page, cute kitten pictures, or pharmaceutical spam.

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