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Comment by Khao | Hacker News Reader

The guidelines states that anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity is worthy of Hacker News. "The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget" was a short fictional text about death that tickled my intellectual curiosity. It was a short read and I liked it and by my understanding of the HN guidelines, it's perfectly normal that it was on the front page for 6 hours.

This post, on the other hand, serves nothing but bash people for no reason.

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Of course, I can't see inside your brain, but it tickled your intellectual curiosity? I thought it was an interesting story but it was an emotionally oriented story from my POV and I wouldn't have submitted it here. As always, different strokes for different folks :-)

The emotional can be intelectually aproached.

It's a slippery slope, though. Small I post a picture of a cute kitten? We could intellectually examine our emotional responses to it.

And HN would implode.

I agree, but I don't think this was a case of that. It was a very short story that appealed to the emotions. Just IMHO, of course.

We keep talking about getting rich and getting acquired for a billion dollars but a part of building something great is also about making the world a better place. Think about apps to help deaf or blind people, if you were building such a product and you had a "moment" like in the cab story where you felt you really changed someone's life, wouldn't that be worth more a lot more than cash?

It's easy to stop seeing any emotion in a startup world where we keep talking about technologies and cash and VCs and angels. But there are some people out there who work just as hard on technologies and softwares only because they want to make an impact in people's life, not just make a bazillion dollars.

In the end, it really got me thinking "Will I ever build something that has a real impact in someone's life?" and this is perfectly valid from a hacker / intellectual point of view in my opinion.

Yeah, I have no problem with the story. I've read it before, it was properly attributed. Did it belong on HN? Not at all. It was an emotional story.

I am quite wary of people making this argument. While I think HN is a place for mostly on-topic intellectual goodies, I would dislike it if people linked to more emotionally stimulating content. (For what it's worth, I didn't think the "Cab Ride" story was very interesting).

It's the same thing with humor - sometimes HN is way too uptight. I see a lot of genuinely funny comments that get massively downvoted because people fear the "reddit" effect.

What petercooper said, basically.

I like the story and I would share it around on social networks, but I wouldn't post it to HN. That's not where it goes.

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