Hacker News Reader

Because it's cool and hackers like cool things. I would never have known about this if it didn't make it to the top of HN.

So can we come up with an meaningful definition of 'cool'? There is an infinite number of arbitrary 'cool' things in the world - audio perception is definitely interesting, but so is granular synthesis, binaural audio and physical modelling.

I'm just not sure if the role of HN is to educate users on 'cool' things. Maybe its because most of the US is currently sleeping...

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.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a weekend. Different content rises to the top on the weekend.

If you already know everything about perceptual audio techniques...

I didn't know about it, and found it interesting.

Because it's Saturday... From first-hand experience, it's not hard to get to the top on HN on most Saturdays.