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Comment by coherentpony | Hacker News Reader

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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"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

As a rule of thumb, when someone who has been a user here for over 6 years cites one of the guidelines, it is a really bad idea to get into a citing match with them. You will just get embarrassed, like you are now.

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Yeah, well, you know that's just, like, your opinion, man.

A smartphone app leaking election results before voting starts is an "interesting new phenomenon," IMO.

So instead the results being leaked early via a typewritten page or someone leaking the results early via an email, in this case the results were leaked early from a mobile app. How is that in any way novel or intellectually gratifying?

I've never before heard of election results being leaked (through any medium) before an election has taken place. It sounds like a new phenomenon to me.

  Emperor Augustus assured Gaius Malefictus that he would be
  elected to the senate: "Don't worry about the elections. I've
  made the appropriate arrangements. This day next week, you
  will be a senator."

I can't imagine something like that ever happening in the history of politics. Or the results of a boxing match leaked early to the mafia boss before the fight has taken place, or...

Corrective upvote for your previous post since I agree that the level of interest to most HNers is roughly the same as if the leak had occurred via a different medium (calls to mind the Chicago Tribune's famous gaff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman), but I strongly disagree with the second part of your post. This is an extremely rare occurrence--where a faux democratic regime that everyone knows to be authoritarian but which makes the effort to pretend to have elections (unlike, say, China's government which directly states that they don't like the idea of elections where the populace votes) accidentally reveals that its elections are indeed rigged. Many of us find it fascinating, and that's why it's at the top of HN. If you don't find an article interesting, I don't get the point of sarcastically criticizing other users for upvoting. There are plenty of articles on derivative startups that hit the front page of HN every day, but I don't think you typically ask on those threads, "How is that in any way novel or intellectually gratifying?" Just accept that each of us finds some highly voted articles interesting and some not.

At least those derivative startups are building something. However, you're correct. I should have just bit my tongue and moved on.

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