Assuming your question is not rhetorical, do you mean 'why is this on the front page of Hacker News', or 'why is this on Hacker News?'

If your question is the former, and thus regarding rank, then there are a few resources from where you could begin pursuing an answer to your inquiry [0].

If your question is the latter, Hacker News has clear guidelines [1]. When I find something is not immediately of interest to me, I like to pause thinking about myself for a moment and ask myself, 'would this be of interest to others in the community?'

Further, based on the recency of the post and upvotes, the answer to that question is 'yes, there are some numbers of 'hackers' or Hacker News readers who find this article interesting.'

[0] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because flashes of insight and great ideas often come from reading articles about topics outside of our individual fields. Also, hacker news is primarily for entrepreneurs and hackers (not in the criminal sense of the word) which means besides the small common threads like technology and business, we come from all walks of life and fields.

Just for interest: why shouldn't be on the front page? Why do you think this is off topic?

And what should? What do you think is on-topic?