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Hacker News is really Hacker Discussions

15 points by chasingsparks ↗ HN
The number of "this is not news" comments seem to be increasing lately. This site might be called Hacker News but it has developed into a community of smart people who like discussing interesting things. From the first sentence of PG's Guidelines (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.
While this site is, and should be, dominated by recent developments, recency alone should not be grounds for down-voting or complaints. If a submitted link is not "news" but is novel enough to elicit an intellectually simulating conversation, for me at least, it's relevant. (The novel part disqualifies most political conversations; not only is this the wrong venue, but slinging dogmatic comments is really mundane.)

This is how I see it, anyway. I'd really like it if PG weighed in. He might allow this place to run organically, but generally his comments become HN's mores.

3 comments

[ 27.9 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread
frossie
I can see your point, though I think in some (many?) cases "this is not news" stands for "we have discussed this before, and therefore don't be surprised if many people don't weigh in, as the horse has been thrashed already"
chasingsparks
In those cases, I think the karmic voting system does the job of hiding redundancy more than the comments that say "this is not news." Especially because the submitter and interested commenters usually take it offensively, (even though it is rarely meant that way,) resulting in a lot of meta comments.