It must be awesome to be able to file away big, direct threats to the lives of huge numbers of people (including everyone who reads HN) as "just politics."
Doesn't HN site guidance allow stories about politics, or crime, or sports if `they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon` and `gratifies intellectual curiosity`?
A snapshot of which links happen to be on the front-page at any given time doesn't tell you anything, really, vis-a-vis the point I was getting at. The front page ebbs and flows constantly, stories that aren't on the front-page still get discussed, and not every front-page story draws the same amount of engagement.
There's a lot of CDC/Cornoavirus in the /active list, and almost none (so far) in the /best list. And I suppose this is begging the question a little, but it doesn't seem out of place for coronavirus to be a big topic in /active. The first community transmission was just reported in the Bay Area, which means there will be a potential imminent impact to the daily lives of HN's biggest audience. Nevermind the already existing impact of travel and tech events being cancelled worldwide.
Yeah, I mean, on the Coronavirus thing, I understand why people here are interested in talking about it, and I'm not going to complain too much. Heck, I've been active on some of those discussions myself. But in general, I do feel like HN has "drifted" over the years, to be closer to "talking about the same stuff that's on CNN" site, than the hyper-niche techie/startupy/sciencey site that it was.
Of course there's still plenty of tech|startup|science stuff here (and "coronavirus" arguably falls into "science" anyway) and one can always ignore the stuff they don't find interesting. shrug
Both coronavirus and climate change present potentially seismic shifts, if not existential threats, to human society. Are you really incapable of understanding how technology is relevant and intertwined to human society?
> 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.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Ten years ago, this could have been an incredible forum to discuss the emergence of coronavirus, as it has the potential to affect economies and societies around the world. It no longer seems appropriate here, as there is little civility and open conversation here.
You either deal with it now or deal with it later once it unfolds and collapses one by one the things that make your day-to-day life feasible that you take for granted. Luckily, I'd say the people here in tech are more insulated from the impact of CV/CC due to the potential of remote work (can't remote into a job involving physical labor), so that gives them a fighting chance. But it's not a chance to hole up and pretend nothing bad is going on, but a chance to prepare and even make a difference.
What's on topic is whatever hackers find interesting.
Yep. At the end of the day, that is the standard. Which has the unfortunate side effect of permitting the Eternal September to set in here.
Well, most of us are interested in not dying.
And yet we all are going to die, unless some of the more radical ideas of Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, etc., become reality. I can see how discussing the latest research into radical life extension stuff here makes sense... but most general health/nutrition/wellness stuff feels like it should be off-topic to me. Now, some story about a cool new DNA sequencing technology being invented to help study viruses, or something like that, that makes sense to me.
But in the end, the community will be what it decides to me. All one can really do is go along for the ride.
12 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
An awful lot of what gets discussed here, IMO, falls into the "generic story that would be covered on TV news" category. But that's just me.
1. Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates (letsencrypt.org)
2. GitHub Facing Downtime (githubstatus.com)
3. Goodreads Data Pipeline (github.com)
4. Why the Gov.uk Design System team changed the input type for numbers (technology.blog.gov.uk)
5. CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital says (thehill.com)
6. Things about the new Firefox browser for Android (blog.mozilla.org)
7. Japan's PM Asks All School to Temporarily Close (nhk.or.jp)
8. Hasura raises $9.9M Series A to simplify GraphQL for developers (techcrunch.com)
9. New improvements to IPFS Bitswap for faster container image distribution (ipfs.io)
10. Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths (worldometers.info)
11. The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM (engadget.com)
12. Pen testers mom breaks into a state prison and infects wardens computer (wired.com)
13. The Simpsons in CSS (pattle.github.io)
14. Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output (benhoyt.com)
15. Rome: An experimental JavaScript toolchain (github.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
https://news.ycombinator.com/best
There's a lot of CDC/Cornoavirus in the /active list, and almost none (so far) in the /best list. And I suppose this is begging the question a little, but it doesn't seem out of place for coronavirus to be a big topic in /active. The first community transmission was just reported in the Bay Area, which means there will be a potential imminent impact to the daily lives of HN's biggest audience. Nevermind the already existing impact of travel and tech events being cancelled worldwide.
Of course there's still plenty of tech|startup|science stuff here (and "coronavirus" arguably falls into "science" anyway) and one can always ignore the stuff they don't find interesting. shrug
> 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.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Ten years ago, this could have been an incredible forum to discuss the emergence of coronavirus, as it has the potential to affect economies and societies around the world. It no longer seems appropriate here, as there is little civility and open conversation here.
It's sad this doesn't happen anymore.
And I don't see how the corona virus is political.
Yep. At the end of the day, that is the standard. Which has the unfortunate side effect of permitting the Eternal September to set in here.
Well, most of us are interested in not dying.
And yet we all are going to die, unless some of the more radical ideas of Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, etc., become reality. I can see how discussing the latest research into radical life extension stuff here makes sense... but most general health/nutrition/wellness stuff feels like it should be off-topic to me. Now, some story about a cool new DNA sequencing technology being invented to help study viruses, or something like that, that makes sense to me.
But in the end, the community will be what it decides to me. All one can really do is go along for the ride.