It's appropriate as long as it is of interest to the audience is the policy, is it not? And this here member of the audience has just upvoted it, finding it more interesting then the rising inequality between Edward Snowden and Brendan Eich, which has nothing to do with "hacking" and is perennially trending on HN because, well, every freaking thing is appropriate if upvoted!

> every freaking thing is appropriate if upvoted

That's not true—HN is a constitutional democracy. But I'd have thought a desert-dwelling cat would be intellectually interesting enough to satisfy the criteria of the guidelines, and once a story crosses that bar, pretty much anything goes.

Users who disagree are welcome to flag the story, and admittedly have some evidence to back them up in this thread.

"It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature." - Eric S. Raymond

Holy shit, he actually said that. I thought you made that up. http://catb.org/jargon/html/miscellaneous.html

esr has a bad habit of claiming all of his own behaviors, likes, habits, and dislikes are generally shared by anyone who considers themselves a hacker. Thus, I assume from the link above that:

* He owns a cat

* He owns a "decrepit heap" of an unwashed car

* He has terrible handwriting

see also: http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1534249/esr-recasts-...

Anything that grabs HN attention (and being on index page means so) is appropriate. HN isn't a tech-and-startups-only site, it's perfectly fine to post other stuff. Especially if that's a cute kitties.

Even though you're right that

> HN isn't a tech-and-startups-only site,

it's not true that

> Anything that grabs HN attention... is appropriate.

That's why there's moderation. This is written down:

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think this link is of any intellectual interest. It's just cuteness.

This article gratified my intellectual curiosity.

> Adorable and fascinating

The second adjective covers why it's HN-appropriate.

Perhaps a stealth advertisement for Sandstorm? :) https://sandstorm.io

Hah, we're really not that clever. ;)

"Fascinating" is very close to the ideal quality for an HN story.

You can flag it. (I did.)