From the HN Guidelines:

"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."

This is why I come to HN. There are a lot of websites out there that gratify one's intellectual curiosity, but none with the same "human filter" and comment quality.

Because who knew lightning could kill 300 reindeer at once?

Now that it's happened and we've observed it, it makes me wonder how many times such an event has happened throughout history and how improbable it actually is. I've only ever thought about lightning killing a single creature until just now.

or maybe they were in a cult.

I'd say this falls within "science".

I think the discussion is what separates HN from the mainstream news sources. That is where ideas get "hacky" IMHO.