From [1]:

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Exactly if it's of interest to hackers, and the best way to determine that is by posting it and seeing how it fares. If it's not of interest, then it'll sink into obscurity, and no harm will have been done.

At one point the way to do that was to post it to reddit. A bunch of things which are not what HN wants to cultivate rose to the top, and HN's core material sank into obscurity.

I think it is related to the many comments in "On Getting Older in Tech" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136060

Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.

> Our software development work is meaningless in the grand scheme of life.

This is a tool for presenting things meaningless. One can also say any sort of philanthropy and medicine as a whole are meaningless as we'll all die eventually.

Pessimism absolves the thinking classes of ideas...

"A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it."

Sounds like HN to me.

From a quick skim, it has the potential to become a GTD-style geek cult. So yes-ish.