It wouldn't hurt for the website linked to tell us what the package does at least somewhere on the page, I will agree with that much. The first paragraph tells me what it replaces, what language it is coded in and who wrote it...but not what it does.

Would you not consider cron to be 'general knowledge' in the Hacker News community?

I would, but I also would like to know in what way is it different from vixie cron and what impact does it have on the user ?

It says exactly that. It's written in Guile (which is inconsequential until it reaches the second part) and can take Scheme code as configuration file (which is very interesting).

I read that, but to the end user, that's not really a plus if the "old" syntax works the same.

How does mcron's working differ from cron's ? That's what should be on the front page, not the language its written in.

Oh yes I would, but since when was this website only available to the HN community? It is full of mysterious pages like this...hardly making free software accessible.

It certainly isn't likely to make me question the choice I made to use the cron that my distro came with.

They could have easily used the same text from here: https://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/manual/html_node/Introduc...

Or at a minimum they could have had one little section titled, "What is Mcron?", followed by a link to that introduction page in the docs.