That's not what the guidelines say. They say:
>>Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
There are all kinds of things I find interesting but which would not be interesting to "good hackers" generally. I would think you'd expect posters to make the distinction and separate "what I personally like" from "what I personally like due to hacker-related reasons".
As an example of the difference, I'd be really interested in an article on how to do better on doubles mode on Dance Dance Revolution, but that's such narrow interest that it doesn't really belong here; me finding it interesting isn't enough.
An article on doubles mode in DDR might be interesting in HN's sense, or it might not. If it were just a basic tutorial, that probably wouldn't be—tutorials are useful to people who are working on a specific task, but have little appeal to the general reader. If, on the other hand, it went into the design of doubles mode, the history of it, why it is the way it is, what makes it harder than you might expect, clever things that have been discovered about it—all of that would be on topic. Something that could go either way might be a story about, say, a couple who met because they were good at doubles mode in DDR. That would depend on how good an article it was.
This is such an important point because the kind of story that gets excluded this way—the kind that people find interesting but assume that it's not hacker-related enough—can be the absolutely best kind of HN submission. Why? Because it's unexpected. It's the one you can't predict from any sequence.
(Edit: Unpredictability isn't the only quality that matters, but it's the rarest. Actually, maybe it is the only quality that matters. For a while I was thinking otherwise, because a front page consisting of random numbers would be unpredictable, but not interesting to read. On the other hand, it's unpredictable only along one axis. From another point of view it would be fully predictable: random numbers again?)
Keep in mind that finding something interesting isn't quite the same thing as liking it, and also when we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest. For example, there is social interest (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political interest (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual interest (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
> we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest
> For example, there is social interest (the sort of thing that leads to celebrity gossip).
> These things all have their place, but not here.
I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest or that it belongs here.
Of course we can only guess about that. No doubt the users who flagged the article feel the same way as you. On the other hand, I disagree because I can feel it touching my own intellectual curiosity: it's extraordinary that a 5-year-old could and would do that. Yes it's strongly sentimental, which is not usually our thing here, but it's important for HN to have the occasional story in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram.
This is one of the cases where a moderator's individual taste affects the site. Is that fair? No it is not, but there's an interesting reason to do it anyway: you need some sort of individual judgment affecting the site, in order to prevent it from converging into the brown noise of everyone-put-together. A system like HN can get itself into a rut otherwise, becoming too predictable and too common-denominator. I don't think that I'm the best individual to supply the perturbations; it's just that someone needs to, and for whatever reason I ended up in that role. Since this function is about bumping the system out of its grooves, sort of like the mutations in a genetic algorithm, it probably doesn't matter that much if I do a fabulous job on that point. I just need to not suck at it, and if that were the case, HN would probably be screwed for more significant reasons.
IF he was using Tesla autopilot to drive the car, then I'd find it HN worthy. ;-D
I think you're wrong about the article not being technical though. In a deeper sense it is.
I've posted it as a separate story, I wonder if that will work? For now at least it seems I cannot add comments there.
HN used to have a software penalty on wikipedia.org submissions and I was persuaded to remove it. For the time being.
It's good for HN to defy expectations, because predictability and repetition are the worst things for curiosity. But it's good to defy expectations in an interesting way. The distribution of defied expectations is bimodal; when it's bad it's very bad.
On the third hand: it's also good if—more rarely—there is an occasional bit, just a wafer-thin bit, of "why is this on HN" agitation of the bad kind too. It gets the juices flowing. It means readers care. I think it bonds users more closely with the site in the end. But it should be rare. Since there's so much variance in what people like to see, and HN is a non-siloed site (i.e. we're all in the same theater), every user sees a lot of things they dislike, so we mostly have the opposite problem.
One other point. People sometimes react to these unpredictable submissions by saying "oh, so stories about little kids driving [or whatever $story was] are on topic now?" But of course that is exactly the wrong conclusion. Since this story made HN's front page, a follow-up about, say, a 7-year-old driving a tractor, would have power-law-dropoff levels of uninterestingness. And a 3-year-old driving a motorboat would be right out. Rather, there's some other unexpectedly interesting off-beat story waiting to play this role for next time, and the point is that you can't predict it from any sequence. Actually such submissions are surprisingly uncommon—I feel like they show up maybe 2 or 3 times a year, if that. That's why I'd be curious to see links.
Edit: just to be clear—I'm not criticizing your comment! I'm saying you're an ideal HN user.