I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.

Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again.

What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.

But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.

There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.

  >  i submitted a link ... about an hour ago, and after
  > watching it depressingly fall off the first page of
  > the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting
  > a link to HN again.

  > What's so frustrating is that i can identify content
  > that is good, and relevant (the link above is about
  > open data, citizen access to data, and information
  > management), which are obviously relevant to the
  > hacker news community.

That doesn't mean it's of zero interest to everyone. That doesn't mean it should be of zero interest to everyone. It does mean that you are mistaken in your belief that founders and hackers would be interested, if only they'd seen it.

You're going to fall into at least one of those categories, and i think that hackers in particular are going to fall into multiple of those categories (that i happen to know from personal experience).

But if you didn't think it was relevant, then i certainly don't think you're obligated to upvote. :)

And that's my point.

It should be of interest to everyone, and it's got nothing specifically related to being a hacker, being a founder, running a project, or other technical issues that are the point, purpose and focus of this community.

Or once were.

And before someone trots out the "satisfies intellectual curiosity" line from the guidelines let me just say no, it doesn't, and if you think it does then you have a very different concept of "intellectual" from mine.

So I'm not saying it's uninteresting in general, I'm saying it's uninteresting to this community as I understand it ought to be.

And in consequence it's clear that you have a different understanding about with this community ought to be. Maybe I'm now out-of-date, and it's changed into something with which I don't share significant overlap.

At the same time, if you don't find the generalist argument persuasive, i'd fall back on the point i skipped previously, which is that this is of direct interest to data geeks. One of the major information brokers, which is interesting both as an individual instance, and as a representative of all large information brokers is fundamentally broken internally.

This is a data processing and scaling issue laid out in a way that should make us ask what's wrong, and what it is that can be done to fix these sorts of problems.

Put more succinctly, this is a problem in our domain.

I think you're getting into a long-deplored mailing-list tendency for people to ascribe general attributes to their community based on personal preference. "I like ice-cream, lots of other people probably like ice cream, so it's a good post for HN." Journalistic feature-creep, if you will.

My point being that yes, we are all tax-payers more or less, but that doesn't mean everything paid for with tax revenues is germane. Syllogistic posting rationales tend to cast a wider and wider umbrella, sometimes venturing into the realm of slippery slopes.

EDIT: fixed quote-italics

Additionally, i do feel that i have some sense of the hacker news demographic having both been a part of it, and watching the sort of content that does generate discussion.

So i'm cognizant of the problem, and i'd like to think that gives me at least some ability to compensate from the bias.

1) Match peoples' interests

2) Write really really well

So, you can either submit articles like "BubbleTwit (YC '08) gets $14B in funding, announces Natalie Portman is new CEO" or you can just keep writing and writing and writing until you get really good.

I'm mostly suggesting this because it's what I wish I would do. I'm not that good yet.

I peeked at your post... I think it is a fascinating subject, but your title and opening paragraph don't work that well. "Sustainable" doesn't mean anything without context. Your opening paragraph doesn't really create any kind of desperate need. What is the specific crash going to look like? Paint us a picture of destruction, and then lead us out of it. Great writing grabs people and holds their faces in front of something real.

I don't doubt that you've got real things to show people, so just keep working on the craft, and you'll get there.

credit where credit's due, i didn't author the original piece, and there are several things i would change about it if i had.

But yeah. i should blog more too :P But self promotion is frowned upon at HN.

The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.

If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.

Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.