Another thing is that many business related links never propagate upward either. I've started my own mini news site that will be all about business/finance/management. I haven't give the link to anyone yet. Anyone interested?

It's still missing some pages: about etc. but everything's functional.

Thanks for the link btw. This looks neat.

I came to the HN because of YCombinator and my ambitions, but I am no longer studying computer science (I have changed my major to mathematics and physics, pursuing what I dropped my first go-around at an undergraduate degree). I stay because this group shares many of the same interests in news. If science posts were to show up, then all the better. If not, then it may be that this group is more inclined towards tech news.

Help me understand: Are you suggesting that there is a lot more good programming writing than good science writing? Or a lot more good valley gossip writing than good science writing? Sturgeon's revelation suggests that there is a lot of crap writing about everything, but the question here is why HN seems to now prefer crap on other subjects to anything about science, good or bad.

I'm dying for non-technical science writing. I want to know what those guys are thinking, not read a popular write up.

They're usually good, even when it's outside their field.

And you make great submissions to HN too.

Maybe in a small population social news site, the 'norm' for content can drift in a similar fashion to allele frequency in a small gene pool.

I don't know but every time I post an article detailing the hard science behind say a wired, the economist, newsweek, salon or FT post it will be ignored. The reason behind this might be the fact the real science doesn't make for entertaining reading or more likely journalists explain difficult things in an more entertaining way.

1. Are enough science stories being submitted? If not, why not?

2. What happens to the science stories when they are submitted?

I can't answer the first question (anyone got data?) but from experience submitting a few science stories is that they get a couple of votes and die. This, I think, is an interesting observation.

The hint of an answer also comes from my experience: I get my science news fix elswhere. HN, to me, is about things that make me think harder/better or see the world in a new way. Granted that's not always the case, but the gems here outclass any gem elsewhere I've seen.

So what think is happening is that we don't care for mainstream science news. I think for a science story to survive here, it needs to be a slightly off the beaten path subject with a very clever title - hackers are humans after all and headlines can affect them emotionally to get them to up vote.

Your English is fine, by the way. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so.

Oh, and thank you for your comment about my English :)

A top story for almost two days was a screenshot of a hapless fellow complaining about mistakenly ordering the 'I Am Rich' iPhone app. (It got 59 story upvotes, and this was in addition to other news coverage of the app.) The thread had multiple highly-rated comments that were no more insightful than "ha, don't click 'buy' if you don't want to buy". (Two of those had over 20 net upvotes.)

The idiot hordes have arrived and are breeding like rabbits through mutual upvotes. Death of News.YC predicted; news at 11.

News.YC has been mentioned in enough places -- like Reddit, where I migrated from -- that it's been gathering some influence from those places. PG has been curiously adamant about not doing anything algorithmically to address this, instead insisting that somehow this forum will just never accumulate the kind of cruft that every other web-based forum accumulates.

I think that web-based forums have to follow one of the basic rules of capitalism, in that it has one of three states: either it's dying, or it's growing slowly, or it's growing quickly.

Interesting conversations and submissions happen as a way for people to signal information to other people that they think might not be aware of it, and might find it interesting. Assuming it were possible for a forum to never either lose nor gain participants, eventually the participants would share most of the information that they weren't mutually familiar with, and those that were interested in external sources of information that they weren't initially aware of would begin to follow them, and there'd be nothing left to share. The forum gradually gets quieter, and dies.

Or, the forum can grow. It may grow quickly, as with Reddit or Digg or Fark or what-have-you, in which case it has a natural tendency towards more mainstream topics. Or, it can grow slowly, like News.YC, but it still gathers a little bit of new blood, and inevitably, that new blood brings a certain fraction of mainstream interest along with it.

The funny thing is, a forum in a slow state of growth will tend to accelerate into a faster state of growth, as the gradual increase in mainstream topics draws the interest of a larger cross-section of people.

So, the trick is to enforce a slower state of growth without killing it altogether, and I haven't seen any willingness here to do that.

The way I found reddit was from a link in pg's essays. And boy was reddit good when pg first linked to it. So we need a place where the only people are the kind who would voluntarily read something like pg or steve yegge.

Perhaps a simple logic puzzle wrapped inside a question about programming? That would require both factual knowledge of programming and at least a modicum of thinking ability.

That's your captcha for posts and voting permissions.

The problem I see is how to generate the captcha question/reply pairs. Perhaps something wiki style?

Cry as we might, this HN is still better than Reddit or Digg.

The recent http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html is worth mentioning because if the VC types appear in droves here to observe us, they indirectly create a salting effect where we stop posting or otherwise behaving as ourselves. i.e, we go elsewhere, possibly back to a chat room, or just keep to ourselves until another collaborative opportunity presents itself.

So, you can't complain why there are less science related posts. It is just the way because the community does not find science interesting. (By the way, I personally love science). You can try seeding the community with science related posts and see how we respond.

I post my own articles when I have time too.

It used to be five or six votes could keep you on the front page for a while. Now you submit the same kind of article and it dies with only a vote or two, and other people coming in with the same link count as some of those votes.

Sadly, I'm left to conclude that it is not the quality of the article, but the personal relationships between the posters that lead to upvoting or downvoting. That is, the same article submitted by two different people would get highly different scores based on the track record of the people involved, not the community's feeling about the content of the article.

Speculation only, but it explains the answer to your question. We ARE seeing just as many science stories -- probably more. It's just the wrong people are submitting them. (on average)

Just guessing, but I think there are probably three levels of visitors: random browsers, occasional voters, and people who play the board like a video game.

I'm more occasional. For instance, I usually don't view things that only make page 2