By HN guidelines, things that are appropriate are "Anything that good hackers would find interesting... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

This is the story of Dr. Joshua Miele who, after this horrific attack, has been working on some really interesting projects using technology to make the lives of those living with disabilities better.

After reading this story, I found an interview he did describing some of the projects he's been working on, including tactile maps on smartphones to help blind people navigate their world. http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201106171000.

So I'd say it's relevant.

From HN's Guidelines[1]:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

[1] - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

First off, to the person who submitted this article, thank you!

Next. Sometimes people work in technology are interested in how the world works, about beautiful things, about life and how it interacts with the rest of the world. Yes, sometimes we also have this feeling that things that strike and inspire us and stimulate our intellect might be of interest to others. I come here not for the technical articles. I work in this field and those will inevitably float through to me. I come here because I wish to read and savor the thoughts of incredibly amazing people. It is discourteous to decide explicitly how this community will evolve. If you or anyone really feels that there is no place here for humanity, art and articles on culture, you can very well flag the article. If it looks like that is happening enough. Those of us who enjoy such things will find another home to continue this journey.

How hard would it be for HN to filter posts like this? There are only so many permutations of "Why is this here? / What does this have to do with HN?" possible...

To my knowledge, HN hasn't added any new features in years. I think the people who run this site are pretty happy with it the way it is and don't want to change it, despite many suggestions for improvements. So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to do anything about it.

Actually I added one about an hour ago.

This is an interesting suggestion but it would not be on our top 100 things to fix.

As accounts cannot be deleted (and I understand why), I would love to see the ability to change my username to something less identifiable to me.

Very glad to hear that improvements to HN are still being made. I stand corrected.

>Actually I added one about an hour ago.

What was it? I'm genuinely curious.

Better detection and banning of abusive crawlers.

Most likely related to behind the scenes algorithms (e.g. combating spam, ranking the front page, etc).

Could you please delete my account?

You just have to be around for some of them. Sometimes pg has done things to the UI of the site, then there is a large thread of community commentary, then it's kept, modified, or removed. If the feature shows up, and then goes away over the course of a day or two, you might miss that anything happened.

In the past pg has mentioned adding a feature to the running instance via a connected REPL, not the real source. If it proves its usefulness it goes in the source -- if not, the next restart removes it.

There are very many add ons and extensions and things available for HN.

There's bound to be a thread filtering add on for whatever browser you're using.

Here's your answer: someone submitted it and people upvoted it