Hacker news is not about hacking, not about news, and not about news about hacking. It's about posting links that apparently have become interesting to the community evolved here recently.

This includes, not limited to:

- iPhone news (if you live outside the US, disregard this as nobody gives a shit).

- Web frameworks (bonus if it uses an esoteric language)

- Anything distributed (CouchDB or MapReduce)

- Functional programming musings bordering on the philosophical by people who are contemplating writing a functional program.

If you are lost for news, but want to build credibility (points), you can consider doing any of the following.

- Go to TED, BBC, NYT or any of the other major feeds and add the newest item to HN.

- Post some course notes from MIT OCW (usually anything with a MIT or Stanford label on it translates into instant cred).

Finally, if you really need points and have exhausted other options, you can post the link to the SICP videos or pdf. This happens quite often but people seem to vote it up out of fear of neglecting their religious duties.