"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."
Since there is no check for "being a hacker" to join this site, presumably I could find a bunch of people interested in, say, the Tour de France, get them to join, and start voting up bike racing articles. Or for that matter, perhaps there are enough people already here interested in bike racing to vote up those articles.
This kind of article completely fails the "of more interest to hackers than other people" test, which I think is more relevant.
Au contraire, it's front page news at HN, and I don't see it enjoying such popularity at any other aggregator service. That does suggest it is, in fact, of more interest to hackers - or at least the HN variety - than other people.
"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.
What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I thought that this submission fell into that category. If you don't agree, well, OK.
(edited to remove personal reference)
If people would post less of this sort of thing, then you wouldn't see it. Are you really interested in hacker / startup articles or do you just want to see "interesting" things? There are good subreddits for the latter.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700644