I have been a long-time lurker here, but felt compelled to create an account to post in support of the parent. There has been too many submissions lately where there is a low barrier to entry, inane discussion, and no connection to hacking.
If I had my way the names seth godin, tim ferriss, derek sivers, or any number of these quack bloggers would never show up in HN. I come here for business and technology, not bullshit self-help articles on agenda-having auto-promotional blogs.
The samurai used to meditate to on their deaths daily - they felt it gave them purpose. The idea was that you'd try to live every single day so that if you died at the end of the day, you'd feel it was a good day.
And whenever I remember this, I think a little about the fact that in not too long, I'll die, and most likely be completely annihilated. So I try to look around and take in my surroundings and appreciate them, eat a meal slowly that day, and call someone I love that I haven't talked in a while. Then I work on something meaningful and important to me. Thank you for reminding me of this.
Nice sentiments but the problem with sharing this stuff is that the mere act of sharing causes you not to be following your own story.
A hacker should be able to tell apart a scientific argument that rules certain stories in and others out from empty rhetoric that appeals to emotions.
As an aside, hackers' concerns are not the same as those of people doing startups, and it's a mistake to equate the two. Lots of people involved in a startup are not hackers by any stretch of imagination, and vice versa.
But I don't think Hacker News works the same way. Anyone is allowed to submit a story, and depending on the community interest, the story gets posted to the front page. This ensures that the stories of most interest to the community are most viewable to the community. So the way I understand your criticism, it seems more to be a critique on the entire community (or at least the ones who vote), rather than a critique on the poster not following the rules.
"WhyIsThisOnHN" commented on articles about differing ways to look at literature, a painter who creates photorealistic paintings, a question posed to the HN community (this article), and one on the cause of death in cyclists. None of these articles strike me as something that merely exists to draw in eyeballs, but rather portray the varying interests of a group of highly motivated and intelligent people. Those are the types of articles I come here to read. If I wanted to read about computers and code all day, there are websites for that. If I wanted to read about startups all day, again, there are startup centric sites. I am interested in what people of like mind find interesting, but perhaps do not have the chance to expose myself to due to time constraints, and I think that this is partly responsible for the appeal of HN over other aggregate sites.
note - sorry for the off-topic comment, this is just something that has been on my mind, and possibly exasperated by the WhyIsThisOnHN username
From the hn guidelines:
"What to Submit"
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
"A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. 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."