I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s Violent Secret

Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by azinman2 on Saturday April 11, 2015 @12:53AM (#9358555)

So it's interesting and all, but why is this in HN?

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by karlshea on Saturday April 11, 2015 @02:15AM (#9358716)

Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? It's on HN because it was voted to the front page. Not every thread has to be about a VC, startup, or argument about a database engine.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by xtrumanx on Saturday April 11, 2015 @01:12PM (#9359909)

> Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately?

I'm pretty sure I read before that PG started HN back before reddit had subreddits because he wanted a community about a specific set of topics. Lots of people then formed an idea of what HN was about and started visiting regularly for more of the same. If something seems out of place and on the front page it's perfectly natural to expect comments questioning why something got upvoted.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by karlshea on Sunday April 12, 2015 @03:58PM (#9364553)

This is the very first paragraph of the Guidelines:

> 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.

I've seen lots of non-technology topics since I started reading, and to me this post didn't seem out of place at all. The "why is this here" posts seem to be happening more frequently in the last couple of months, but I guess it's possible that I just wasn't noticing them before.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by blazar on Saturday April 11, 2015 @01:26AM (#9358618)

The role of technology in family? The fact that two hundred years from now, your descendants might google you and see this post? It's a bit bewildering.

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Re:I Googled My Mother’s Maiden Name and Found My Family’s V... by erlo on Saturday April 11, 2015 @01:37AM (#9358638)

Almost all subject matter will have a technology aspect to it, does that immediately qualify it as HN worthy?

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