> 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, or celebrities, 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.
The leader of the most powerful democracy on earth doing authoritarian actions and eroding norms is worth discussion.
That story spent all of 9 minutes on the front page. Turning off flags is separate to restoring to the front page, and we don't think it's a good look to have a [flagged] tag on any bereavement post, no matter who the deceased is.
Yes any technical subreddit averages out to the average HN thread. In some specialized subreddits like /r/AskHistorians the quality far exceeds HN because you're required to know what you're talking about to even state an opinion.
Here's an illustrative example: the thread for "LLMs aren't world models (https://yosefk.com/blog/llms-arent-world-models.html)"
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854518
/r/programming: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1mnc9qf/llms_a...
I don't see a qualitative distinction between HN and "literally a cesspool of humanity" here.
I won't belabor the point because I know it's futile and diverging far from the topic.