[shermablanca]

For sure this is interesting, but it's curious that articles of this sort are appearing on HN with increasing frequency. There used to be purely tech news, now it seems that anything interesting qualifies for an up vote.

[icebraining]

Check out pg's (the creator of this site) own submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

The first page alone includes articles on the migration of monarch butterflies, boardinghouses, income taxes by US counties, doodles by medieval kids, health benefits of eating nuts, and more.

[sillysaurus3]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN is for anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. The only time it was purely tech news was when it was called Startup News.

[DanBC]

Two people have posted the guidelines. Here's the guidelines from 2008, which shows that this intellectually curious thing has been there for many years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

> 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.

[beardog]

"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."

[lostlogin]

A post like the parent and a reply of the guidelines happens multiple times per weekend. I wonder when the complainers will notice the pattern and accept it.

[mikekchar]

New people come along all the time. I was also confused by the guidelines. Possibly they need to be in a more prominent place.

[kryptiskt]

Nonsense, this is of huge interest to any startups and other tech companies using RFC 2549 [1] in their tech stack.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

[Razengan]

For what it's worth, I love reading HN, compared to other news sites.

It's a refreshing change from say, Reddit's technology subreddits, which are a continuous regurgitation of the same old Comcast, Google, Apple and Microsoft opinions every single day; a thinly-veiled political and astroturfing soapbox at best, where anything remotely interesting in regards to what we're learning about this universe and how our technology applies to it, barely gets above 50 points.

"Tech" is not just computers.