seeing it flagged was the reason I clicked it then noticed what an awesome article that was. Not sure what's the issue with this kind of post as long as this content doesn't overtake other more on-point posts. Which would be unlikely anyway considering the audience here.
Whoever flagged this, is probably very stressed. Should take the day off and treat themselves for a good time at home.
I get the impression that some people flag things as a way of "down voting." I don't approve of the method, but I do sometimes wish for a way to down vote an article. I've had non-controversial submissions on topics regularly discussed on HN be flagged in the past.
Do you mean something interesting related to technology? Or just that your expectation is that HN is for "something interesting" inherently, regardless of subject?
If the criticism here is that this blog post does not directly address the subject of technology, it still has value to me as a software engineer. Mouse is an engineer whose work I look up to because it models a way of having a life that is passionate about technology and passionate about other things too.
I love programming language and software design. I love discovering the way things work. I love thinking about how things can work better. I love working towards and achieving technical elegance. And I love following the community conversations about this stuff. In short, I love everything that Hacker News is typically about. That's why I visit the site on a daily basis.
I follow Mouse's work because she connects those kinds of passions, passions in the domain of software engineering, to other areas of passion. Her work gives me hope about what my life can be like. To me this article says, software engineers can take a day off and indulge something they love, and don't have to worry about falling behind as programmers. This isn't what Mouse is saying explicitly. It's what I conclude from or project onto her blog post. But I don't think it's implausible that her writing would have the same meaning to other HN readers.
> The system used to say [flagged] only when the story was both heavily flagged and dead (closed to new comments). Now it says [flagged] if the story is heavily flagged, dead or not. Flagged-but-not-dead was the case here. That's why you didn't see a 'vouch' link, btw; there's no need to vouch for posts that aren't dead, since the purpose of vouching is to unkill them.
Whoever flagged this, is probably very stressed. Should take the day off and treat themselves for a good time at home.