[dang]

Your comment got treated rather harshly, so let me try to explain. The post is on topic for HN because, although the question is a whimsical one, it gratifies intellectual curiosity (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Whimsical submissions like it have always been welcome here, as long as they're uncorrelated with anything that's appeared recently. (Sometimes people start doing the copycat thing of posting follow-up stories on almost the same topic. Those get old quickly unless they're really interesting, so the bar gets higher superlinearly.)

It isn't just a question of the community upvoting it. Plenty of stories get plenty of upvotes yet still don't belong on HN—e.g. most sensational controversies.

Many HN users value the diversity of the stories that appear here and don't take well to comments that appear to want to narrow the site down. That might be why your question got flamed.

[asketak]

Thanks for contructive answer. Got it. I was just curious. I am lurking here for long time and it seems to me, that the ratio of technical posts is really declining over last few months so I was wondering about the guidelines.

[gpderetta]

also Lego have the hacker nature.

[dang]

Quite.

[rimliu]

While my view is that if someone posted it on HN and it was upvoted high enough—it belongs there; there is little in this post that "gratifies intellectual curiosity". Unless we are talking about the child involved, but I doubt she reads HN. There is often a complaint about negativity on HN, but I don't think swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction adds quality. If anything it devalues really interesting content.

[dang]

Intellectual curiosity doesn't only mean studying great work or deep problems. It's closely allied with a playful spirit that likes to do things just because. That playful spirit is vulnerable to being dismissed as unserious, so it needs protecting. We protect it here.

Of course opinions will always differ about any given submission, but that's the general approach.