[napa15]

Are you not setting this up as a website? I was really hoping that this would turn out as an announcement to be an aggregator of an aggregator. Personally I dont understand either why Apple news and 'Why is X down' links dont get banned, these are the most obvious offenders. I was just about to make a list of posts on the top page that I personally wouldnt allow on a serious hackernews site and I stopped because it would include almost every single link and at that point I feel like I'm just grandstanding. The number one rule that I would have for news that I dont want to read is that if this is some political decision, I dont want to hear it. Politics change all the time, it's messy, it's opinionated and frankly populated by stupid people with stupid commentators. Absolutely no value gets generated by reading some post about how solar power is now 20% more affordable in Florida or how France just banned Monsanto crop nr. 4 or how country X wants independence. These daily occurences will happen over the course of thousands of years, I dont care. You would have to keep reading and following that particular industry/country in a research-like capacity to be up to date at all. Other rules are of course any kind of 'do this to be a better programmer' post. Look I heard it all, I dont need to hear it for the next 30 years too, this is all too similar to politics and they are always blatantly opinion pieces instead of objective looks at the landscape.

[kbenson]

This somewhat makes sense if you use HN primarily and exclusively as an aggregator. I, and I'm sure many others, also make very heavy use of HN as a discussion board, and in that respect the submitted article is more like a loose word association used to start a discussion. If the submission is titled "Blue is better than purple." but has 300 point and 100 comments, I might take a look regardless of the stupid topic. For all I know, I might encounter some neuroscientists talking shop in the comments.

I also don't particularly care for more Apple news, or some political rant, but the discussions that sometimes follow these can be extremely interesting, and enough so that I would regret their disappearance.

[petercooper]

You might like http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ - a guy whittles down the stories but on a weekly basis.

[dmd]

http://n-gate.com/ is better

[petercooper]

Well.. I'd agree with funnier :-D

[globeadue]

so you want to ban those posts so you can have independence from stupid peoples news thus affording you 20% more time for tech articles on HN?