[arethuza]

"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."

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

[teddyh]

People here love to quote that, but they rarely mention the very next sentence:

“Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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.”

Left to their own devices, people tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator-type news. I wish the moderators here (since we have them) would do a better job of keeping such “Off-Topic” stuff off the front page.

[ceejayoz]

Don't forget this bit, though:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

[shuaib]

Talk about having a clause that you can bend in any direction when needed. :/

But fair enough. The story isn't really that uninteresting.

[phoe-krk]

I greatly prefer "off-topic, but interesting" to "interesting, but off-topic".

Stuff belonging to the former category can be eye-opening at times.

[nosianu]

> off-topic, but interesting > interesting, but off-topic

I believe you just said the same thing twice, you only reversed the order (I think the "but" here just is an AND) :-)

[delinka]

There's some subtlety to the arrangement of the words. "off-topic, but interesting" has the implication that 'interesting' is preferred. "interesting, but off-topic" implies that as interesting as something might be, it is still off-topic and therefore might not be permitted.

[phoe-krk]

Not really. In English, "X, but Y" translates to "X, except that Y" - Y takes priority in importance over X.

[mzanchi]

It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

[nosianu]

I did think about it. Before I posted I spent more than just a small bit of effort. I still don't see what the difference actually is though. Yes I know what "but" means. I know all those words... but...

I do not see any actual difference. Anything you apply those two descriptions to are both "off-topic" as well as "interesting", according to those descriptions. The "but" does not make any difference at all as far as I can see. The other replies say there is a preference implied (I already knew that that was the intention), but as I just wrote, however you parse it, you end up with both attributes and I don't see any preference actually being applied. I see the attempt, yes, but I don't see that there is any effect.

[amval]

Nothing wrong with that. It leaves to us qualifying what makes the cut and what not.