Every time a story like Egypt appears on Hacker News, some people inevitably comment that it's unsuitable for HN. As much as the attempted curation is appreciated, it is these comments that are often off topic.
by Al Jazeera
If anything, stories like Egypt are well-suited given that:
- It's historic! Just look at the picture to the right! If something truly momentous is happening, then I'd like to see discussion about it on HN — it tends to be well-informed.
- The Hacker News Guidelines explicitly allows for political stories that demonstrate “evidence of some interesting new phenomenon”.
- It's arguably more worthy of discussion than the majority of the Techcrunch posts that we see on HN.
- It's an entrepreneurial opportunity! With a GDP of nearly $500bn, Egypt just became a lot more attractive for innovative startups.
The occasional non-tech/startup post doesn't mean that Hacker News is going to the shits. We are not in danger of becoming Reddit 2.0 anytime soon either. So, please, can we reserve the comments about off-topic posts to the kind of posts that truly are off-topic?
— Cheers, tav
