A lot of math is related to computer science, and thus would be perfectly suitable for Hacker News (but obviously in less concentration).
How about splitting HN into categories, while still having a main page that displays articles from all categories? It'll never happen, but we can always ask.
Even just a simple tagging system would suffice. One to two tags attached to the submitted link would be great. One could use Reddit for this, but I prefer the average comment/article on Hacker News to the average comment/article on Reddit. (:
I agree. While I like Reddit, I think they've missed a trick by not just using tags. It'd much rather see all posts in the Reddit ecosystem tagged "Ruby" than just those that were directly submitted to the Ruby subreddit, for example. That's a bit like Delicious, though, I guess.. just with commenting ;-)
I guess the only problem there is that it makes it harder for one community focused on a certain topic to "branch" to another when things get rough, whereas now you can just start "/r/ruby_two" or whatever if /r/ruby makes you mad. It's definitely a trade-off, but I think Hacker News is still high-quality enough that tagging would work.
At the risk of over-tooting, categories and control over which are displayed on which pages are features that will be in Noostr in the next week or two. Sub-domains are also slated for a future version - probably 0.9.
How about splitting HN into categories, while still having a main page that displays articles from all categories? It'll never happen, but we can always ask.