Submission guidelines: 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.
I found it interesting and the discussion was even better, I've regularly had a low-grade curiosity about nuclear testing, the effects on people, etc, and a lot of that was brought up (with references true HN style) in the comments. So it is exactly hacker news.
Much like in real life as a programmer - it's not always editors, programming languages etc, sometimes it's just fun. Not too long ago, the whole dev team ended up roped into a heavy discussion one afternoon, we were debating and calculating the observed effects of some hypothetical phenomenon, full whiteboard and math style. The boss comes in and tells us problems with our math and helps us whip up a quick simulation to figure it out. (this is at a university, the bosses are pretty smart cookies, professors and the like) After a couple hours for us (an hour for him), he says, "ok, I guess I should probably suggest you get back to work, but this was fun!". Amusingly 2 of the devs got modules back on schedule the next day, apparently we all just needed some hard but fun and unrelated problem. HN can have that too :)
I found it interesting and the discussion was even better, I've regularly had a low-grade curiosity about nuclear testing, the effects on people, etc, and a lot of that was brought up (with references true HN style) in the comments. So it is exactly hacker news.
Much like in real life as a programmer - it's not always editors, programming languages etc, sometimes it's just fun. Not too long ago, the whole dev team ended up roped into a heavy discussion one afternoon, we were debating and calculating the observed effects of some hypothetical phenomenon, full whiteboard and math style. The boss comes in and tells us problems with our math and helps us whip up a quick simulation to figure it out. (this is at a university, the bosses are pretty smart cookies, professors and the like) After a couple hours for us (an hour for him), he says, "ok, I guess I should probably suggest you get back to work, but this was fun!". Amusingly 2 of the devs got modules back on schedule the next day, apparently we all just needed some hard but fun and unrelated problem. HN can have that too :)