Not everyone has the luxury to ignore news and politics. Sometimes these events touch our lives in ways that a new release of the Rust compiler could never.
(Not to pick on Rust, I love the language, but just an example)
I agree this site should not turn into Reddit, or Digg. What keeps HN great is the highly technical discussion around these topics. On mainstream articles like this I often skip reading the article, and go right to the HN comments to learn real info about the topic.
We have a community of some extremely smart people, let's not filter the articles posted, but instead harbor the intellectual conversation around the articles, because I think that's the real value of this site.
(Not to pick on Rust, I love the language, but just an example)
I agree this site should not turn into Reddit, or Digg. What keeps HN great is the highly technical discussion around these topics. On mainstream articles like this I often skip reading the article, and go right to the HN comments to learn real info about the topic.
We have a community of some extremely smart people, let's not filter the articles posted, but instead harbor the intellectual conversation around the articles, because I think that's the real value of this site.