Comment by tokenadult

From the Hacker News guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The way users can respond to off-topic stories they find on the new page or front page is by flagging them, by the way.