I think of Nobel Prize winners as what I will call "single function machines". That is, and this is purely speculative, they are focused on only typically one goal or area of interest maniacally.
The typical HN reader, by contrast, finds many things and almost everything and anything (as PG might say) interesting. [1]
"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
This is not to say that Nobel Prize winners aren't curious of course they are. But somehow I doubt they are all over the place. I find so many things interesting it's hard for me to stay focused some times with the distractions of what is available at your fingertips.
The typical HN reader, by contrast, finds many things and almost everything and anything (as PG might say) interesting. [1]
"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
This is not to say that Nobel Prize winners aren't curious of course they are. But somehow I doubt they are all over the place. I find so many things interesting it's hard for me to stay focused some times with the distractions of what is available at your fingertips.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html