alt Hacker NewsIt's not about voting patterns. It's about the rules of HN:
>On-Topic: 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.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I am also aware of what the rules say, as well as how they tend to be applied in practice.
The latter is why I don't find arguments that fall back on the former persuasive.