The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot 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.
It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news.
Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology).
As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.
I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always high minded and interesting.
Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside posts about hacking more specifically.
I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments.
It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve politics, but were instances of it.
