The takeaway for me was related to business and startups which is a focus of this place. What I got from reading about Mrs. B (who I had never heard of despite buying all my furniture from her store) was that you can be amazingly successful with nothing but tenacity and hard work.
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, 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.
> Most stories about politics ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
clearly HN does not follow nor enforce these rules, so why pretend when pick-and-choose anyways? And why lecture people on what is "on topic" when objectively "off topic" stuff makes it to the front page all the time?
