Its a place to learn and know interesting perspectives. Just as there have been discussion on inefficiencies of agriculture in the US, fights in McDonalds over glasses and other US political stuff things like this get discussed.
It gives a perspective to people on poverty in the world and how things are else where beyond your cubicle and first world countries.
According to PG's guidelines, the criteria roughly boils down to whether or not something gratifies your intellectual curiosity. Shall we flood HN with stories of corruption in the Congo, Thailand, Haiti, Russia, Egypt, and so on? Maybe HN should have a weekly feature of poverty-stricken AIDS victims in various countries in Africa? Perhaps title this weekly feature "Poverty Perspectives Beyond the Cubicle"?
Stories like these, while tragic, are not new phenomena. Unless one is naive, one should already know that the world is full of corruption and that there isn't anything particularly novel about this brand of corruption. On the other hand, a story about cleverly planted subtle bugs in a high-frequency trading algorithm would make for a great HN story involving corruption since the details would be intellectually gratifying. But plain old selling of supplies meant for the poor? That's been going on forever. How is your intellect gratified by hearing about yet one more case?
I've apparently flagged too many submissions which I thought weren't HN material as last week the flag option disappeared for me. Perhaps flagging a submission is heavy-handed (I rarely used it for comments), but as there's no downvote option on a submission that was the only signaling mechanism.
OMG! i didn't know that. Thanks for enlightening me. But i along with other fellow geeks would want to see more tech stuff than why people have got used to corruption and talks about protests etc.
Most articles on HN are about technical subjects so I don't see why you complain about some discussions which are on others topics. If there are news on India corruption on HN, it's because there is a lot of hackers interested in it. If you're not, just ignore these articles.
Its a place to learn and know interesting perspectives. Just as there have been discussion on inefficiencies of agriculture in the US, fights in McDonalds over glasses and other US political stuff things like this get discussed.
It gives a perspective to people on poverty in the world and how things are else where beyond your cubicle and first world countries.