Comment by brightsize

> If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Bingo. I love HN for this very reason. Each time I visit, which is several times a day, I can count on finding a batch of postings about stuff I'm interested in: tech, startups, theoretical and applied science, law, philosophy, and yes, politics, just to name a few things, and quite often the intersection of one or more of these. I'm not a HN old timer, so may have missed-out on the before-the-Fall HN, but I have no regrets about that because it must have been a duller place.

I was a Slashdot addict before discovering HN. At one point I remember being really, really impressed by the great variety of people who posted there, people who had subject matter expertise that was all over the board. I might see, for example, a posting of an article about research into controlled fusion, and then browsing the comments I find information and insight posted by actual researchers in the field. This is what HN gives me today, and it's fantastic.

Perhaps a bit OT, but another thing that I love about HN is the level of civility in the comments and the swiftness with which people who break those unwritten(?) rules of decorum face chastisement. Rudeness is called out. People often humbly admit when they've made an error and apologize for it. People who make spelling or grammar errors aren't childishly flamed for it. HN feels like a big room full of well-mannered, intelligent adults, whereas /. (now) is a room full of twits and children and trolls and vandals. I have a hard time imagining HN ever becoming THAT because of the quality of this audience.

HN seems to have become not just a forum full of hackers, but a forum full of intellectuals including the non-hacker variety. These intellectuals, hackers and otherwise, have a diverse range of expertise, interests, curiosities, and passions. I learn something new every day from HN, usually tech or business-related, but often not, and I think that HN would be a far less interesting place if it was narrowly tech/startup focused. For me, HN simply ain't broke.