If I could downmod this topic, I would. But since I can't, I will upmod other topics that interest me more in hopes that this topic will drop off the front page.
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.
Item 1. certainly seems to fit the bill. Item 2. not so much. However, given the growth HN appears to have experienced over the last 6 months the signal to noise ratio nothing short of remarkable.
Perhaps odd to comment on myself, but what if I (we) more liberally up-mod the on topic posts regardless of quality... Ideally (as others have suggested) we could vote on relevance separate from quality/agreement.
