What is this doing on the front page of HN? It isn't news, it isn't interesting technical content, and it isn't relevant to the tech business or startups.<p>It's literally just a funny picture. I love me some funny pictures, but not on Hacker News. Can we please keep this Reddit-style stuff from becoming a thing? I come here to read interesting things, not to browse through funny pictures for cheap laughs.
I'm not a CS graduate, I didn't went to the university and I understand/follow the basic concepts behind most of what I see here because it happens to to map quite well with my areas of interest <i>and</i> my actual job: front end developer. What I don't understand/don't know I'm very glad I can read about it here.<p>I usually avoid the facebook/twitter/google/ms/apple/stocks stuff because I don't give a crap and am not a fanboy but I like most of the rest. The signal/noise ratio is still extremely high on HN for me (it was higher when I started lurking, though). If it's too low for you, why do you inflict yourself all this suffering?
This also rings a bell here I suppose <a href="http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/image/32317753046" rel="nofollow">http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/image/32317753046</a>
What makes HN interesting is that there are a lot of stories on topics with which I am unfamiliar. Odds are that a lot of them will be uninteresting when I read or more likely skim the first article or two. Often this is because I don't have the contextual hooks to make it interesting - Clojure and closures are but two examples of topics that have become interesting from reading HN articles.<p>But, that's just reading the articles. Much of the value of reading HN is reading the discussions, and for myself, even more of the value I find in HN is participating in those discussions.<p>As a Liberal Arts graduate, I use HN to improve my writing. The constraints imposed by the topic and the feedback provided by the karma system help. Interaction with some really fucking smart people who write well helps even more.<p>Which reminds me that as parody the article falls flat - no article about Apple's latest at the top of the HN front page.
I love this, it's important to remember the way HN can simulate the SV bubble and step out of it and see things from someone with new eyes' perspective. I'd love to see at least 1 HN satire thing make the front page every day.
The insinuation that one needs a technical degree to understand HN headlines is erroneous and pernicious. The advantage of being on the internet is that you are a small number of clicks away from learning the meaning of any arbitrary string of punctuation marks. The only requirement to do this is a willingness to learn. The apposition of what presumably denotes technical terminology and meaningless management jargon (i.e. "## paradigm") suggests that the author of this comic is unwilling to venture very far outside of a small intellectual comfort zone.
Reading and commenting on Hacker News as a non-graduate of anything, with one whole term of a programming course:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidw" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidw</a>