Bad answer. That opens up the site to anything and everything. I care deeply about the ongoing Giro d'Italia, and if all goes well, will go watch a stage in the near future, but I wouldn't post daily results on this site. Nor would I attempt to inflict my own political and economic views on the other users. Were we all to do that, the site would rapidly degrade.
Hacker News IS my portal now, and if an occasional piece not directly related to hacking spawns excellent discussion among my peers, great. That's something I'd probably find nowhere else.
As far as the "appropriateness" of submissions, just trust the rest of us to prudently use our up arrows. Sure, stupid stuff will get through, but a small price to pay for good content and discussion.
Oh, and go ahead and submit a Giro d'Italia post. Not sure it would see too many upvotes.
Are any of these discussions actually that interesting? They all seem to turn into "market-will-fix-everything libertarians vs OMG evil corporations!!! types". Ok, that's a little bit of a caricature, but not too far off the mark, and in any case the whole thing is a slippery slope into territory that's not really about hacking or hackers or startups.
I disagree with you, of course, but finding a fellow cycling fan here on HN is cool.
And I do agree with you that HN shouldn't cover the Giro. That's taking it too far (but I do think an occasional piece on a major geo-political issue is no problem at all).
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