Yes! This post is appropriate for Hacker News. It's a solid article on an intellectually interesting subject—exactly what the guidelines call for. Although the human-interest angle ('what killed my sister') often signals fluff, here it is appropriate and tasteful.
As I hope everyone knows, HN has never been only about tech and startups. Intellectual diversity is something we cultivate, and we've been running a little short on it lately. So consider this a general call for (a) more thoughtful pieces on (b) substantive topics from (c) out-of-the-way sources.
(Since ngcat has read the guidelines and already turned his or her comment from a bad one into a good one, I think would it would be fair for the rest of us to apply the corrective upvotes policy and get this comment back to par. I'll go first.)
"Imagination, suggests Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, is related to the brain’s “noise” (random firings of neurons, or nerve cells), thus generating more associations. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia and their unafflicted family members show mega-amounts of random noise. Brain scans of control subjects (no schizophrenia in the family) do not."
I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to have some sort of mental illness.
My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both.
It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.
I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can discuss these problems publicly.
I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers-Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2] (now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder).
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.
This article is a nice survey of science around a disease that affects people I care about. Quite cool in that gives me a bunch of search terms, etc. Much better from my perspective[1] than the SSH Kung Fu article that only reiterated things I've been doing for a decade, and were old when I first read some article about "awesome things you can do with ssh".
As someone who has direct experience with schizophrenia I very much enjoyed the article. It is rare to read something on this topic that is anything more than fluff.
What's your particular objection to it? It seems to be a pretty good overview of many of the prime leads and perspectives we have to look at a fairly common and well known disease, especially one with significant cultural/social impact.
However my simplistic bar for determining stories I like are, is it related to programming, new business ideas, or fields I am so out of my league I swap tabs to wikipedia or the like to understand the words I just read.
Having worked with a bipolar person I was always interested in what knowing how they separated the two.
Look, people who always post "why is this on Hacker News": There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users. If it is here and people are commenting, then it is where it is supposed to be. I understand longtime users who rant the it used to be more techmical/strict hacker stuff, but the user base has grown, and it seems people on Hacker News like what ends up on the front page of Hacker News. Go figure ;)
> There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. HN has always been actively moderated, and what makes it to the front page has always been a combination of upvotes and curation. Also, the call for intellectually diverse subjects has been there as long as HN has been.
Ok, my mistake, I though it was only moderated in exceptional cases. And about the diversity on HN, just this week somebody here was complaining about the good old days of HN when it was only technical stuff, so I thought that's how it was. Thanks for the clarification!
