I respectfully disagree. I'm a person who is "widely interested in the world" but I don't come to HN to be a source of all interesting things in the world.

There are already a thousand other general news sites, or even tech news sites. I come to HN specifically because it satisfies one niche very well. It is incorrect to suggest that attempts to keep a site on-topic and focused implies that the people doing said guidance don't have outside interests.

I think the problem is: what do you do when you really like a site and the community of people that revolves around it, but your interests are broader than just what that site covers? What if you want a hacker news, but for other topics in your life you are interested in?

You are tempted to try to broaden the definition of that niche site but pushing it's boundaries. It is up to the site to push back on you and resist that.

I think there is a lot of confusion around what qualifies as "Hacker News" both in tone and scope anyway. The niche is ill-defined. I could probably even defend a position that focusing on startups isn't really hacker news either even though it's clearly an interest of pg's.

Wide interests are not exactly the same as shallow interests, but if they get to be wide enough then they can not help but be shallow.

A good point. I like that HN strikes a balance, whereas other sites don't. Reddit and Digg or as shallow as a Florida lake in early spring.

> pg seems to be of the latter stripe, so it's no surprise that Hacker News reflects this bias, and will continue to do so in the future.

If we start from the assumption that if somebody writes about something that he is interested in it, then would you please categorize the following list into 'one or two little areas' ?

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html