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What to Submit 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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.
Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.
What I love about Hacker News (usually) is the lack of flame-wars. I know they exist, but they get hidden very quickly. After reading the article in full, and finding it sparse in actual data, I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.
Edit to add: If it is merely the "population dynamics and sexual activity statistics" that we should be interested in, why not link directly to the study instead of this meandering commentary on it?
How so? It's not about political decisions one way or another but observing a new phenomenon on the market for sex and relationships. There are tons of scientific angles available for approaching the issue. Why is this happening? What has changed? What factors can contribute?
Flagging comments such as "that's good, all sex should happen in a marriage anyway" would be contributing to the discussion, flagging the entire topic would not be.
> How so?
It's in the very next sentence.
But oh by the way, the author doesn't have a great track record on this issue.
https://slate.com/business/2018/05/robin-hanson-the-sex-redi...
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I feel like this is on-topic? I feel that the flag button is not there for "I found this uninteresting", because at any given time a significant portion of the articles on the front page are uninteresting to me. I don't go around flagging those because I'm sure others do find it interesting and it's possible to have a valid discussion about it without devolving into flamewars.
> See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre.
FWIW, this was not covered by Hacker News.
