A lot of people don't read the Hacker News Guidelines⁽¹⁾ before submitting and deserve to be flagged. Quoting (emphasis mine):
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, 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.
You say that, but there was a big thread on Val Kilmer on the front page this morning...
This is not really mysterious or anything, though, right? They allow bending of the rules for stuff that is not likely to devolve into a big stupid political flame war, because, like, pick your battles.
Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?
If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.