From the Hacker News Guidelines:

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.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, but do hackers find this interesting, or are non-hackers voting this to the top? There was a time when you didn't see stuff like this on HN.

While I agree the OP doesn't seem like a great fit for HN... is there a clear and cut definition of "hackers" that should apply to who can post here?

You can play word games looking for precise definitions of anything. I don't have a clear-cut definition of the word "hacker," but in most places it's clear who is or isn't (I'm definitely not at this point in my life, though I might have been five years ago when I registered here). Yeah, there are some edge cases - maybe someone thinks he's a hacker because he runs Gentoo and knows a little shell scripting but people who contribute substantially to open source projects think he's not - but the vast majority of people clearly are or are not hackers.

Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It is very interesting because it is a story about the longevity of hardware and software and how, in the end, the decision whether a platform is useful or not is up to the USER and nobody else.

While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.

Two reasons: Because his goal/usage of said games, and because complete collections like this is very rare.

Late weekend means different stories make the front page.

As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware.

I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.