The guiding value here is intellectual curiosity, which is gratified by running across things that are unpredictably interesting. HN has never been just about startups and tech. It&#x27;s also about Byzantine coins, medieval manuscripts, Nabokov&#x27;s butterfly expeditions, the tomb of Queen Esther, T.S. Eliot&#x27;s letters, and Jim Henson&#x27;s coffee commercials. Pee-wee Herman? Why not, if there&#x27;s an interesting aspect to the story?<p>Stories that take us off the beaten track into the wild are the rare earth elements of HN, and we can never get enough of them. There&#x27;s a strong tendency for everything to homogenize on a small number of hot topics. Those are exciting, but to let them crowd out the quieter, odder material is not how to optimize HN&#x27;s long-term interestingness. We think it&#x27;s great to have stories on the front page that defy expectation, and we consciously moderate HN to protect those when we see signs of community interest in them.<p>Of course people disagree greatly about what counts as interesting, but hey, if one oddball story bores you, another may hit the spot. Keep HN weird.