I wonder at the legal status of this digital copy of the original article.

Words seem smaller and lighter than seeds...

The whole site seems to be 'borrowed' content. http://www.wesjones.com/whatsnew.htm

Hacker News is for anything of interest to hackers, not just computers. The independence and individualism that home gardening affords is right in line with hacker ethos. This story of the epistomological challenges surrounding poppy cultivation could be seen as analogous to the perceptions toward possession of a password-cracking program. What one could use to audit security or for intellectual exercise could also be used with malicious intent.

The role of authority in these matters is of interest to many hackers.

This is a game called "7 degrees of hacker news" where you try and "connect the dots". For instance, "This story of the epistomological challenges surrounding poppy cultivation could be seen as analogous to the perceptions toward possession of a password-cracking program." is certainly one of the more creative ones I've read here. When you start being that broad though, you really stop being able to exclude anything.

Most of us are interested in a great variety of things, and, being intelligent, well read people, have opinions - sometimes strong ones - on things like politics too.

Those topics, however, are not really hacker news.

Fair enough.

For me at least, it was a nice and well-written diversion from coding.

Given the fame and popularity of Paul Erdos within the hacker-type groups I've known- perhaps opium is actually of very great interest to hackers?

Breasts are of great interest to many hackers, yet that doesn't make pictures of them on topic.

No, but a provocative and thoughtful piece about the female breast in North American culture might be of interest.

There was actually a lively discussion about the engineering of bras or some such at one time that I participated in. I even volunteered "scientific" style info about my own personal history of bra sizes and most everyone was a perfect gentleman, with one tiny slip up by a guy who "generously" offered to help me carry them and then promptly removed the remark after I politely indicated it wasn't really appropriate.

I don't recall any protests about it being "off topic" either.

That actually sounds much more obscure than something labeled "war on drugs", which is a good thing. I think genuinely "random" articles that treat some topic in depth can be fascinating and don't really harm the site. A classic example of this is the Neal Stephenson one about the guys who lay cables around the world.

The "war on drugs" type articles, IMO, come from people who are really eager to share their particular point of view. I get that feeling too: "This guy's right! How can people possibly vote for Berlusconi?!", but I think articles posted due to that motivation are generally a Bad Idea, and I think if people are honest with themselves, they're not really posting them because they find them fascinating, but because of "dammit, that's wrong" or "this is spot-on! Everyone should read this!"

You know, I didn't read the article. I intentionally did not reply directly to any of your posts. I think you are being unnecessarily argumentative. I recognize the dynamic: People are arguing with you, so you argue back. They don't like you behaving X way so they do something not terribly different and just add fuel to the fire. Given that your complaints that this is off topic is the primary discussion here, this article is probably not of much interest to the crowd here. Flag it and move on is probably a better policy than arguing at length, thereby creating something akin to "the Streisand effect" of drawing additional interest to something you think shouldn't be here at all.

I probably shouldn't have replied at all myself. I'm just kind of pedantic about things like assumptions that an interest in female breasts is merely lurid. It's not. Even with a 98% male populace, I have found it perfectly possible as a woman to talk about things like breasts in a perfectly civil, logical, scientific fashion. (And even photos of breasts are also not necessarily about sex per se.) Not all men are pigs who treat women as nothing but sex objects and a majority male population does not automatically suggest a majority sexist pig population. Such implied assumptions bug me.

I suspect I will seriously regret having replied a second time as well, though my only intent was clarification: That is to say I'm not arguing with you about whether or not this is on topic. I'm merely being pedantic about an unrelated point, one that I think is a little more important than whether or not some specific article "belongs" here.

Great read