(a) Stanford is a research hospital, and the work they do in research hospitals improves healthcare everywhere.

(b) This doesn't preclude him from making other donations.

(c) Even if it were an unwise choice (which I don't believe), it was still a generous thing to do. No one deserves to be called names for giving away $28 million.

This seems to me the meanest (in both senses) comment I've seen on News.YC to date. Ending it with an ass-covering "Just my 2c" just makes it seem that much more contemptible.

I'm cautiously optimistic. A lot of hackers I meet say that they read it. And traffic continues to rise: we now get about 6500 unique visitors a day, and about 65k pageviews.

The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com, but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006.

to me Hacker News will always be Startup News =)

"How Harmful is Religion?" topics are one of the biggest red herring scapegoat topics you can get, and usually come with a generous side of philosophical wankery. I'm glad we don't talk about it much here. I'd recommend discussion of the impact of particular cultural values and beliefs instead.

Personally, on non-hacker topics, I'd be interested to see more on linguistics, the scientific study of language. We can't even begin a real discussion on most of your listed topics until we know how to recognize and establish semantics and metaphors.

The first problem we run into with "how harmful is religion," for example, is that everyone is going to see 'religion' and think of something completely different, but no-one will notice. Everyone will start arguing and get angry because they're confused and don't realize it. The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery. But again, most people ignore that question and dive right into discussion.

I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, than I am interested in hearing about the actual archaeological discoveries that inspire such speculation.

Those questions belong in a late-night dorm room discussion in between bong rips, not Hacker News...

It's interesting that this is in the Fashion section. I think the reason is that it's a PR placement, and the Fashion section is much easier to score those in.

Don't forget, pay your "consultants" $50K per year and bill them out at $250/hr. Margins that would make Microsoft weep.

Everyone post how curvy your mom/mum is to see if we can verify this