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.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I feel like the cocktail recipes site posted falls closer to on-topic than off-topic then, having only Ingredients and Recipes pages, not even a blog...
Just because you might prefer coffee or soylent doesn't mean some other hackers don't like cocktails. Make yourself some https://entropia.de/Tschunk and relax!
You've missed the point. I enjoy cocktails, and I even think the linked page here is nice, both in cocktail selection and page design, but I don't think it particularly belongs on HN.
I'm not trying to win any wars here, I only provided a possible explanation to someone's question. Culture evolves and that's fine, or maybe the ratio of technical vs non-technical content is actually stable on HN? I really don't know, but to me it feels like the the volume of random content and low-grade comments is increasing. Personally, I don't think that represents the spirit of HN, but my comment was downvoted so either I'm wrong, the culture has shifted, or the mainstream is already the majority here.
I'm a fan of the Caipirinha however, so thanks for the Tschunk recipe.
I see what you mean, and agree that that kind of submission taking a place on front page would indeed be better, but this submission is still original, done-by-hand work, while pancakes guy served out LLM slop...
Didn't publish the backend yet but I experimented with DIY plotter based on Drawing Robot by henryarnold and it works fairly well. I m not sure what to do with the layer between plotter backend and different plotters though.