I don't think this post deserves downvotes because it is a good question.
I think few people really think of what happens when a whale dies over deep ocean. It apparently has huge nonlinear effects. That is pretty cool in its own right, but there are some practical reasons why many HN readers may like this.
Most of us working in areas where there is a complex interplay of technology, competition, big economic actors, small economic actors, evolutionary incentives, multiscale processes, etc. Whale falls map just enough on what we do such that it is a fresh starting point in thinking about the enterprises and industries in which we work, and just imprecisely enough such that it can spark some new thinking about things that we are working on that we might have missed before.
I used to work for a multibillion dollar enterprise that is averse to public embarrassment. Already I am re-thinking of what really happens when a dying megaproject is sent off to quietly die without canning all of the people, some of which are actually talented and creative.
> 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.
> A Wikipedia link to something obscure, which most readers won't have heard of before, about which there isn't necessarily a good general-purpose article or blog post out there, can be a great HN submission.
I almost knee jerk downvoted you, then decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. You should know, that if a wiki article makes it to the front page on HN, then it is almost guaranteed to be interesting. My experience is that more often than not it was worth at least reading the first paragraph.
HN is a place I turn to to feed my curiosity, and really appreciate that it’s not just tech/startup content that makes it’s way here.
Proximately, because it's really interesting. A step beyond that whale falls were mentioned in a good recent SSC post on slack using them as an example of a situation where suddenly there's a lot of slack in some creatures' existences.
Other commenters gave great answers, but I'll add that a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23212386 on a submission is a good sign, since it shows just the sort of intellectual curiosity-gratification HN exists for.
