I was once berated for posting a blog article on how to build a multitude of data structures, in 3 different programming languages. The reason for this was because "This is hacker news, and this article is first year computing science stuff." - Yet Bill gates reads a book about Richard Nixon, and suddenly it is the top item on here, even though it is in no way related to anything technical. I'm out, this place is most definitely a circle jerk at this point.
It might be that people see this headline and are interested in returning later to skim the book list and all of the other lists linked here in the comments.
Upvoting Bill's book list might not mean they like his list, think it belongs at the top of HN, or that they even read the blog post. The top-of-front-page ranking could just be the result of a large number of readers upvoting in order to have the discussion show up in their "saved stories".
edit: A "save story" button that is independent of the voting/ranking mechanism might actually change the front page significantly.
I wish that were the case, except there were over a hundred comments, about how it didn't belong on here because it isn't of a high enough standard for hacker news. I still write a well known advanced programming blog, but I don't share links here as a result - I have found better outlets for content which actually concerns people in tech circles, as opposed to things like : "Why I scrapped X and did Y", "X is broken, we are fixing it", "Bill Gates read a book, Click here to see what it is! - You will never believe number 3!"
