I think point 2 is a bit off. Normally the items that hit the front page are indeed news, but a largish percentage of the content is not new, just interesting to hackers and accepted because it hasn't been posted to HN in a while.
I meant "news" in the "social news" sense, where if it's new to me I'm fine with it. That said, it's a category that gets clogged with trivial announcements from YC companies, a lot of tech gossip that I don't care for, and articles on subjects I'm not interested in that other people really dig. I wish there was some system that would let me see what I wanted and remove the rest.
