homely and relatable, but why promoted on HN?

How many here have read Burmese Days, had the bookworm's childhood, and are imbued with that sense of political worldliness?

HN is for anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Historical and/or unexpected materials are welcome here! Having them on the site is a long tradition. (As is the "why is this on HN" comment, of course.)

It sounds like you know your Orwell - want to share something about that?

  Hacker News Guidelines

  What to Submit

  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. 

Haven't read the book, but points two and three definitely struck some bells in the back clocktowers of my mind.

More generally, reading a bit of Orwell was inescapable in my schooling, but I sought out 1984 myself. I discovered I had kind of a thing for both utopias and dystopias.

And as I contemplate things I might write or compose, I do note that outrage towards this regime is very much in the mix of my motivations.

Wow that's a lot of snobbish superiority.