HN has never been that narrow, in my experience. I don't recall ever seeing a day on HN without something of mere general science interest (although I've only been here since '09.)
Come to think of it, there are HN guidelines that explicitly state that HN isn't that narrow:
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.
