5 ms·
how is this relevant content for Hacker News?
by pilif 16y ago
how is this relevant content for Hacker News?
- pclark 16y agoover 40 people think its relevant
- Mz 16y agoMy first thought when reading the question was "Ooh, shiny!". But I didn't think anyone would get it and it would get downvoted as smart-assed. More eloquently: I think it falls under "anything engaging" (or whatever that phrase is in the guidelines).
- paulgb 16y agoTrue, but I bet over 40 people think it's irrelevant, too. Without downvoting, the number of votes does not imply relevance.
- shrikant 16y agoNot really - if over 40 people thought it was truly irrelevant, it would be flagged to death.
- paulgb 16y agoNot all users can flag, and flagging is more to deal with spam and trolling. (The guidelines mention offtopic posts as well, but community consensus is that flagging is not downvoting.)
- chc 16y agoFlagging is not downvoting, but it is the sanctioned way to register your opinion that some content does not belong on the site. If your efforts to combat off-topic posts are limited to ranting in the comments after they're posted, it's too late.
- DrJokepu 16y agoThose people can upvote other stories they think are more relevant or interesting. The "newest" page at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest always has interesting submissions waiting to be upvoted.
- Jun8 16y agoWell, then you have an issue not directly with this story but the way HN is designed. Start a submission of your own, citing this example, about this issue and get the discussion rolling, if you feel passionately about this.
- davidedicillo 16y agoIf everything in life were relevant, it would be a boring existence. How SMS could be a relevant business for a podcast company??
- i80and 16y agoBizarre instances of real-world recursion are always relevant.
- NathanKP 16y agoIt looks to me like something I would go to Reddit to find. It is interesting and I would upvote it on Reddit, but it is certainly not what I would expect at the top of HN.
- jrockway 16y agoHow is this relevant content for HN? If you want relevant content, write it and submit it.
- davidw 16y agoI can submit 100 stories that'll get people riled up about politics / amazing pics / funny-hah-hah! in the time you can write one article about monads.
- jrockway 16y agoHow many politics-related stories can you submit in the time it takes "island in a lake in an island in a lake in an island" to become the #1 story?
- davidw 16y agoThe point is simple: off-topic content is far easier to submit than good content. There's way more of it, and it's of interest to far more people. It would be very simple, were there no controls, to crowd out "good" content with politics/pics/etc... Which means that doing the opposite: crowding out bad content with good content, is very difficult. It would require a significant amount of work to go find and promote good articles, as compared to "bad" ones. If anyone actually thinks this isn't so, think about the mental effort and learning required to write a good article about monads vs the effort required to rant about Bush or Obama or post a cool/funny pic. ("good" and "bad" are simplistic. I actually thought this article was kind of interesting; I just don't think it belongs here)
- Charuru 16y agoI find it dubious that bad content is actually 'crowding' out good content. Which good real entry is this one higher than? The off-topic is just filling in the dead time between seriousness.
- 16y ago
- jerf 16y agohttp://www.retrologic.com/jargon/H/hacker-humor.html http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/H/hacker-humor.html Not that I want HN to become a joke-a-day site but accidental-hacker-humor like this is a unusual enough find that I can deal with the rare exception.
- Jun8 16y agoOh, for Pete's sake: relax! People thought it's interesting and it is interesting (I had no idea you could go that deep). Hey, maybe if your elevator pitch doesn't work you can try to impress a VC with this tidbit, I bet this would get more attention than a lot of pitches.
- mbubb 16y agoArticles in this vein can spur thought which leads to unexpected ideas. This is perhaps a point of overlap between reddit and HN and really has very little direct relevance to startups, hacking, programming. The piece in question here was not particularly deep but made for pleasant lunchtime thoughts about recursion and that fun little Linux fractal viewer that I havent played with in ages (xaos). I wondered how the guy figured this out and whether or not the Capian Sea were really the largest lake... Then when I looked at the comments I saw a few good points and this metacomment. Not terribly deep thoughts. But I am not so sure that articles like this are irrelevant. It is good to have ludic content that generates seemingly random thoughts. I used to follow a site called everything2.com - which i imagine lots of people remember (or still use).a simple Perl driven site that if I remember well was related to the slashdot engine(slashcode). Spending an hour on the site following tangential entries could be really fun but beyond that could be a way to get unstuck when in a mental rut. HN has that ability at times. In recent months articles on airplane safety; playing GTA with one's 4 yr old; pneumatic brass tubes at Stanford; Feynman on Science and religion have had that affect. None of these articles were particularly 'relevant'. But I am glad to have stumbled across them.