4 ms·

The paper is dense with ideas and 70 pages long, had I found it the minute it was posted, I still would not have been done reading through it and understanding

The paper is dense with ideas and 70 pages long, had I found it the minute it was posted, I still would not have been done reading through it and understanding its contents by the time you posted your comment. And I just don't have that kind of time to spend when I'm browsing hacker news. Considering this is also a "news" site, I would guess a lot of people (I know I do) simply browse it quickly to keep an eye on the technical landscape as well as for ideas for future technical exploration. I think if you want engagement on "non-scannable" pieces like this one, you would be better served by a sort of "book club" system, where people can submit long-form content and vote on it to pick one for discussion a week later. This seems like a cool idea actually. Might have to play with it.

fao_ 6y ago
You're missing my point completely. And I already covered the reasons you just stated, in my comment above yours. That's what the second to last paragraph was about :/ > Considering this is also a "news" site, I would guess a lot of people (I know I do) simply browse it quickly to keep an eye on the technical landscape as well as for ideas for future technical exploration. Hacker News was not supposed, originally, to host the same content as Bloomberg or The Wall Street Times, or The New York Post, and yet it often does, and those are the articles people engage with the most. Not only are those usually articles where the the commenters have zero new insight on the things in question -- i.e. where they are utterly uneducated, and bringing up problems as if they are new, when they are covered in a 101 undergraduate class on the subject(!) -- but it is articles where it's 'acceptable' for people to be uneducated, and still have an opinion, even if they (as is often the case with high-paid WEIRD[0] tech workers) live an extremely sheltered life and have no life experience with the realities of the situation and the people involved (As is usually the case with 'free speech' articles, etc.). It's almost guaranteed I can click on a political article about something like race, gender, or class, and have people who have never picked up literally any type of writing about racism in their lives, denying that it exists because they live in an all-white suburban area and have never had to deal with the realities of the world in which they live. The realities that other people face every single day. I'm not asking for this place to be purely technical manuals, I'm asking for this place to be what it was originally supposed to be, and what it used to be, which incidentally, is not replicating the content of major news outlets, but bringing interesting articles about science and technology to the front page. Interestingly enough lobste.rs is much better both because I see marginalised people posting there more often, and getting upvoted, and also because the content feed is more technically-focused. I don't agree with why PG ditched this place, but I do agree with the act. These days there's generally less than or equal to a single item on the front page that I could not have found by just opening any other major news outlet dedicated to tech, like Wired, or Techcruch. Or just some shitty subreddit reposting from those sites. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

fao_ 6y ago

You're missing my point completely. And I already covered the reasons you just stated, in my comment above yours. That's what the second to last paragraph was about :/ > Considering this is also a "news" site, I would guess a lot of people (I know I do) simply browse it quickly to keep an eye on the technical landscape as well as for ideas for future technical exploration. Hacker News was not supposed, originally, to host the same content as Bloomberg or The Wall Street Times, or The New York Post, and yet it often does, and those are the articles people engage with the most. Not only are those usually articles where the the commenters have zero new insight on the things in question -- i.e. where they are utterly uneducated, and bringing up problems as if they are new, when they are covered in a 101 undergraduate class on the subject(!) -- but it is articles where it's 'acceptable' for people to be uneducated, and still have an opinion, even if they (as is often the case with high-paid WEIRD[0] tech workers) live an extremely sheltered life and have no life experience with the realities of the situation and the people involved (As is usually the case with 'free speech' articles, etc.). It's almost guaranteed I can click on a political article about something like race, gender, or class, and have people who have never picked up literally any type of writing about racism in their lives, denying that it exists because they live in an all-white suburban area and have never had to deal with the realities of the world in which they live. The realities that other people face every single day. I'm not asking for this place to be purely technical manuals, I'm asking for this place to be what it was originally supposed to be, and what it used to be, which incidentally, is not replicating the content of major news outlets, but bringing interesting articles about science and technology to the front page. Interestingly enough lobste.rs is much better both because I see marginalised people posting there more often, and getting upvoted, and also because the content feed is more technically-focused. I don't agree with why PG ditched this place, but I do agree with the act. These days there's generally less than or equal to a single item on the front page that I could not have found by just opening any other major news outlet dedicated to tech, like Wired, or Techcruch. Or just some shitty subreddit reposting from those sites. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias