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It's "interesting" because it's of general interest to anybody (anybody in the U.S, that is), not because hackers would have a particular reason to find it inte

It's "interesting" because it's of general interest to anybody (anybody in the U.S, that is), not because hackers would have a particular reason to find it interesting. I thought it was off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. But that's just my opinion. Apologies for adding to the noise.

kelnos 15y ago
I would downvote myself for this comment that I'm making, but: I generally dislike this sort of meta-discussion on HN. I believe the guidelines have something to say about this, as well: if you disagree with a posting, don't comment about it, just flag it and move on. Adding a comment saying "this doesn't belong on HN" does not at all add to the discussion. That is why I (and many others) will downvote you for your initial comment. It's not because we disagree, it's because the comment is extraneous noise.
- BrandonM 15y ago
  This sort of meta-discussion sucks, but when the majority of the people responding to a comment are wrong[0] (as evidenced by jsdalton's numerous downvotes), then the necessity to educate the members outweighs the desire to avoid meta-discussion. The average commenter here has less than two years of membership[1]; many likely are not familiar with what HN is (was?) all about, and some of the longtime ones are likely getting sucked into interesting-but-vacuous discussion. [0] I consider this to be undebatable. This is exactly the kind of submission pg wanted to avoid when he discouraged politics. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 [1] Just to redeem this post, the following code calculated this: import re, urllib2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup pg = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005365")) user_re = re.compile(r'^user\?id=(.*)$') users = set(user_link.string for user_link in pg.findAll('a', href=user_re)) created_days_ago = 0 # Some error-handling code omitted for conciseness for user in users: profile = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=" + user)) created = int(profile.find(text="created:").parent.nextSibling.string.split(None, 1)[0]) created_ago_days += created print created_ago_days / float(len(users)) # printed 624.666666667 (I've been doing a lot of C programming lately. To be able to do such a high-level task in 9 lines of code is ridiculously sexy.)

kelnos 15y ago

I would downvote myself for this comment that I'm making, but: I generally dislike this sort of meta-discussion on HN. I believe the guidelines have something to say about this, as well: if you disagree with a posting, don't comment about it, just flag it and move on. Adding a comment saying "this doesn't belong on HN" does not at all add to the discussion. That is why I (and many others) will downvote you for your initial comment. It's not because we disagree, it's because the comment is extraneous noise.

BrandonM 15y ago
This sort of meta-discussion sucks, but when the majority of the people responding to a comment are wrong[0] (as evidenced by jsdalton's numerous downvotes), then the necessity to educate the members outweighs the desire to avoid meta-discussion. The average commenter here has less than two years of membership[1]; many likely are not familiar with what HN is (was?) all about, and some of the longtime ones are likely getting sucked into interesting-but-vacuous discussion. [0] I consider this to be undebatable. This is exactly the kind of submission pg wanted to avoid when he discouraged politics. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 [1] Just to redeem this post, the following code calculated this: import re, urllib2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup pg = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005365")) user_re = re.compile(r'^user\?id=(.*)$') users = set(user_link.string for user_link in pg.findAll('a', href=user_re)) created_days_ago = 0 # Some error-handling code omitted for conciseness for user in users: profile = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen("http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=" + user)) created = int(profile.find(text="created:").parent.nextSibling.string.split(None, 1)[0]) created_ago_days += created print created_ago_days / float(len(users)) # printed 624.666666667 (I've been doing a lot of C programming lately. To be able to do such a high-level task in 9 lines of code is ridiculously sexy.)