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), th

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.)