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I appreciate that decisions have to be made, but it's odd that several of the things I think of as HN classics don't appear to be in this list. Things like "Th

I appreciate that decisions have to be made, but it's odd that several of the things I think of as HN classics don't appear to be in this list. Things like "The Story of Mel" ... how can that not be there? What submissions do you think of as classics, and yet don't appear? How can the selection criteria be improved? ================ Edit (After OrangeMonkey's comment): Sorry, OrangeMonkey's reply to this comment made me realise that "The Story of Mel" isn't necessarily recognised by everyone, so I did the HN search[0] and here are the top few hits. I haven't made all these into links, because you can do the search for yourself. If you do so you'll see that the exact same URL is submitted many times, but doesn't always get 30 or more votes each time. Possibly different URLs are found and submitting because the previous ones are rejected by the dupe-detector. Finding the true HN classics is not a simple job, so consider this a useful test case. If your criteria don't find this one, maybe a more complex selection criterion is needed. The Story of Mel (1983) (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html) 445 points|thunderbong|17 days ago|167 comments The Story Of Mel (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html) 169 points|jacquesm|8 years ago|77 comments The story of Mel (1983) (http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html) 80 points|vaksel|13 years ago|22 comments The Story of Mel Explained (http://jamesseibel.com/blog/?p=109) 68 points|seibelj|7 years ago|25 comments The story of Mel, a Real Programmer (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html) 43 points|donw|14 years ago|9 comments The Story of Mel (1983) (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html) 22 points|thefreeman|8 years ago|8 comments The Story of Mel ... (http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html) 19 points|urlwolf|12 years ago|17 comments [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+mel https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+mel

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
For those, like me, who needed it: * The Story of Mel (1983) - 17 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 * The Story of Mel Explained - July 20 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phgn 4y ago
It's really hard to attribute all these posts to the same content when they use different URLs.
- ColinWright 4y ago
  These are just the top few in the search engine's rankings. If you search for the URLs you'll see that some of them have been submitted many, many times. For example: * 12 times: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html * 6 times : https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html * 4 times : http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html * 3 times : http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html It's just that subsequent submissions have not always scored as highly, exactly because people recognise them. Perhaps "classic" should be: * Has scored more than 50 points on some submission[0]; * The URL has been submitted more than 10 times[1]; ======== [0] For some value of "50" [1] For some value of "10"
- cxr 4y ago
  This is the tip of a much bigger set of related, often frustrating problems. It's a problem with annotations in a loose sense, for example, which involves anything that relies on URLs as identifiers. The reality is that URLs _are_ identifiers, but it's necessary to recognize that they identify different "printings" (e.g. a work carried by many different "publishers"—The Story of Mel carried by Lindahl is not the same printing as the one carried by Brunvand, for example). There's a lot we're missing out on by abandoning the lessons (and conventions) of legacy print media in the move to the Web. The addition of "accessed on $DATE" in bibliographic citations is an indicator of how we've truly messed things up with this abandonment and by our desire to treat the Web as a sui generis medium unlike anything that came before. Both this and the industry at large has normalized/legitimized (professionalized, even) unhygienic practices in publishing. What's needed is probably something like the way OpenLibrary functions as a registry for works and particular editions, or an open database like graph.global where you can can mint relations linking individual pieces of content—this thing (identified by URL $X) and this other thing (identified by URL $Y) are the "same" thing. However, I think we'd most benefit as a first step from a technological and social re-calibration of the way we interact with URLs entirely: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803419> (It's telling that the "past" links at the top of all HN submissions point to a search by title, rather than a search by URL. I've personally hit minor hurdles in my own Algolia searches that turn up 0 results, only to eventually realize that it's because the URL I've entered differs from the one that was submitted in their respective "https"/"http" schemes.) The convention I outline in that comment is probably the way to go. If I could refer to <https://apress.com/P. Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. Apress, 2009. https://apress.com/P. Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on...> then that would help a lot. It wouldn't fix the deduplication/canonicalization problem, exactly, but it would reinforce some good habits and the way we conceptualize the things we're working with, which could lead to this sort of thing becoming more tractable.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

For those, like me, who needed it: * The Story of Mel (1983) - 17 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 * The Story of Mel Explained - July 20 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

phgn 4y ago

It's really hard to attribute all these posts to the same content when they use different URLs.

ColinWright 4y ago
These are just the top few in the search engine's rankings. If you search for the URLs you'll see that some of them have been submitted many, many times. For example: * 12 times: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html * 6 times : https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html * 4 times : http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com//~lindahl/mel.html * 3 times : http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.html It's just that subsequent submissions have not always scored as highly, exactly because people recognise them. Perhaps "classic" should be: * Has scored more than 50 points on some submission[0]; * The URL has been submitted more than 10 times[1]; ======== [0] For some value of "50" [1] For some value of "10"
cxr 4y ago
This is the tip of a much bigger set of related, often frustrating problems. It's a problem with annotations in a loose sense, for example, which involves anything that relies on URLs as identifiers. The reality is that URLs _are_ identifiers, but it's necessary to recognize that they identify different "printings" (e.g. a work carried by many different "publishers"—The Story of Mel carried by Lindahl is not the same printing as the one carried by Brunvand, for example). There's a lot we're missing out on by abandoning the lessons (and conventions) of legacy print media in the move to the Web. The addition of "accessed on $DATE" in bibliographic citations is an indicator of how we've truly messed things up with this abandonment and by our desire to treat the Web as a sui generis medium unlike anything that came before. Both this and the industry at large has normalized/legitimized (professionalized, even) unhygienic practices in publishing. What's needed is probably something like the way OpenLibrary functions as a registry for works and particular editions, or an open database like graph.global where you can can mint relations linking individual pieces of content—this thing (identified by URL $X) and this other thing (identified by URL $Y) are the "same" thing. However, I think we'd most benefit as a first step from a technological and social re-calibration of the way we interact with URLs entirely: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803419> (It's telling that the "past" links at the top of all HN submissions point to a search by title, rather than a search by URL. I've personally hit minor hurdles in my own Algolia searches that turn up 0 results, only to eventually realize that it's because the URL I've entered differs from the one that was submitted in their respective "https"/"http" schemes.) The convention I outline in that comment is probably the way to go. If I could refer to <https://apress.com/P. Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. Apress, 2009. https://apress.com/P. Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on...> then that would help a lot. It wouldn't fix the deduplication/canonicalization problem, exactly, but it would reinforce some good habits and the way we conceptualize the things we're working with, which could lead to this sort of thing becoming more tractable.