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I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN discussion from years ago and wish I
by thadt 4y ago
I get the sentiment. Many times I've been trawling the Internet for commentary on a topic when I come across a fantastic HN discussion from years ago and wish I could ask a question, or make a comment in that conversation today.
However, our gating factor is time and attention - we only have a fixed amount. I suspect that what makes many HN discussion valuable is that the few top discussions draw most of the focus of a large part of the community at the same time. Without that concentration of focus, you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time.
Long lived threads and resurrected discussions from the past diffuse that time and attention. While I like the idea of longer term discussions (a lot!), spreading the beam of focus gets us less 'power on target' for the topics of the day.
- Agraillo 4y agoYour comment inspired... HN is a pool of ideas of "above average" quality fighting for the attention of readers in evolutionary sense. As in the life they born and die, the lifespan is very short, but the "DNA" of the best fitted lives somehow through the users passing them to other users.
- akiselev 4y ago> you don't get those spontaneous interactions where someone makes a comment about a decision made in a 30 year old piece of software powering half the Internet, and the guy that wrote said software responds with the rational for why he made that decision at the time. Perhaps less glamorous but one of my favorite HN moments is a recent link to the wikipedia article on Grandma Gatewood [1] where someone asks “Any of her descendants here on HN? She had 11 and it's been more than half a century now…”. Minutes later… > Hi! I’m her great-great granddaughter. I actually met the thru-hiker mentioned in the comment above, Dixie, in October 21 and we still keep in touch! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321521
- dang 4y agoYeah, that was great and I added it to the highlights list at the time. That's a list we keep of particularly good or cool comments - we used to publish them periodically (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22hacker%20news%20highlights%22%2020&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but it was too much work. Anyone who wants to can see the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. It's just a handful and tons more are out there, so if anyone finds a post that belongs on it, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com. I figure this'll be useful for something someday.