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Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for his daily compute over macOS. The original subm

Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for his daily compute over macOS. The original submission included the timestamp to concisely link to the comment. It might be that autocanonicalizing YouTube submissions to remove the timestamp is the actual issue, perhaps that could be reconsidered.

dang 4y ago
The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity gossip—admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree. Although we didn't write code to do it on purpose, I think removing timestamps from videos (and similar things, like removing HTML anchors) generally does more good than harm, because people tend to use those to cherry-pick some detail they think is important rather than letting the reader make up their own about the whole submission. Generally we try to discourage that (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20cherry%20pick&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which is about titles but makes more or less the same point).
- rezonant 4y ago
  Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can understand the intent with stripping them, but it might be an outsized measure when there are definitely other cases where including timestamps can help with context. Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the submitted title (which we as readers are voting on) matches the actual content you get when you visit the URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned with the submission itself. Ideally, I think this talk should have been two submissions, one for the OS commentary (which HN mods can choose to moderate or not) and one for the actual talk.

dang 4y ago

The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity gossip—admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree. Although we didn't write code to do it on purpose, I think removing timestamps from videos (and similar things, like removing HTML anchors) generally does more good than harm, because people tend to use those to cherry-pick some detail they think is important rather than letting the reader make up their own about the whole submission. Generally we try to discourage that (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20cherry%20pick&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which is about titles but makes more or less the same point).

rezonant 4y ago
Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can understand the intent with stripping them, but it might be an outsized measure when there are definitely other cases where including timestamps can help with context. Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the submitted title (which we as readers are voting on) matches the actual content you get when you visit the URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned with the submission itself. Ideally, I think this talk should have been two submissions, one for the OS commentary (which HN mods can choose to moderate or not) and one for the actual talk.