3 ms·
> The thread runs for close to a year, and then just stops cold in August 2022 with no resolution. "Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?" * https://x
by throw0101d 3y ago
> The thread runs for close to a year, and then just stops cold in August 2022 with no resolution.
"Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?"
* https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
- toyg 3y agoSome datascientist out there should crunch the numbers and give us the probability that an XKCD link will appear in any given HN post. I bet it's fairly close to 1. One day we will have an "XKCD number", to represent how far from an XKCD reference any existing concept is.
- chaboud 3y agoMaybe the useful XKCD number would be the proportion of comments before and after the first XKCD reference? There’s also the “true XKCD percentage”, which could exceed 1 for highly XKCD’d topics.
- toyg 3y ago> the useful XKCD number would be the proportion of comments before and after the first XKCD reference That would be XKCD velocity, I guess.
- ploum 3y agoVelocity is indeed a nice idea. According to XKCD’s law, the probability to have an xkcd reference is proportional to the number of comments (see https://ploum.net/xkcds-law/index.html https://ploum.net/xkcds-law/index.html ) But adding velocity is really nice. Should think more about it…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amenghra 3y agoI don't consider myself a datascientist but I did some HN x XKCD analysis a while ago. The HN dataset is hosted on Google BigQuery and it is included in some TB per month of free tier processing you get. I.e. you can answer your question quite easily. See my stuff if you are interested: https://www.quaxio.com/hackernews_xkcd_citations/ https://www.quaxio.com/hackernews_xkcd_citations/
- gavinhoward 3y agoGreat post! You should submit a Hacker News post for it!
- amenghra 3y agoFeel free to resubmit it on a slow news day -- my submissions tend to fizzle out.
- layer8 3y agoThe even better case is when the user posts “nevermind, found the solution”, but doesn’t post the solution, and marks the thread as “[RESOLVED]”.
- neilv 3y agoMore recent Pro variant on the theme: You have a problem. You get a Google hit to a Reddit post. The top-voted Reddit comment has replies saying "That worked! Thanks!". But the comment with the answer is deleted, or replaced with boilerplate text protesting Reddit enshitification (and sometimes also advertising the automated tool to do this scorched-earth redaction yourself). Like both Reddit and the poster with the answer once at least partly understood the altruistic open-sharing global good that the Internet could be, but then they both forgot, or decided other things were more important to them. Fortunately, you can sometimes recover the answer from archive.org.
- ars 3y agoAnd even better when that person is you.... and you can't remember how you fixed it last time.
- forgotusername6 3y agoUsually when this happens I eventually realise that I'm the problem. By which I mean I'm doing something stupid/obviously wrong. If nobody else has this same problem with a common bit of software then I'm likely making a typo on the command, not completely following the instructions etc