4 ms·

I don't know, "random" wikipedia articles often pop up on the front-page. It's been speculated that some groups use random wikipedia articles to test-run their

I don't know, "random" wikipedia articles often pop up on the front-page. It's been speculated that some groups use random wikipedia articles to test-run their botting. I think a more charitable explanation is often that it's something or relates to something that's going viral on other media, and we get to experience the wash of that, turning up here. The HN ranking is also very enigmatic. You sometimes get articles whose presence you can't fathom, but by the time you refresh it's disappeared entirely. It feels like the live front-page is built for reactivity, not for stability. That's perhaps for the best given there's no "recent trending" type page for that. Edit: This one was submitted 2 days ago, and randomly got front-paged today. It shows "2 hours ago" but mousing over shows the original meta-data of 2 days ago, so this returned via the second chance pool. Genuinely worthy or a fat-finger I wonder?

xnorswap 1y ago
Another way to detect the odd way HN handles articles it re-pushes to the front-page, the wikipedia submissions page, and the submitter submissions page show the original 2 days ago submission time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org and https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe
Rendello 1y ago
I vote up "random" articles if I've found them interesting and learned something new. Occasionally I'll post an article and I've had some great discussions over random things. After all, according to the guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
jszymborski 1y ago
I think it's cool and weird that there is a hybrid celery/lettuce cultivar out there. I would never have found this otherwise. While I love a wikipedia spelunk as much as the next person, hitting the random button rarely gets you truly interesting articles. You're more likely to get a random soccer player or an unremarkable neighborhood in India. None of which would end up on the front page.

xnorswap 1y ago

Another way to detect the odd way HN handles articles it re-pushes to the front-page, the wikipedia submissions page, and the submitter submissions page show the original 2 days ago submission time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org and https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe

Rendello 1y ago

I vote up "random" articles if I've found them interesting and learned something new. Occasionally I'll post an article and I've had some great discussions over random things. After all, according to the guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

jszymborski 1y ago

I think it's cool and weird that there is a hybrid celery/lettuce cultivar out there. I would never have found this otherwise. While I love a wikipedia spelunk as much as the next person, hitting the random button rarely gets you truly interesting articles. You're more likely to get a random soccer player or an unremarkable neighborhood in India. None of which would end up on the front page.