5 ms·

Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?

fishtoaster 13y ago
I was confused for a bit as well. Reginald is raganwald, one of the more prolific hacker new users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).
- _frog 13y ago
  Somewhat tangental, it would be great to be able to sort that list by average karma. There's a lot of users in that top 100 that got there via quantity of comments alone, it'd be interesting to see who the most _valuable_ contributors are rather than just the most prolific.
  - oblique63 13y ago
    Points are a pretty bad approximation of 'value' though. My shortest and most mundane comments are always the ones that get the most upvotes, meanwhile my lengthier ones that actually lead to insightful discussions hardly get any. And I've seen that same complaint around here from other users for a while now. The only real 'solution' I could think of would be to use slashdot's odd voting system, but meh...
  - akx 13y ago
    Execute this in the page's scope. Works on Chrome at least. (function(){ var table = document.querySelector("table tbody tr+tr+tr td table tbody"); [].slice.call(table.querySelectorAll("tr")).map(function(r){var c=r.querySelector("td:last-child");return [c?parseFloat(c.innerHTML):0,r]}).sort(function(a,b){return b[0]-a[0]}).forEach(function(r){table.appendChild(r[1])}); }());
simonsarris 13y ago
Because many of us care about raganwald's voice. He's among the top 10 in all time karma on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- joeblau 13y ago
  Oh wow, HN has a leader board. I didn't even know about this.
  - thisistheend 13y ago
    Just proves points are bs.
    - foolfoolz 13y ago
      Then why do I want them so bad?
    - antiterra 13y ago
      Then why did you make a new account?
      - xtrumanx 13y ago
        Did you make your account for HN karma? I would imagine most people did it to submit comments/links.
        antiterra 13y ago
        Are you pretending to not get the implication that it was a throwaway account just for that comment?
        levosmetalo 13y ago
        Maybe it's a way of self censoring, and not because of the fear of karma loss, as your comment might suggest.
  - robin_reala 13y ago
    See also: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall
lhnz 13y ago
Because he is way above the intelligence of 90% of HN users and noticeably so.
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  Why so insulting? Is there a way to flag a comment, or I need more karma on this account?
  - lhnz 13y ago
    How is that insulting? It's the reason that he's high on the leaderboard and the reason that he is recognised by the community. I'm just stating the truth here - he is unusually smart. Edit: It has to be pointed out that I was responding to a comment which said "Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?" which was in fact a rude thing to say.
  - DrJokepu 13y ago
    There is a way indeed. Just click on the "link" link within the comment's header. On the standalone comment page there will be a "flag" option within the comment header. There may be a karma limit or something though; I'm not sure about that.
sytelus 13y ago
I think it's not interesting to vast majority of the HN users. They probably don't even know who this guy is or care if gets job at X or Y company. What is happening is here is though there is small number of people who does know him (may be < 100) and they all upvote this link or write redundant comments of congratulation in quick succession driving it to the top. This is one of the scenario that downvote button could have prevented allowing rest of the users to indicate that they are not interested. Without downvote, their only recourse is to vote something else which gets pretty thinly spread at least in some small time window while those 100+ users are upvoting this.
- m0nastic 13y ago
  I feel like you don't understand what a community is... Hacker News is an online community. It has a pretty open membership policy, which is that, if you show up here over a period of time, and manage to not get hell-banned, you're a part of the community. Congrats! Part of being in a community is that it's pretty common to have a kinship with other people in that community. This place isn't a real-life place, so naturally, that kinship might not develop as quickly, or spread as deeply as one might in person. But you'd be surprised that it can still develop. So, "the vast majority of HN users" might not actually know who raganwald is, but I'd bet they've probably seen at least a few of his comments, at least if they've spent any amount of time here. However, "the vast majority of HN users" aren't actually the community. There's nothing stopping them from being part of it, they just aren't. Which is fine (I don't consider myself to be, for what it's worth). But when someone who is a part of the community has something good happen to them that's of interest to the community, people share it. The fact that this story is popular is a triumph of community, not a shitty side-effect of this place not operating the way you wish it did. I hope it continues to feel this way, lest it really turn into a shitty link aggregator that you so wish it were.
  - mhartl 13y ago
    Well put.
  - larrys 13y ago
    I agree with almost everything you are saying but would like to point out that in my observation on HN some community members (by your definition of "community") are more equal than others. And what they say, think and perhaps up vote or flag means quite a bit. Noting last paragraph of this top 10 profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm

I was confused for a bit as well. Reginald is raganwald, one of the more prolific hacker new users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

_frog 13y ago
Somewhat tangental, it would be great to be able to sort that list by average karma. There's a lot of users in that top 100 that got there via quantity of comments alone, it'd be interesting to see who the most _valuable_ contributors are rather than just the most prolific.
- oblique63 13y ago
  Points are a pretty bad approximation of 'value' though. My shortest and most mundane comments are always the ones that get the most upvotes, meanwhile my lengthier ones that actually lead to insightful discussions hardly get any. And I've seen that same complaint around here from other users for a while now. The only real 'solution' I could think of would be to use slashdot's odd voting system, but meh...
- akx 13y ago
  Execute this in the page's scope. Works on Chrome at least. (function(){ var table = document.querySelector("table tbody tr+tr+tr td table tbody"); [].slice.call(table.querySelectorAll("tr")).map(function(r){var c=r.querySelector("td:last-child");return [c?parseFloat(c.innerHTML):0,r]}).sort(function(a,b){return b[0]-a[0]}).forEach(function(r){table.appendChild(r[1])}); }());

simonsarris 13y ago

Because many of us care about raganwald's voice. He's among the top 10 in all time karma on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

joeblau 13y ago
Oh wow, HN has a leader board. I didn't even know about this.
- thisistheend 13y ago
  Just proves points are bs.
  - foolfoolz 13y ago
    Then why do I want them so bad?
  - antiterra 13y ago
    Then why did you make a new account?
    - xtrumanx 13y ago
      Did you make your account for HN karma? I would imagine most people did it to submit comments/links.
      - antiterra 13y ago
        Are you pretending to not get the implication that it was a throwaway account just for that comment?
        levosmetalo 13y ago
        Maybe it's a way of self censoring, and not because of the fear of karma loss, as your comment might suggest.
- robin_reala 13y ago
  See also: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

lhnz 13y ago

Because he is way above the intelligence of 90% of HN users and noticeably so.

levosmetalo 13y ago
Why so insulting? Is there a way to flag a comment, or I need more karma on this account?
- lhnz 13y ago
  How is that insulting? It's the reason that he's high on the leaderboard and the reason that he is recognised by the community. I'm just stating the truth here - he is unusually smart. Edit: It has to be pointed out that I was responding to a comment which said "Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?" which was in fact a rude thing to say.
- DrJokepu 13y ago
  There is a way indeed. Just click on the "link" link within the comment's header. On the standalone comment page there will be a "flag" option within the comment header. There may be a karma limit or something though; I'm not sure about that.

sytelus 13y ago

I think it's not interesting to vast majority of the HN users. They probably don't even know who this guy is or care if gets job at X or Y company. What is happening is here is though there is small number of people who does know him (may be < 100) and they all upvote this link or write redundant comments of congratulation in quick succession driving it to the top. This is one of the scenario that downvote button could have prevented allowing rest of the users to indicate that they are not interested. Without downvote, their only recourse is to vote something else which gets pretty thinly spread at least in some small time window while those 100+ users are upvoting this.

m0nastic 13y ago
I feel like you don't understand what a community is... Hacker News is an online community. It has a pretty open membership policy, which is that, if you show up here over a period of time, and manage to not get hell-banned, you're a part of the community. Congrats! Part of being in a community is that it's pretty common to have a kinship with other people in that community. This place isn't a real-life place, so naturally, that kinship might not develop as quickly, or spread as deeply as one might in person. But you'd be surprised that it can still develop. So, "the vast majority of HN users" might not actually know who raganwald is, but I'd bet they've probably seen at least a few of his comments, at least if they've spent any amount of time here. However, "the vast majority of HN users" aren't actually the community. There's nothing stopping them from being part of it, they just aren't. Which is fine (I don't consider myself to be, for what it's worth). But when someone who is a part of the community has something good happen to them that's of interest to the community, people share it. The fact that this story is popular is a triumph of community, not a shitty side-effect of this place not operating the way you wish it did. I hope it continues to feel this way, lest it really turn into a shitty link aggregator that you so wish it were.
- mhartl 13y ago
  Well put.
- larrys 13y ago
  I agree with almost everything you are saying but would like to point out that in my observation on HN some community members (by your definition of "community") are more equal than others. And what they say, think and perhaps up vote or flag means quite a bit. Noting last paragraph of this top 10 profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm