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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the great things about HN, and indeed the internet at large. Someone posts a link to a little quirk of our world, and then someone is able to pipe up and say "hey that's me! I made that thing!" Even better when it's something like a software bug.

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Yeah but for every superstar post like this there are thousands of equally upvoted yet ignorant comments that play on the sympathies/bias of HN readers for upvotes.

I wish we had more of the former and less of the latter. I suspect no forum is ever safe from eternal September.

What do you suggest as a means for achieving that end?

Cites from journals (not politicized websites like huffpo, guardian, etc) , credential listings, publication listings, etc.

Something like this could filter out the "random geek wanna-be with an axe to grind" type post.

Essentially a reputation system, based on publisher or specific known authors then?

How would, say, something like Thompson's "Trusting Trust" (though I suppose that was published in ACM or IEEE), or a Dijkstra or Pike blog post, rate?

Comments from, say, Linus Torvalds on the LKML, or Lennert Pottering on systemd, or Bill Gates' various book recommendations, etc.?

Comment proving HN superiority over other pathetic news websites.

This happens pretty often on many forums. It's like the Birthday Paradox. You can't expect some creator to chime on on some specifically-selected topic, but relatively often some creator will give their input on some random topic. In the same way, one cannot expect two people in a relatively small group to share birthday X, but can expect two people to share some birthday in the same group with high probability.

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