Testing Ancient Ships | Hacker News Reader

Testing Ancient Ships

nautil.us

36 pointsdnetesn12 comments

Sad how clickbait Nautilus is becoming (or was it already):

"Archeologists Are Planning to Sink This Ship Dozens of Times"

"Once that superstructure model is conclusive, they’ll be able to repeatedly simulate the shipwreck until they find the storage pattern for the amphorae that matches how they ended up in reality."

They aren't sinking it dozens of times, they're just simulating it in software. It would be equivalent to saying "engineers crash the same car a million times", whey they're just doing a software simulation.

You're right about that title. We'll be more diligent. Thanks

Pardon my presumption in asking, but assuming that clickbait titles actually work as intended, what balance do you seek between pageviews and accuracy? In relation to that choice, what type of audience do you seek?

We avoid clickbait titles, compared to what you see on a lot of sites, but try to make the title appealing and accurately informative. Pageviews are important, you want to be read...but we always strive for accuracy and context. It can be a fine line struggle that all media goes through.

Does nautil.us sponsor hackernews now or does hackernews just really like the content on nautil.us?

Looks like op scrapes nautil.us and posts anything, which gives them more karma (~26000) as nautil.us articles generally do well. Creating a feedback loop.

Karma doesn't directly influence story submissions, so I don't think there's a feedback loop there (if that's what you mean).

The op gets karma from the submissions because they do well enough so the op just keeps submitting them. Feedback loop.

Sounds like a virtuous cycle, as opposed to a vicious cycle. We could do worse.

It produces a lot of "Yay! X" where in this case X is archeology/classical Greek civilization/ shipwrecks. Perhaps the X's it picks tend to stand out as intellectually interesting among a tide of "Yay! Money" and "Yay! Science" articles.

HN really likes nautilus content. Although dnetesn does post a lot of it.

nautilus (sailor in Greek) is posting an article about ships. That made me smile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com