Hacker News: 2016 Top Stories | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News: 2016 Top Stories

hn.algolia.com

42 pointssaycheese10 comments

It's an eventful year when Alan Kay's AMA isn't even in the top 30 of submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851

With the meme that 2016 was a particularly deadly year for celebrities, it'd be interesting to do a count of death posts that made it above a threshold of up votes -- maybe 30? Like other similar metrics, it's limited by a selection bias -- i.e. It consists of folks considered celebrities to the HN Crowd, which apparently doesn't include Debbie Reynolds, but does include lesser known pioneers in tech -- but it'd still be interesting to count. David Bowie was the most popular death post in 2016. His death might be the most prominent for folks who don't think Castro's death was bigger news.

I like to search Algolia for PDFs from time to time:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf&sort=byPopularity&prefix=f...

Not that it's surprising, but it is unfortunate the highest slots are dominated by politics and other emotionally charged topics, with intellectually challenging topics much further down.

Are intellectually-challenging and emotionally-challenging mutually exclusive? In my experience they tend to coincide.

Anticorrelated, especially regarding the actual intellectual engagement.

It's great, because we should be more aware of the political and societal implications of technology.

The top story, Apple's refusal to bend to the governments request to assist in compromising security on the iPhone, was hugely important.

It's also interesting that Google/Facebook/Amazon have not made anything like the same commitment to user rights and privacy.

> It's great, because we should be more aware of the political and societal implications of technology.

As one can see in the guidelines, awareness-raising is not the purpose of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All stories are about raising awareness... even if it's about awareness of a particular algorithm.

As for if politics is on-topic or not? The mods didn't delete the threads, so I assume they were considered important enough, and on-topic enough not to be deleted.

Personally I couldn't care less, creating and disseminating technology is already a political act.

Politics and emotions have the largest audience. They'll always be able to get more votes than everything else.

This is a better link since it's only for 2016, instead of the past year:

https://hn.algolia.com/?%20%7B%20%7B%20%20settings.style%20=...

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