Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This is actually an excellent service. Many times I see some news item come by and then months later I find myself wondering whatever came of it. At least in this case there is some follow-up, plenty of times there is no follow-up at all. The people consuming the media have a short attention span, but the media themselves also have a short attention span.

There ought to be a 'google news' like facility that you could go to in order to see what came of something that was in the news. We could call it dejanews ;)

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events sort-of manages that, but also highlights the limitations of the linear/textual.

I have a vision of a better way to organize information for the 21st century and beyond, but alas this comment box is too small to contain it.

> but alas this comment box is too small to contain it.

At the lower right there is a little triangle that you can use to drag it larger ;)

There actually is a size limit to HN comments.

That said a link to elsewheere can work as well.

To both you and jacquesm, I may be reading too much into it but that sounded like a riff on the famous last part of Fermat's Last Theorem.

"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers.

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."

Of course it was a riff on that. No need to spoil the joke by explaining it (twice, at that).

In all seriousness I am not yet ready to write it up, nor am I sure that that would be the best medium...I might be better doing it in pictures, a la Alan Kay's demonstration.

See Fermat's Last Theorem.

Yes, I got the reference, see that little ;) at the end is a 'wink' ;)

As a side note, I really like that Wikipedia page. Does anyone know of an RSS feed that scrapes these links day by day or does Wikipedia provide one directly?

That's actually a good idea. I used to write down stories and check up on them after a few months. You learn how sloppy initial reporting is that way, and just how credible "sources close to X says" are actually are. You know, just in case you needed another reason to distrust the news.

What if HN could have a "related post" option? If you remembered (or searched for) the older post, you could then link a given post to some other post.

Oh! And then you could have people rate the relationships, just like they can rate comments!

Oh! And you can put it into the API, making everything into a linked list of stories!

Yes, let's make the schema even more complicated 8-)

Edit: To be clear, I do like the idea.

You just invented the semantic web. :-)

And then we could use an algorithm to use these connections to determine the importance of articles! Name it something catchy, like PageRank

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