Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

This is literally the twentieth (!!) time in less than two months that this talk/paper has been submitted to Hacker News. The entire concept of this kind of website (Hacker News / reddit / etc.) really needs some major innovation to deal with this variability of response to content combined with repetition of material over time due to the rotation of readers (which eventually leads people to move to new communities of people with a different seed base of "stuff already seen"; a problem I call "the cohort problem" and have given talks about at times).

(There is also something weird going on where Algolia claims this specific post appeared 19 hours ago while Hacker News itself claims it appeared only 3 hours ago. What's up with that?)

As mentioned in another comment, I will argue the video is a much better way to experience this, due to a combination of the humor of the presenter and being able to watch it actually function. (After seeing it on Hacker News when it was posted six or seven weeks ago, I showed this video to the first day of a class I am teaching this quarter on the nature of programming languages.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016364

You sound like a ribosome in a follicle complaining "More keratin?! Really?! Can't we make something else?"

> This is literally the twentieth (!!) time in less than two months that this talk/paper has been submitted to Hacker News.

It may be the twentieth time the talk has come up, but it's not for the paper; I check my submissions with hn.algolia.com usually.

> (There is also something weird going on where Algolia claims this specific post appeared 19 hours ago while Hacker News itself claims it appeared only 3 hours ago. What's up with that?)

Algolia is counting my original submission last night, not the boosted resubmission by dang or whichever HN mod decided to give it a second chance.

Personally, I didn't find the video better than the paper.

I maintain "talk/paper" as the talk video links to the paper; the opposite happens to not be true, which is why it is so much more interesting to tell people "there is also a video". FWIW, if your goal is just to link to different landing pages or sub-representations of the same thing, we could also submit the PowerPoint file itself. (I will also say that I guessed it was moderators that made the bump but purposely didn't make that explicit. That to me just underscores the need for a more fundamental fix to the way that content appears, as it makes clear that the twentieth time posted this was also just going to be do poorly again without manual intervention.)

I mean... for what it's worth, I'd never seen it before, I would never have seen it without the manual intervention, and I loved it and think it's perfect for HN. I don't think we really need a 'fundamental fix' for anything, seems to be Working As Intended (tm) ;)

> That to me just underscores the need for a more fundamental fix to the way that content appears, as it makes clear that the twentieth time posted this was also just going to be do poorly again without manual intervention.

I agree, there's far too much randomness to HN. The two-tier structure is part of the problem; even with mod boosts, it's frequently the case for a link to fall off /newest with no upvotes, while on another occasion, it'll get +100. I see this all the time when checking my submissions: a link will be submitted 5 times previously over many years, and only 1 will do well - obviously, the link quality hasn't changed, yet the ratings are contradictory.

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