The Last Line Effect | Hacker News Reader

The Last Line Effect

viva64.com

69 pointsbaoyu8 comments

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The Evil within the Comparison Functions - https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0509/

Annotation. Perhaps, readers remember my article titled "Last line effect". It describes a pattern I've once noticed: in most cases programmers make an error in the last line of similar text blocks. Now I want to tell you about a new interesting observation. It turns out that programmers tend to make mistakes in functions comparing two objects. This statement looks implausible; however, I'll show you a great number of examples of errors that may be shocking to a reader. So, here is a new research, it will be quite amusing and scary.

Note: [2014]

Probably submitted because of the relationship with this recent post about the osx exposing passwords in cleartext issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432045

The referenced story talks about the last line effect.

Is the point of this comment that the point being made by the article is no longer relevant (i.e. 'obsoleted by the march of technical progress')? Or that you might waste a click on an article that you have read it before? Or ... ???

It's just how Hacker News works - people like older articles to be tagged by year. It's to make it easier to spot things that they may have already read, or that may be interesting but not as current.

Fair enough. And especially with re-titling.

I guess I am getting old and crotchety, so if somebody posts an article about aliasing artifacts using vector EE equipment to play galaxy wars, the quote "[1968]" doesn't seem necessary. It's relevant or not and while time makes all things irrelevant -- it wouldn't be on HN if it wasn't relevant to someone now.

Hmm. I need to rethink my think about that one.

[I am still personally triggered by the people who really really didn't get and yet dog-piled on the Alvy-Smith Rasterization post which remained true - but no one got it. Again ... I need to rethink my think.

Thank you]

> Or that you might waste a click on an article that you have read it before

Shouldn't that be the sole decision of the reader?

The year suffix enables everyone to make that decision on their own.

Some don't want to read anything twice. Some especially like good, old truths. And most are somewhere in the between, having differences preferences depending on the topic.

Fair enough. And almost certainly right.

Where does the line of full disclosure fall on the submitter, the editor and exploration by the reader?

AND! IF we push it to the submitter, does the quantity of high-quality submission fall because they think it's a pain in the ass (that happened to me in use-net, btw: an 'ah, fuck it' attitude after 15+ years in a news group)

Hmmm. I like your balanced approach to thinking about it. But I don't know that my bitching or your response get us any where close to where we all want to be.

Q1: Where do we want to be on this article/position? Q2: How much time does it take from the committed to battle the spam?

Net-net: Tagging articles as old and moving on is a pretty dang good compromise.

EDIT: Anyway - to parent - I get frustrated by the "TL;DR" posts and I want to post angry scrants about learning how to read. But at the end of the day - I'm old and losing. They're young and winning. And, you know? They feel pretty good about it - so I should too... :-)

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