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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I submitted "A Problem Course in Compilation: From Python to x86 Assembly". An 80 page book with worked examples. It got ZERO up votes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1662430

Yeah, I am jealous.

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HN works best for discovery of interesting fields/material. That's why short pieces like the OP get up-voted: if someone hasn't looked at assembly before, they might learn a thing or two. The problem with what you submitted is that there's no easy way to verify its quality, because 1. The author isn't well-known and 2. It's too long (and there's little incentive) for someone knowledgeable to go through it and post a thumbs up in the comments.

If I seriously want to learn about compilation, I'll just Google site:news.ycombinator.com compiler books, and grab the top recommendations.

With the high frequency of posts on HN, I can imagine a post on HN not making it "big" even if it's good. Digg, Reddit and other democratic content sites suffer from the same problem. They don't guarantee that all good posts will be at the top. They only guarantee that all the posts at the top are good. Most of the time, the good stuff gets enough up-votes to have the same behavior reinforced.

I wonder if spending some of your karma to the post would help. Though, I see no dearth of hackers here with a ton of karma, so it would have to be substantial "price" to make that worthwhile.

If you want traffic and downloads, work through the book a little at a time as blog posts, with "learn more" type links to your book. That will both satisfy "the masses" as others said, and solve the underlying problem you're trying to solve.

Goodluck!

That link currently has more votes than this one, despite the pain to skim and evaluate an 80-page PDF. Thanks for the good find.

Not anywhere in any non-trivial population of people will you ever see anything of serious depth and novelty (aka, not some kind of cargo cult "classic") get nearly as much recognition as LOLcat/Hello World type material.

This is one of my favorite communities, but it's not exceptional in that regard.

That said, I like your link.

I think it may be when a site transforms from basically being a resource to being considered a community. I effectively just said goodbye to Less Wrong, which I have followed longer than HN.

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