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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

That seems a bit passive aggressive. I don't think economical value is what is in question, but rather the social impact of the application (or lack of positive social impact).

Applications can be both economically valuable and have positive social impact. Now recommender systems are in fact useful to discover new things, not just to entice people to buy more. E.g. finding new music, related research, or other things.

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The tone of his comment seems to me he's just frustrated a community of programmers took the conversation down the path of debating the merits of recommendation systems rather than exploring the more general applicability of the algorithm in other problem spaces.

I agree with him. Half the time you'll enter an HN discussion and the most upvoted comment will an unrelated bikeshedding discussion.

Usually one of these:

- "I love the idea but can we talk about how the website doesn't look good when CSS is disabled?"

- "25MB of JavaScript? Really? You know, websites used to..."

- "This website is impossible to read because the contrast ratio is too low and I am personally offended."

- "Did anyone else get an ad from this news website? Why does advertising exist?"

- "An obscure open source project uses the same name as this unrelated business. Have you no shame?"

- "The website looks weird on mobile, by which I mean my rooted Android phone running Opera."

- "The text is too big."

- "The text is too small."

When did "comment" transition into "thought-provoking well-defended essay"? Is there no water cooler talk on the internet anymore? I find interesting tidbits and interesting tangents here on HN and I appreciate it all!

I think the "most upvoted comment" part is important here. Tangents are indeed good to have, but I don't think they should occupy the most visible parts of the comment section.

OMG this is so true. Should be a HN bingo.

Contrast ratio is an accessibility issue. One of these things is not like the other.

Very true. But all the same, when I see an article with about 25 comments, click on it, and see that the text has poor contrast, I know exactly what all those comments are going to be saying. Probably nothing about the article at all. The first comment will be about how the site is hard to read - which is a very legitimate complaint. And then the next 24 will be complaining about the design of every other random website under the sun.

Good part is that they visit the link at all.

That is in fact why the mods boot many of the most-upvoted comments to the bottom of the thread. I think it’s incorrect to say that half the time you’ll see such comments at the top.

That’d be like criticizing the development of calculus because it could be applied to the development of atomic bombs. This is first and foremost a mathematical result. When people come up with a new algorithm for the orienteering problem it’s not primarily because they want to be better at orienteering; the same applies here. Your comment is well-written and almost totally irrelevant.

I chuckled when I read it and took it as tongue-in-cheek.

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