Look Around You - Maths
video.google.com
video.google.com
You can even play one of the fake games ("Diarrhea Dan") profiled in the episode on the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/programmes/compute...
We come here to interact with a group of people with some sort of shared ethos and sensibility, submitting and voting on content we collectively find interesting. If you don't enjoy seeing this on the front page, vote something else up.
I very very much disagree. Online communities really are a slippery slope. People are naturally predisposed to upvote cotton-candy content, and if you start letting any of it in, eventually it will overwhelm whatever nutritional content used to be there. The people who care about good content will stop checking HN, and you'll left with nothing but stuff like this.
Totally. That's a very valid point. It's much easier to upvote an amusing BBC2 video than to digest, upvote and participate meaningfully in a discussion around a serious technical article.
However Hacker News has remained remarkably tonally consistent in my opinion:
December 2007 frontpage: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229130614/http://news.ycombi...
December 2008 frontpage: http://web.archive.org/web/20080701051131/http://news.ycombi...
And it looks like the group nostalgia for the glory days of reddit is a little overblown as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229144532/http://reddit.com/
Ok, maybe not entirely overblown. Most of that stuff looks like it was at least submitted by people who could drink legally.
My current concern with HN is actually not fluff content, but the preponderance of inane business and personal development blog posts. If I have to see one more "how to find a technical co-founder" post... ;)
Thanks Y-Combinator... Thombinator.
Get that MESS OFF HN.
That garbage is a special case of a huge ocean of related grabage that has nothing at all to do with 'math' and, instead, is some brain-dead, K-12, social, cultural, economic, WTF nonsense. Follow the money: The unions of K-12 teachers want taxpayers to send more money for more nonsense. Sickening.
The writers know what they are doing; this parody of mathematics is exactly how real mathematics sounds like to a lay person. This is nonsense, sure: but so is the satirical poetry of Lewis Carroll and the poems of Edward Lear, and the most erudite experts in the English language derive much pleasure from reading such nonsense.
Indeed, the more sophisticated the mind, the greater the need for self-parodies such as this show.