Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning | Hacker News Reader

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

mariovittone.com

16 pointsshawndumas10 comments

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492835

Many, many, many comments there.

Repeated here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647662

You've submitted a huge number of items in the last hour or so, and these last two appear to have been pulled from HN's own history.

Is this deliberate? It certainly looks so, given that you've added a "#" on the end of each URL, no doubt to avoid the duplicate detection algorithm.

Very deliberate: I post in groups as time allows. I open a tab group with my news sites and I work my way through submitting interesting news. Then, once and a while, I use http://searchyc.com/ to post a few that are more than 200 days old.

It's an OCD thing.

Well, I have no official standing, I'm just a user, but I find your actions with regards modifying the URL and resubmitting old, high-karma items less than honorable.

No doubt others will find it useful, especially those newer to the site who won't have seen the originals, but to me it's just polluting the stream with old material, to the possible and probably detriment of valuable items.

I dislike the whole karma farming business, but the article itself is very interesting and I missed it the first time around.

There are literally hundreds of brilliant articles in HNs history. Learn to mine them for yourself and there's treasure to be found.

Don't rely on other people to do your work, in this case learning for yourself is very useful. After all:

    "Give a man a match and he's warm for a moment,
     set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of
     his life."

That's a very good point.

Speaking of which, thank you for the link to the old one. The comments there were very informative.

You're welcome.

Speaking of which, I've seen you pull out links to dupes probably dozens of times. I assume you're taking your own advice and have a means of mining old HN articles? I have a pretty good memory, but I don't think I would've caught all of those without some computerized help.

You also gave me the idea that maybe there should be an application to trawl through old HN articles looking for good ones (probably excluding old hiring threads and the like), but it's such a simple idea that I'm assuming that someone has already built essentially that and I don't know about it. SearchYC's top feature is close, but not quite what I have in mind.

Interestingly, I noticed that one of the top comments ever according to SearchYC is from btilly commenting on the original article. The other top comment makes me wish that btilly had taught math at my university.

I usually recognise things, and then use SearchYC for them. I do also have an interest in the old, good articles, and I'm working on a system to make them more readily available, accessible, browsable and discoverable.

If anything comes of it I'll certainly announce it here, if I'm still here.

First of all you're not just a user. I think you're a valuable assist in the service you provide. Second; I have a ton of karma that has nothing to do with older posts. Third; I missed this article the first time myself -- and I am here a lot.

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