The World’s Northernmost Town | Hacker News Reader

The World’s Northernmost Town

scientificamerican.com

55 pointssni32 comments

If this corner of the world interests you, I highly recommend the science-fiction series Fortitude:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498622/

It ran two seasons. Both are worth watching.

I believe there was a short third season

Wow I did not know this! Sadly, it seems to be unstreamable in the US. I can't even find a decent torrent. It might as well not exist.

Some pretty interesting past HN comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Funny to see how many comments come up warning "You need a snowmobile and good rifle skills to do anything useful and be safe from the polar bears." From what I can gather, there's nothing out of the ordinary with that, because it's remote and there really are polar bears roaming around everywhere. There's something very cartoonish and charming about that.

I've liked the little time I've spent in the Arctic Circle so far. What a surreal place to live.

Hello from Phoenix, AZ! Could you describe some of these surreal experiences?

I haven't really done anything more adventurous than a short, touristy stay in an arctic resort in Lapland with a couple of friends. But even that time was enchanted. I'm from the Northeast. From the snow to the flora and fauna and sun, a lot of things felt at once familiar as well as surreal and almost alien.

We get longer summer days and winter nights in the Northeast. But it's much more extreme there, with the polar day and polar night. Lots of berries, reindeer and fish. We tried to catch the Northern Lights but didn't manage to.

I'd love to spend some more time up there, and maybe see some things off the beaten track, though.

I've never been to the 'Nordic' parts of the world, and the closest I have come to actual Winter weather is vacationing in some local mountain ranges that get snow. I have been suggested to see the Northern Lights, and it's definitely something on my bucket list. It would be fantastic to hike in an actual proper snowscape.

Not many people realize, but Longyearbyen is very accessible during the season. There is a fully operational airport only a few miles out that services multiple passenger flights in and out daily. I came by to visit a few years ago and the flight between OSL to LYR came around about 70 euros, albeit I think I had a student discount. I was more surprised there was not more tourist activity, given the novelty.

Woah, 4 degrees Celsius temperature rise since 1970. 7 degrees warmer in winter. That's a lot, no wonder it's changing.

I've been to Longyearbyen and besides a trip to the seed vault, drinking, worrying about the polar bears, thinking the obnoxiously cute Svalbard reindeer are polar bears, getting to Pyramiden, and kicking ice into the bay, there is very little to do. Definitely the closest thing you can get to living in an output on an alien planet that I know about (on this planet, anyways).

Season 2 of the Extremities podcast [1] talks in some detail about this in 6 episodes.

I absolutely love the presentation, and it gets delightfully better with each season. Strong recommend!

[1]: https://anchor.fm/extremities

Should really include the full title: “The World’s Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically”

I considered that, but actually that's the cliché angle of nearly every story about northern places, especially in publications like SciAm and NatGeo, so I think we can safely take it as presupposed. It's not part of the diff: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

> but actually that's the cliché angle of nearly every story about northern places

It's not a cliché when it's true.

I lived in the Yukon for 4 years, and the old timers there tell stories of an entirely different climate. 100F days in Alaska and Yukon are a heck of a thing!

Certainly a cliché can be true. Repeating true things doesn't mean you're not repeating them.

And in the case of severe climate change it's imperative that we DO repeat it. Forever if necessary.

Next you're going to say that telling people to wear masks in a pandemic is cliché, or that professionals should stop telling companies to focus on cybersecurity, because that's a cliché. Repeating things that are true and extremely important is critical. You can't just hand wave it away with "it's a cliché so it's not important".

You need to be more careful what you editorialize to suit your own beliefs. The author who wrote the article chose the headline they did for a reason, and you're changing it to what you want and taking away the entire purpose of the linked article.

Who says it isn't important? It's more important than nearly, if not literally everything else that appears here.

You seem to be under a misconception of what HN is. If importance were the criterion for the front page, HN would be an entirely different forum—something like a current affairs site. It also be repeating the same things every day. I posted a longer explanation elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27486354.

> You seem to be under a misconception of what HN is

Please don't make assumptions about my understanding of things.

Nothing in my comments has anything to do with what is or isn't on the front page, or what should be or shouldn't be on the front page.

I'm talking about how you editorialized the title of the article to take away it's meaning - it's very reason for existing - and the reason someone might want to click it and learn more.

The article itself isn't much about the actual northern town, it's about how climate change is changing it so much - surely the title needs to indicate that.

I was about to respond with something like "please don't edit titles" or something of the sort when I realized to whom I was responding.

Seems like a weird position; it's repeated so much because it's a massive problem that needs all of the attention it can get. I don't see why "repeating" anything is a reason to edit titles.

It doesn't matter who you are replying to - if they're doing something wrong it's very important they are told as much, especially when that person is in an immense position of power.

It will seem less weird if you understand the purpose of HN [1] and how it is optimized [2]. The idea here is to gratify intellectual curiosity. That's not the same as repeating the things that need the most attention; to some extent it's the opposite, because curiosity withers under repetition [3]. What curiosity likes is to encounter things it hasn't heard before; it's fine if there is an overlap with a familiar topic, as long as there's some interesting diff. Diffs are what make submissions intellectually interesting [4].

People sometimes feel that if a story doesn't make HN's front page or gets downweighted or flagged from HN's front page, that's because moderators or the community are saying it is unimportant. This is not true at all. Many topics are far more important than anything on HN. An odd, obscure topic is more likely to be on topic than a world crisis. There was just a thread about John Cage's mushroom hobby [5], of all things.

This leads to a somewhat complex dynamic because having an interesting site attracts a high-quality audience, and people then want to use the site to get stories they care about in front of that audience. Sometimes their motives are merely commercial, but sometimes it's because the story is big and important and they're passionate about it. It's easy to declare the commercials off topic, but when it comes to the important stories, that's when we need to remember what HN is. Maintaining an odd sort of site that goes against the default forces of the internet takes a lot of focus and you have to say 'no' a lot. If we start breaking the intended purpose, HN would quickly cease to be the kind of forum it is today—it would become a site for the same few important and/or most controversial stories, repeated over and over. Not only would that make HN totally different, it would probably kill it, because such a situation would be unstable: the current audience would largely leave, because HN would no longer have the quality that attracted them here in the first place. No one is claiming that intellectual curiosity is the most important quality or motive—but it's uniquely what this place is for, and one has to know what one is trying to achieve and what one is not trying to achieve.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27481830

Would you consider updating the site guidelines to explain this "just the diff" principle? It sounds like an important enough concept to be captured there. And it seems in some cases to supersede the "please use the original title" guideline so it's probably worth calling that out.

[Edit]

I wish I didn't have to continually edit myself but originally I used the term "editorialize" and I thought it had a more broad meaning of "exercise editorial discretion". While there is still an opinion involved in the edit. Something along the lines of "users of this site will already know X so it isn't part of the diff" I don't think it meets the stricter definition of editorializing. "Not part of the diff" is still cited as a justification for editing the title that I don't see covered in the current site guidelines.

I think this case is a bit weird and you shouldn't generalize too much from it. I wouldn't put that principle in the guidelines, for the same reason. These are heuristics, not formal rules, and my comments are just trying to help people understand the intended spirit of the site.

Haha. Everything's changing drastically so "The World's Northernmost Town" is the only thing in this title intellectually interesting. That's an interesting take. A great way to satisfy the diffs guideline would be to add a fascinating hint about how the northernmost town is changing. Leaving out some words isn't it.

Arguing against including the whole title in this case makes me much more curious about how you make decisions and why than anything else.

This is weird mental gymnastics if you ask me. But okay. It's your site, I'm not here to argue.

I know that some aspects are counterintuitive but I don't think it's hard to understand that, without intervention, HN would trend to sensationalism, indignation, hotness, and other qualities which are not aligned with the intended spirit of the site.

But the article is about how they're affected by climate change. Removing that part from the title completely changes the meaning of the article.

You're essentially saying "I'm removing this because I don't personally like it" when it has no other reason to be removed...

Perhaps I didn't read the article closely enough.

The subtitle states the intention of the article pretty clearly and is located directly below the main title:

> Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard

The article's first paragraph is how homeowners are noticing cracks in the foundation due to the terrain under their houses receding due to climate change warming the otherwise permafrosted ground.

The article's third paragraph pretty concretely discusses exactly what is happening to the temperatures there.

The entire article is about climate change. You've removed a very important part of the original title for (in my opinion) some philosophical nonsensical reason, ultimately changing the meaning the author intended.

All the content in the article is about how it this northern place is changing. If the contention is that the title is cliché for noting that things are changing, then the article is cliché for all the same reasons. So wouldn't we want a post title that reflects that (and also matches the article's title) so that readers can judge for themselves whether they want to click?

This is about accurate labeling. If we want cliché articles to have less prominence on this site, it is a matter of moderation, not editing.

[Edited because I got a little off-topic.]

I expect it is bad form to reply to yourself but I've changed my opinion and no longer object to the post title. I think this reply better reflects that than a mere edit...

Not to put words into anyone's mouth but if I imagine what dang or someone else with a similar position might think in response to my post above:

The goal with the title of a post isn't only to accurately convey what the linked content is, but also why it is interesting and belongs on Hacker News and do both of those concisely. And while both the title and content of the article might wander into cliché, framing everything in the context of change, some things that are just plain interesting are included and those are the main reason for it being posted here. I think it is easier for me to recognize that when the post title adds to or modifies the original, pointing at what makes it interesting rather than removing something. But I can see how in this case removing from the article title achieves the same goal so it seems in keeping with the goals of this site.

Oh, and finally I misunderstood the comment about "not part of the diff". I thought dang was pointing at a history of edits to the post title showing he merely chose not to alter the original post title which already differed from the article. I should have followed the link which I appreciate. Though it also makes me concerned about how we can fight the novelty bias it introduces which I think our society and the tech industry in particular suffers from.

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