A Once-in-a-Lifetime Bird | Hacker News Reader

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Bird

theverge.com

32 pointsTomte15 comments

Open articleView on HN

Very cool art and parallax animations between the sections.

Which bird was it? I can't give enough fucks to wade through 6000 words for the name of a bird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwing

apparently common in europe, but rare since it was in maine

Ah, I completely understand you, too high of a noise:info ratio. It was a redwing.

There's many paragraphs like these that bring nothing. I couldn't care less of what brand of car he drove or how early he was used to get up in the morning.

> Three days later, Hitchcox woke up at 3AM. He picked up Louis Bevier in his Prius, and they drove up Route 1A toward the coast, admiring the ascending sun peeking over Acadia National Park. Bevier observed a thin crescent moon, rising as well, as they made their way to Steuben".

Chris greeted the duo at his house at 7AM, pleasant and slightly begrudging that it was the earliest he’d woken up during the pandemic. Despite his high spirits, he was nervous about bothering the locals. So they treaded lightly, so as to not upset Chris’ neighbors before he’d even met them. “We were three dudes walking around where there’s not usually three dudes walking around,” Chris says.

Thanks. Exactly what I was looking for.

"I don't want to read the whole thing, can someone just tell me whether Ahab catches the whale or not?"

Thats different though. There are so many pieces of journalism that start "It was a cloudy April day when Someone McSomeoneface finished their coffee and walked outside and had no idea that later that day they would take the first steps towards revolutionising sock manufacture" and you just know from the first sentence that its just going to take fucking ages to tell you anything

That's my point. Those stories are specifically about the journey not the destination. You don't read long-form articles to ingest information, you read them for the flowery prose and turns of phrase and evocative mental imagery.

Well then they should stop using enticing headlines. Its making promises they cant deliver. The headline should just be "a long form article about birdwatchers"

What does "A Once in a Lifetime Bird" tell you that isn't "a long-form article about birdwatching or ornithology or something"? It's not particularly calling you to any specific action. Clicking through and seeing the subtitle "Birding saved one man’s life. Maybe it can save the rest of us from climate change?" makes it even more obvious that it's some sort of personal story.

I read that headline and my first thought is "I don't particularly care about birds, probably not gonna click." (My second thought in this case was "curious to see on HN, I wonder if there's a specific connection?" so I clicked the comments.)

Well, does he?

I read Moby Dick. I know Moby Dick. Moby Dick was a friend of mine. Cecil, this article is no Moby Dick.

The story says it was a redwing, and as a fun bonus in ONE place in article they use the word "thrush":

> Days later, a redwing did appear just 180 miles southwest in Portland, Maine. It was a much better, safer location for visiting birders — a public park instead of someone’s backyard. The ABA email announced it. The thrush stuck around the city for two weeks, where Hitchcox estimated a few hundred people turned up to witness it.

I think a redwing is a kind of bird in the thrush family of birds.

Are there any fairly good off-the-shelf auto-summarizers with modern NLP?

I would also like to know about this.

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