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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30173379 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27445943 - June 2021 (3 comments)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690250 - April 2019 (2 comments)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16801710 - April 2018 (2 comments)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134712 - Dec 2016 (69 comments)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751329 - May 2013 (390 comments)

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 - Dec 2009 (226 comments)

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This comment is one I still remember from 9 years ago (from the top of the May 2013 thread).

> Then one day a guy came in with a hand cart, loaded the coffee machine on it, and rolled it away. A week later the layoffs started.

> [...]

> In other words, the free sodas are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When they die, it's time to get out if you don't want to die with them.

It's really interesting to read the comments from the older posts. The oldest post was made before bitcoin existed. Times have changed, a lot.

Like this one

> I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd.

I regularly practice just switching to a whole new system and restoring from backups. I think asking an infected system to scan itself is sketchy. Just blow it up, mkfs, and rebuild it. Binaries are disposable.

Maybe it's a Windows system...

It would be interesting to have a view showing all comments from the above submissions on the same comment page.

I guess the ranking would have to be proportional rather than absolute, since I'm assuming more recent comments would have gotten more votes due to a growing audience.

Holy moly, first thread summary I've seen, very cool! Is this an automatic thing now? (assuming url match I suppose)

I used to do this a lot, but I've given up. I used to run a 'bot to do it, but I got a lot of pushback and discontinued.

Dang is a moderator, and he does it when he thinks it's useful. I suspect he does it "by hand" but, like me, has written scripts to help.

Given that your account was created 12 years ago I'm a little surprised that this is the first thread summary you've seen.

Yes - I wrote software that makes it fast to do by hand.

You'd certainly be welcome to resume! I think including the date + number of comments is the important bit, plus not pointing to threads with zero comments - but IIRC you had both of those features.

Edit: one fun fact – it's surprisingly difficult to post links to past threads without coming off as somehow reproaching the latest submitter for posting a duplicate. In reality, HN allows reposts after about a year (and this is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but many people don't know that and interpret the list of past threads as an implicit criticism, which is a shame.

I've tried out a bunch of different wordings trying to minimize that misunderstanding. The simplest one seems to be the most effective - I just say "Related". Somehow the word "related" sounds less like a criticism. It also has the nice property of being inclusive, so for example it's fine to include other articles on the same topic.

One of these years, I still want to build software support for collecting related URLs and related past threads into HN's official UI. Then we can all build up sets of related things collaboratively. That will hopefully make HN more interesting.

Then we can all build up sets of related things collaboratively.

You could also take all the posts and related links, toss them in a big adjacency matrix and, oh I dunno, rank the relatedness of pages.

Dumb jokes aside, these do add a lot of extra structure to the dataset and people might think up something interesting to do with that.

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