Ask HN: Would it make sense to have a "Wall of Fame" section on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would it make sense to have a "Wall of Fame" section on HN?

23 pointscs7024 comments

Some links get posted on HN more than once, yet each time they manage to gather enough upvotes to rise to the front page.

The latest example is "A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages," which has been submitted at least three times to HN, on each occasion gathering hundreds of upvotes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896

Would it make sense to add a "Wall of Fame" section on HN to which we can nominate submissions that deserve a special, permanent link somewhere on the site?

View on HN

Or maybe a page with different ranking parameters. If it pays less attention to time the all time greats stick around longer.

Maybe. The challenge in that case would be to separate popular submissions that remain relevant no matter their age (e.g., a timeless essay by pg) from those that quickly lose relevance over time (e.g., news, announcements).

This sort of exists already. There is a URL Parameter you can use to show stories rated over X votes. Or, build it yourself, post it on HN and get shit-tons of traffic - that's one of the great things about this site, there are very few features, but they're super-permissive about what you can do with the content.

Just for fun, http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=500

Thanks for that tip. You're right: the limited feature set is one of the best features of HN. As is the site's super-permissive policy.

Alas, many if not most of the popular submissions returned by the "?points=" URL parameter are of an ephemeral nature (e.g., posts about SOPA and PIPA that no one will care about in a couple of years), as opposed to submissions of lasting relevance for the HN community (e.g., essays like "Worse is Better" -- http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html -- or "The Story of Mel" -- http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html -- both of which will be of interest to the HN community for a long, long time).

I'm not sure it's possible to separate the truly timeless submissions from the ephemeral ones without relying on the judgment of the community.

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