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Royce-CMR

The best part - the consultant who patched the server is on Hacker News! He commented on his part here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404

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I'd forgotten about that! That part of the thread begins here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23777700.

We put it in /highlights which may be of interest to people: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

> We put it in /highlights..

+1, After two years from joining HN I’m still learning about it. This is the first time I heard about highlights section! I couldn’t find it in lists nor on any other part of the site yet still interesting to read some comments there that do not show up in best comments section. How exactly this works?

The word "best" in /best and /bestcomments doesn't mean best, it means most-upvoted. Upvotes, unfortunately, happen for reasons other than bestness.

It's always irritated me but I haven't changed it, out of deference to history and lack of a pithy alternate name. Anyone?

Maybe /up and /upcomments?

We do not have downvotes, so no risk of ambiguity: my love for clarity would suggest /voted /upvoted

We do in fact have down votes, you just need 500 (I think?) karma to be able to use it. When you see comments that are not "dead" but are greyed out, they've been downvoted more than they've been upvoted.

Downvotes do exist, but you need to reach 500 karma to unlock them, or at least that's what the rumours say.

I don't have them, but I have seen comments in the negative, so there must be some truth to it

Thank you for correcting me, my bad.

what about /top or /topcomments?

I like that!

/bestcomments (or whatever name may become in the future) had a drawback, I believe. Technically speaking (and generally), the comments in this section are the ones that belong to stories from /best (or highest-upvoted). These stories obviously get more exposure and attention, so their top comments get more upvotes. For instance, a story with 2,000 points might have a comment with 200 points (which is tenth the score of its parent story) that will obviously hit the /bestcomments, while a comment of, say, 50 points on a 150-point story (which is a third) may never have the chance to hit /bestcomments.. Just some thoughts about my daily social network :)

There is probably some sweet spot of n between 0.5 and 2, but not near 1, such that the quotient of comment score^n and thread score^n gives good results.

/highlights isn't on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists – is that intentional?

I knew this existed, and I was looking for it a few weeks ago; it's an interesting page to browse through every once in a while. But I just couldn't remember the name until now.

Having a "highlight" people can't find doesn't seem much of a "highlight" to me?

No, I just forgot.

Edit: it's there now.

Edit 2: I feel like adding an "I feel lucky" link on there that would give you a random sample from the list. It's in reverse chronological order and it would take quite a while to scroll back through all of the comments (there are over 400 at present).

I was wondering how I could have browsed to /lists and /highlights and eventually found the first one in the footer of the page. May I suggest to add /highlights there as well? Maybe just after FAQ and before Lists?

It would make the footer too long. /lists is there as basically a &rest pointer to everything else.

> I feel like adding an "I feel lucky" link on there that would give you a random sample from the list. It's in reverse chronological order and it would take quite a while to scroll back through all of the comments (there are over 400 at present).

How about a link with reverse chronology of random highlights, one per year of HN history?

This could inspire nominations for the highlights back catalog.

Nice idea!

Is there a way to search through /highlights by author?

Already with the feature requests :)

No, I just added it to a list. But we can inch in that direction!

Yeah, at the time of writing I kinda defaulted to assuming it was "just" a tag for posts, which one can use the normal search on. But a while later realized that it very likely isnt.

But reading through the list, you made dang good choices in highlighted comments.

Users have begun emailing in nominations. Please do that, everybody!

It would be nice to have software to make this a community-driven process. Maybe we'll build some eventually.

Any chance Algolia might be able to provide that? Perhaps as a different search target, or a qualifier such as "is:highlight"?

So the article says

>Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system.

But the comment

>Since my preference to wipe and reload was unacceptable - too much downtime and too many billable hours - the obvious thing to do was update sendmail

Must be the part where

>The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty

Or it’s just one of the many things that don’t add up because he made the story up.

See the official FAQ, point 1: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

“Trust me I’m not lying”?

I know Trey. He's one of the most honest and forthright people I've ever met.

To a fault, probably.

And as the former comp.mail.sendmail FAQ maintainer, I can confirm all sorts of weirdness can and will happen if you mix versions of the binary versus the config file.

He certainly was honest and forthright about how much he embellished and... "took license" to spin this yarn. After reading the FAQ, I wondered if there was even a kernel of truth to be found in the story, because he successfully poked holes in practically every detail that made it interesting.

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