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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: There are no uninteresting articles on Wikipedia. I can even prove that mathematically. It's a proof by contradiction:

Start with ranking all articles by their interestingness. Then order the list and look at the lowest values. There must be a least interesting article. But the very fact that this is the least interesting one in the entirety of Wikipedia makes it interesting.

In the same way, I assume the least viewed articles in this blog post will have lost their status by now.

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:-) and surely enough there is a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

I'm doubting the validity of the proof. It seems to assume that there is exactly one least interesting article (the least interesting article). But maybe there are hundreds of articles that have the same lowest amount of 'interestingness'. I would say that then those hundreds of articles are uninteresting.

That's because they botched the proof. You need to sort the articles not by interestingness, but some separate canonical property, like creation date. Then you get a (here chronologically) first uninteresting article, which is interesting.

You assume A) that the set of interestingness values is both finite and discrete and B) that it's cardinality is extremely low. Both things can be remedied by defining a more comprehensive kind of interestingness that lets you compare more articles.

In the interest of being pedantic, the article actually looks at the least viewed articles in 2021.

Which part of the statement would that affect?

>I assume the least viewed articles in this blog post will have lost their status by now.

No matter how many views they get now, they would still be the least viewed article in the year 2021.

And neither was anything of that sort claimed.

>I assume the least viewed articles in this blog post will have lost their status by now

You didn't directly say it, but as the status given them in the blog post was "least read article of 2021" the statement is wrong. It's more because you worded it ambiguously, but that's why you got a pedantic reply.

The statement still remains valid, since the current year is no longer 2021 and it doesn't claim that the list is absolute or eternal. Neither does the article.

The blog post is specifically about the least read article in 2021, and in that context saying it can lose that status is wrong. The "least read article of 2021" is now eternal.

I don't get why you're so reluctant to admit you could have worded something better. "I assume the least read articles of 2021 mentioned in the blog post are no longer the least read articles this year" would have said the same thing without the ambiguity. It's not that big of a deal.

But it actually was the least read article at that time. Since that time is past and the post was made together with links to the least viewed articles, it's a given that they no longer are today.

This does require that the interestingness of being the least interesting article is large enough to cover the gap between least interesting and next-to-least interesting (plus the interestingness of being next-to-least interesting). Probably true, QED

Then it would be even more interesting, because of the more complex gap dynamics. The more you add to this argument, the more interesting things can potentially get.

In the extreme case of a Wiki with two articles, one about WWII and another about the 14th meeting of your HOA to address hedge height limitations, there will never be enough interesting properties of how uninteresting the HOA article is to achieve interest parity. I'd expect the gap dynamics and further will get geometrically less interesting, such that the sum of all levels will never exceed double the first.

The proof implicitly requires a large set of objects. See also the linked page in one of the other comments. Since Wikipedia contains millions of pages, you can directly convert the other proof.

You have to actually do it, though. Until somebody finds the least interesting article and thinks about it, it isn't interesting. Mathematical properties are eternal and exist whether or not anyone is looking.

You don't have to actually do it. In the same way you don't have to calculate and sort every number's prime factors to prove the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Or, a closer example: You don't need to calculate Euler's number to prove that it exists. For the articles, you only need to postulate that individual ones can be more or less interesting than other articles.

I think it doesn't proof that there are no not interesting articles, rather that sorting itself introduces a side-effect affecting the score. A paradox indeed.

No least interesting article, surely?

Unless articles become interesting if they're in the wikipedia category "Uninteresting".

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