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Comment by IAmNotACellist | Hacker News Reader

Story begins:

>The appendix is not, in fact, useless

>It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family's upcoming ski trip...

Immediate skip.

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Almost like they were going to suggest their cooking recipe 20 paragraphs later.

That's very funny, thanks for that one haha :)

> The human appendix averages 9 cm (3.5 in) in length . . . . The diameter of the appendix is 6 mm (0.24 in) . . .

You'd need a bunch of appendii for a meal. Maybe one could pan fry them with mushrooms and serve atop pasta.

No, no. You stuff it. It's the filet mignon of sausage casing.

Stuff it with ground placenta and herbs.

+1. I was bit by an article yesterday[0] whose content begins 13 paragraphs in. Seems like this article starts only seven, shorter paragraphs in, which is more tolerable but still annoying.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248326

At least that one presented itself as a story they were telling, rather than a simple factual answer. A headline about an anatomy professor detailing the uses of the appendix doesn't seem like it'll be a meandering tale about that professor's personal experience suffering with appendicitis more than 30 years ago.

This is what happens when content is curated for Google and not human beings

How does Google preference articles with these sorts of framings/intros?

Luckily they labeled the sections so I just skipped to the middle with all the good stuff.

Whats the issue? Its just 1 small paragraph that goves a bit of background about the researcher. This isnt a scientific paper so a tiny bit of fluff isnt so bad.

Humans retain knowledge better if it's attached to a story

I must not be human. For factual information of this sort I just prefer the information. The story is irrelevant and usually too mundane to be bothered with

Only if the story relates to the knowledge. Not a distracting tangent.

This is why many of us are excited about LLMs. This.

I wish an LLM had obviated this thread from the discussion

"Finally, I'll be able to automate turning a short science paragraph into a 10 page story with human interest content!"

* with additional fluff content because Google mandated it to show up in search results.

Seriously, the reason why all recipe sites online suddenly became autobiographies was a policy change by google prioritizing such.

Yep, it goes both ways.

Until Google uses an LLM on every indexed entry. Then people might start writing stuff for that which might correlate more with what users want to read!

So you won't have to write 10 paragraphs of inane filler, a computer will do it for you?

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