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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

When I see a seemingly "random" post on HN I always wonder if someone happened across some random bit of info and thought it so interesting they just had to share, or if there's some other bit of related news I haven't heard about. Did we just discover space starfish on Mars? I'm guessing I would have heard about that. Or did someone post a paper challenging axial twist orthodoxy? Guess I can google that.

But there's a delightful span between seeing someone post something on HN unrelated to AI, Cryptocurrencies or startups selling VS-Code extensions and the moment when I satisfy myself something outlandish (like space starfish) hasn't happened. During that time, all things are plausible.

[Edit. Which is not to say I disparage or discourage posting cool things you've found on the net. That's kind of what many of us are here for.]

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One of the most delightful things involving reading HN is seeing a strange, context-less post in the morning, and then, later in the day or evening, coming across another piece of information- maybe a popular article on another website or a very popular youtube video- that then leads you to some research hole, possibly wikipedia'ing and following the older, linked sources- where you wind up on the exact page linked from the random post that morning and it becomes pretty obvious that you just retraced the exact steps that a like-minded individual had done earlier that day.

It's happened to me several times where I doubt it could be simply recency bias coupled with chance of topics, due to the specificity and narrow directed-ness of the graph.

same. it happens to me all the time on HN.

on one hand, i feel like this is a text-book example of the Bader-Meinhoff illusion [0].

but... there's an actual causal mechanism that could drive it.

show an interesting article to the HN crowd -> some subset of HN readers are inspired to go down a wikipedia rabbit hole and post some cool thing they found back on HN -> people that saw the original interesting post will not only see the related followup post, but they'll upvote it and cause even MORE to see it

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

This is definitely an actual phenomenon on HN -- someone posts something interesting and it gets a bunch of HNers to go down the rabbit hole together.

A couple weeks ago there was one about leeches:

"You shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45001005

"How Leeches Made Their Comeback" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045235

"Leeches and the Legitimacy of Folk-Medicine" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45009629

"This is my brain on leeches" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037109

Ah yes. We should have an annual Leech Day to commemorate.

(HN feature request- community calendar)

I hereby declare August 28 as Leech Day. Everybody save up your favorite weird HN posts for the year, and we'll compile them in an annual celebration of all the nerdsniping that goes on here.

For all I know there is already a /calendar because I didn't know about /best for a long time.

It is definitely a delightful thing to learn about dimly illuminated corners of the human experience. I enjoy learning about new, weird things almost as much as I enjoy seeing the glee with which people chat about them.

I'm pretty sure that article about online poker was posted because someone saw my "86 million is alarmingly less than 52 factoiral" comment. Glad they did, now I have it bookmarked again

No reason to speculate. I certainly do that sort of thing: I read a bit of news, wonder about some of the details, look them up (on wikipedia or anywhere) and then post an in-depth article I find on the subject to HN. Usually I do that after someone's posted the main news article on HN, but sometimes I manage to ninja the ninjas. Some times the in-depth article is more interesting, or more HN-interesting, than the related news article so the news don't get posted on HN at all.

Anyway if I do that, there must be others who do so too, and probably not just a few.

>axial twist orthodoxy

My impression is that this isn't exactly settled science. If you look in the history for the article you can see that it's mainly written by the lead author of the main citations. He also did the cute illustrations that everyone loves

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Marci68

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