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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Not sure whether such "criticism" is welcome here, since it is ultimately subjective, but I will just be blunt and say: I disagree.

I like this style of writing as well, but I think this article overdoes it, to the point that it became somewhat irritating to read.

The part where I particularly feel this way is when the author spends two whole paragraphs discussing why YouTube (or its developers) chose to sample by "100" segments, to the extent that the author even asks, "If you work at YouTube and know the answer, please let me know. I am genuinely curious." Which, for lack of better words, I found ridiculous.

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> Not sure whether such "criticism" is welcome here, since it is ultimately subjective, but I will just be blunt and say: I disagree.

If this was my post I'd certainly appreciate criticism.

> but I think this article overdoes it

Perhaps its overdone in places, to your credit the question about if 100 was an arbitrary number was a bit much. But, as a counterpoint, I found the related pondering of "might it make sense to have variable time duration windows" to be interesting. The interpolation YouTube ultimately selected is deceiving and variable density could be a way to mitigate that.

There's definitely a healthy balance and perhaps the author teeters on the verbose end, but I mostly just wanted to voice that I was surprised about the type of article it was, but not in an unpleasant way.

Criticism is definitely welcome!

You are likely right that I over-rotated on the "storytelling" aspect there. My curiosity about the "100 segments" stemmed from wondering if there was a deeper statistical reason for that specific granularity (e.g., optimal binning relative to average video length) versus it just being a "nice round number."

That said, I can see how dedicating two paragraphs to it felt like over-dramatizing a constant. I will try to tighten the pacing on the next one. Thanks for reading despite the irritation!

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