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Comment by gmaster1440 | Hacker News Reader

There's been an increase in gwern articles on Hacker News recently, I like it. Just curious why now?

Oh, that's easy: because I'm submitting them. More interesting is why I'm submitting them: I've long waffled on whether I should routinely submit my stuff to HN because while one or two submissions did well, most of my submissions sank without a trace. The obvious thing to do in this situation is to test it out systematically, so for the past few days (and until such time as I get bored with it or run out), I've been submitting 3 links a day: 1 link to a good gwern.net article, and 2 links to non-gwern.net articles which I liked a lot.

Do you also submit your links at the same time of the day each day (when the same part of the globe is awake, the rate of new stories is similar, etc.) or do you vary the time? There have been several examinations of HN story performance vs. timing (e.g., http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...).

I submit them early in the morning as one of the first tasks. So the timing isn't perfectly synchronized (I don't think it'll make a huge difference), but they're all fairly comparable. Amusingly, this turns out to be pretty similar to that post's recommended time.

Interesting, I can expect a post on your findings then?

Whenever I lose patience, I suppose. That can take a while: eg my Redshift sleep experiment is up to 495 days so far.

I, for one, am suspicious. Gwern's posting of old articles from his site (which are nonetheless articulate, intelligent, and interesting) makes me think that this is step 437 of a 21352 part plan that ends with him as Emperor of the Moon, laughing as he abuses the escape from Earth's gravity well to extract utility via threat of kinetic bombardment.

To paraphrase Arthur Weasley: "Never trust anyone if you can't see where they keep their utility function."

Perturbation, I am hurt by your comments. What did I ever do to deserve such well-founded paranoia?

What is non-well-founded paranoia? Is it when you think there's a conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind the conspiracy... and so on indefinitely?

n+1 conspiracies are strictly less likely than n conspiracies, for obvious reasons. There's got to be some length of the conspiracy chain beyond which you're forced to assume that either (a) you've postulated too many conspiracies, or (b) there's a conspiracy whose main goal is the creation of ridiculously long chains of conspiracies behind other conspiracies, and it's doing a good job.

Hey, wait! That's my plan.

By the way, I don't think there's anything wrong at all with bribing early adopters. Just sayin'...

Check the username of the OP.

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