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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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Which articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?

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--I would exclude these:

Why Amazon Vine is a Threat Worth Talking About (jonbischke.com)

Facebook | Username (facebook.com)

MySpace Is In Far Worse Shape Than Its New Executives Thought

Does It Matter If The Future Isn't Available In Canada? (techvibes.com)

Authors, poets replace reporters at an Israeli newspaper for one day

All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours (techcrunch.com)

Heyzap (YC09/USV) looking for a flash contractor.

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise (newscientist.com)

Should you move your startup to the Valley? (tonywright.com)

Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address (newyorker.com)

All my games are now free (toucharcade.com)

How to find new startup ideas? The answer is in the question. (dashnine.org)

More Ways to Sell Out of Your Startup Stock (wsj.com)

A post college memorandum (alexjmann.com)

The TV industry is where the newspaper industry was five years ago: In denial. (businessinsider.com)

The Economics of the HDMI Cable Ripoff (marginalrevolution.com)

Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming [scribd] (maps.org)

Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website (time.com)

--I would include these:

Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC

The hairy ball theorem

Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django

Linus Torvalds on some good git development practices

Offline Processing on Google App Engine [scribd]

Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey.

What is RubySpec?

Great talk on the Python GIL [video][slides in comments]

Hell, yeah! I'm sold. Not only do I hope you build it, I also hope it lasts a long time without declining in quality.

Where do you draw the line? I see the pattern for most of those (things that directly relate to code), but it seems arbitrary to include The Hairy Ball Theorem but not Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming.

I realize the answer is probably "I know it when I see it" - but then, how do you make sure other people know, too?

Two comments:

- bug here, the reply button wasn't in your message until I refreshed the page

- I agree... I think maths is extremely hackish (maybe not a wikipedia link though)

the reply button wasn't in your message until I refreshed the page

This is by design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585507

Ah thanks

Good question, I thought about those twice when compiling the list. The Hairy Ball theorem however did generate a great discussion on how it applies to game programming, so that's why I added it. As for the LSD article, while interesting, I didn't think that it was enough about code to matter. The key here isn't that we are trying to replace proggit and HN, but merely trying to organize the scope of the posts better (naturally there will be some overlap); So you should be able to still visit those sites for the lighter programming articles.

Fair enough, but how would a user decide whether a story is on topic? For Hacker News, the one-liner is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I guess what you have in mind is anything that will foster interesting discussion about programming?

More or less, anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity about programming

Have you tried proggit? http://reddit.com/r/programming

It's pretty tunnel-vision, programming focused.

IOW, you would evict the userbase.

If those stories were excluded, I'd be very uninterested in visiting here. This sort of tunnel-vision is why hackers and engineer types often seem completely out of touch with society -- and not in the good way. It's engineer-itis.

I enjoy the engineering tunnel vision that good days on HN provide me. On the bad days, HN, for me, is sort of only the culture and pieces of society that those who don't know much about either are interested in. To learn about people, places, and things I don't know anything about that aren't hacking related - I go outside.

If you don't have engineer-itis, you probably shouldn't come here. If I didn't, I wouldn't. The discussions that veer off of technical tracks (like politics, economics, social issues) are full of so much noise and emotional opinion that they make good stuff harder to find.

Count me in. Sometimes I go to dzone for my fix of programming news but they have pretty much zero discussion, which is essential in order to debunk the crappy articles.

I believe greatly that being a "hacker" is more than being a great programmer (although that is an important aspect). It means (as a job title) you can take an idea, transform it into a working business based on programming and profit both monetarily and through experience.

Many of those are "learn by others' experience." Others have great tidbits of hackerish potency that, once exposed to, may give you an "ah-ha" moment when you're trying to figure out a problem. Others, even, expose you to new technology or different technology you may be interested in learning or using in a project.

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