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Please reread the Hacker News guidelines. Any articles that gratify intellectual curiosity are on topic. This article may be a bit fluffy, but it fits the bill.

> This article may be a bit fluffy, but it fits the bill.

I don't even know whether this was intentional, which makes it the best kind of wordplay

I personally love novel and lighthearted articles.

Particularly on Friday afternoon when I don't feel like doing much.

The problem is that ppl like you and me can't downvote. Voting systems without downvotes take the expectation of the half-rectified utility across the readership, not the regular utility. So ridiculous articles like this one can survive in spite of having negative true utility. Also, more sensational articles are naturally at an advantage (expectation scales linearly with standard deviation on half-rectified functions). Just one way of thinking about it.