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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the URL from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3773v1.pdf because, with some exceptions (such as computing), HN tends to prefer the highest-quality general-interest article on a topic with the paper linked in comments.

This comes up often enough that it is a good case for linking related URLs together, which is something we intend to work on in the new year.

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I think with science that can be a dangerous preference, because of the tendency of the general-interest articles to overstate (and/or incorrectly state) the results. This one is better than most, especially compared to the junk that comes out of university press offices. But it still somewhat oversells the result compared to the more modest claims of the paper. The paper's introduction and conclusion are pretty accessible, imo, and a better representation of the findings than the Medium blogpost is.

That's why I said "tends to prefer". There's no rigid policy—it's a lot of case by case, and feedback from HN users makes the biggest difference in deciding them. You may be right on this one, but it's a marginal call, and the HN comments have clarified the situation quite a bit either way.

There is indeed an industry based on blowing scientific findings out of all proportion, and we do a lot to keep most of that at bay. But the solution isn't as simple as always linking to the papers, and there's no hope of keeping HN immune from this systemic dysfunction, only of correcting its worst excesses.

Thank you. Yes, that reflects my preference. I come to HN for deep interesting information that's also well-summarized and well-discussed. I may or may not always read through to the journal article, depending on my interest in the area, but I value the article link, the summary, and the discussion.

A high quality summary is important. For example, I would not grasp the significance (in the general case) of an HN post linking to an Arxiv paper titled "The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications". The summary will tell me that this is claimed to be (part of?) a proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

In any case, for arxiv papers it's bad form to link to the PDFs rather than the abstract.

before or after you make links not expire?

We eliminated most of those over the summer. Have you had a link expire recently?

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