It had to happen- there's relatively fewer pg, patio11, raganwald, wheels, tptacek, swombat, etc., and more of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903880
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how his asserted graph deserves the points it has now.
Without those useful 900 words, the post is just "Yeah, I think there are some roughly seasonal peaks and troughs and it peaked in summer '08. btw it's winter '09, rough times lol."
Have you seriously never heard the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words"? It's a very common saying. The point is that an image can convey a lot, not that you need a certain number of significant figures in your image:word ratio. Lighten up.
Come christmas break some of the college kids will drop some ineresting academic stuff and things will look up.
When I see a post about education, I expect tokenadult to have a well sourced and reasonable comment on the topic. When I see a post about security, I expect some intelligent and experienced discourse from you, cperciva, or dfranke. patio11 is consistently arguing from experience about things he knows, like uISV, Rails, and A/B testing, with real-world examples to back it up. These are really valuable posts.
Something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924045 isn't entirely valuable, but it's not a bad thing.
However, something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876726 misses the point entirely and becomes harmful in its Ludditism. To go straw: Do we really need a "product" like plumbing to replace our evolved mutually beneficial practice of shitting wherever we happen to be? Do we really need any of this so-called "medicine" to "hack" nature without consequences?
It's a shy step from vaccine frenzy and represents a titanic reputational blow that- in the absence of proven, public results or credentials- limits the ability to take people seriously. When the quack-science spouting is utterly indistinguishable from what might actually be an experienced person talking from an educated viewpoint, the whole signal is poisoned. No one ever wants to ask the random oracle more than one question.
I'm thoroughly disappointed though... from crystalis' later post, it appears you guys all have areas of expertise, but I'm just some kind of generalist or something... cries
I'm sorry to have left you out of the direct accolades- I figured you'd be happy in the company of pg, of so much merit that it need not be mentioned. Your posts are consistently thoughtful, reasoned, and insightful, with an incredible signal/noise ratio. You're just smart, and you write/do/make awesome things.