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Comment by ceequof | Hacker News Reader

Blogspam. Source is http://www.mathistopheles.co.uk/maths/covering-all-the-bases...

>Blogspam

This is not an accurate characterization and you should be downvoted for it. The article (which links to your source) is great. It's also more approachable than your link, which I wouldn't have read through. (in fact, I did just read through it just now and found it a chore.)

your link also shouts out to our (great) link at the bottom, and calls it "far less circumlocutory". why do we have to read a less approachable source, when we can read a great blog post about it? especially when the link is included for anyone who wants to dive deeper.

secondary sources that explain a subject are good.

I'll take blogspam with a Fields Medalist in its comments over non-blogspam with no comments.

In fairness, the original source gives a calculation that's basically a more quantitative version of Gowers's dimension-of-intersection-of-Cantor-sets argument, and yields the same conclusion.

Both posts have their merits; the OP is more succinct.

That source points to this at the bottom.

From the guidelines:

  Please submit the original source. If a post reports on
  something found on another site, submit the latter.

In this case, it's not just a matter of blindly following the guidelines; the original source goes into much more detail behind the find and search for additional terms in the sequence.

Except that they are both original sources. Two separate sites can come up with similar articles, especially if they collaborated with one another on it. The fact that both articles link to one another with one being described as easier to digest and one being more thorough implies that this is what happened here. Therefore, neither would be blogspam, just different approaches to the same topic. They both have their merits, one is easier to digest, one is a lot more detailed. If someone is interested in the other, they can easily get to it through the links in the respective articles.

The submitted (Google Plus) link was published May 17th. The more detailed (mathistopheles) link was published May 5th and was only updated very recently to link to the summarized Google Plus post. It seems clear to me that the Google Plus post summarized the mathistopheles post.

I do think that the word blogspam is too strong in this case, but given that the mathistopheles post is the original one by almost several weeks, by convention that should have been submitted as the original source.

If it is of any relevance, I am the original poster and I have no objection to Richard Green's article being the one referenced. He has clearly credited me as his source, and very few people would have seen my piece if he hadn't written his. Also his piece is clearly much more digestible in summarising the points of interest, while mine was more of a puzzle (the solution page is the one being referenced) followed by a loose account of my investigation into the problem.

I'm just pleased that it seems to have captured the imagination in the way it has.

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