[TheLoneWolfling]

I guess the difference is:

I consider the possibility of a random person coming across something and finding it interesting a worthy goal in and of itself. You do not.

This is a rather fundamental difference, and as such I do not think that anything I say will reconcile the matter.

[dalke]

My analysis is that there are two classes of random people, while your analysis has only one. Class 1 is "random person coming across a page" and class 2 is "random person who cam across a page and expressed interest in possibly working on the problem." Both can become a member of the desired goal, that is, someone who contributes concrete help.

Experience says that both categories are low. Perhaps there's a 1:10,000 change for a member of class 1, and a 1:500 chance for a member in class 2.

If I do as you suggest, I might raise that to 10:10,000 and 10:500.

However, my belief is that directed email has a higher stickiness, because of the reasons I mentioned earlier. I believe those statistics become 1:10,000 (ie, unchanged) and 15:500, respectively.

If you work the math out, you'll see that it's overall better to send the directed email.

Another option is to do both, which you'll see is what I did for the question that was asked. Your complaint is that I should haven't sent additional information in private mail, which is odd given that HN's own guidelines suggest that there are HN-related questions that are inappropriate to post and should instead be done by email.

You have also stated that I do not "consider the possibility of a random person coming across something and finding it interesting". This simply isn't true, as you can tell from the analysis above, and from the two pages I linked to two pages where I have posted information meant for random strangers to hopefully identify.

You've come across like you are irritated for being left out of the conversation. I've suggested a few topics I could discuss, but how can I say more when you haven't expressed any specific interest about the problem (either on SMILES or short word compression). When writing, it's good to have a target audience in mind. Should I assume a basic understanding of arithmetic compression, or start from the basics? Do I need to explain state machines? And so on.

My above analysis left out the work factor. Rather than write 40 different essays, each aimed for a different set of strangers (chemist background, CS background, math background, web dev background), etc. and with at best a 1:100 chance of success, it's a better use of my time to just work on the code. I believe I could do what I want in about 2 months.