[m2mapps]

Did anyone else find this article to be meandering waffle that has no bearing to anything else on HN? I fear the airplane toilet incident has inspired a host of chemists to start posting on hacker news, creating a subculture.

And yes, I'm totally expecting someone to point to the HN posting guidelines that state that anything that may be of interest to geeks is appropriate...

[jacquesm]

I won't point you to the HN posting guidelines since you obviously know where to find them but with 11 karma I think you should work a bit harder to show by example rather than by voicing your dissent what you feel HN should be like.

[m2mapps]

To be fair, the comment was downvoted, which I accept, but if you disagree with something it's perfectly valid to voice that disagreement. If Karma is a measure of the validity of an opinion, HN becomes a meritocracy.

[sophacles]

Here's the deal. You don't have to agree with the community that this is proper for this community. However, you also don't have to participate. You could just as easily not read the article and move on. Or upon discovering you don't think it's a good article, stop reading in the middle and move on. The time spent on complaining could be put to better use, like advancing the state of text mining systems and creating yourself an automatic curator that finds you only articles you like.

I for one like that these articles get through. This particular one won't get me into chemistry, but it was a fun read, and now I know something I didn't know before. But there are other articles that have been "tangential" that opened new doors for me. Sometimes I don't know there is something out there, and others tell me about it, e.g. through this site. That is useful to me. Pure pull is not the way to expand my knowledge.

And if you're doubtful about how tangential information can be door opening... here is a story about this week: I am currently ramping up on a research project about clock synchronization and security for it. A lot of synchronization systems rely on GPS and this is shown to be spoofable, so we're examining security for those clocks, particularly in geographically dispersed systems. Some guy I was chatting with at happy hour does research in remote sensing in the ionosphere, and was telling me about certain characteristics that the ionosphere imparts to signals from satellites. I had no idea of this, but together we worked out an interesting collaboration on a "tangential" bit of work - using the electron density on the transmission path to help authenticate signals. Probably it's good that I did curiosity and learning about off-topic stuff, rather than say "ooh, cool, I'm do some security stuff" and move on.

[jacquesm]

> If Karma is a measure of the validity of an opinion, HN becomes a meritocracy.

Karma is a measure of time expended.

[hmottestad]

HN is a bit of a meritocracy. Since you get down-voting power when you hit 500 points (or was it 600)?

[lostlogin]

500.

[scott_s]

Voicing disagreement that a particular submission does not belong on the site is boring. It adds no value, and becomes noise. In this case, we care more about the general discussion than an individual's desire to voice disagreement.

[tinsel]

lets discuss ember data issues again. this time we'll have a breakthrough.

[jfb]

Oooh! Or "growth hacking" for consumer startups! That's fertile, unexploited territory.

[rquantz]

No, no one else did.