| HN Mirror

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.