| I didn't mean to scapegoat you to highlight the existence of this widespread problem on HN: People investing too little effort in figuring out elementary things and in the process adding to the clutter of posts that distract from the trunk of the conversation. Someday in the not so future, perhaps all forum posts everywhere can be auto-condensed and auto-recomposed for the purposes of brevity and clarity. Eg: The Natural Language Processing technology licensed from SRI International, that was at the core of Summly, the app Yahoo bought for $30 MM. Until then, we could do what sensible HNers always did - resist adding anything that distracts or leads the conversation astray. HN is hardly perfect. People already bemoan, justifiably so, that not enough striking and incisive stories make it to the front page. Despite efforts, there is plenty of voting-ring activity that bolts undeserving stories to the top. The weighing of upvotes and downvotes (based on the standing of the HNer) could be better. These are all known issues. While these things are gradually improved, we could help by not adding to the tally with this kind of redundant clutter. |