| I don't disagree that HN has been preoccupied with political issues recently. Given the nature of these political issues (and their direct impact on tech) I'm not sure that this is such a bad thing. As far as this thought: > Great minds could be focused on better things. I disagree. I feel our focus on these things is extremely important. Don Knuth says it well here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html > "If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won't the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?" Of course, this is just a re-wording of Edmund Burke's famous (and oft-used to the point of cliché) quote: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The point is nonetheless valid, however. If hackers don't commit to thinking, speaking and debating about political issues relating to tech - who will? Sure, HN might be an echo chamber where we preach to the choir until our faces are blue - but it provides a place for us to hone our arguments, build alliances and keep our fingers on the pulse of the hacker community when it comes to such issues. All of that said, I couldn't agree with you more on this point: > "Very few are evidence of some "interesting new phenomenon". Most are a rehashing of the same old topics." I'd definitely like to see less than 7 articles on the front page every time Snowden opens his mouth, unless all those 7 articles each have something unique and interesting to add to the discussion. I'm not sure how this can be reconciled with the fact that if 7 different posts about the same thing make it to the front page, then there is obviously a massive interest in the community on that topic. What about the wishes of all of these contributors, who have voted already in our debate by putting the content on the front page in the first place? One possible solution is to implement some sort of clustering system that groups posts about the same topic into a single "uber post" (with links to articles and a single comments thread). I'm neither a NLP nor a ML guru, so I have no idea how feasible this would be to automate given such a small data set. I'm also not sure if a manual tagging / grouping system would carry with it more overhead than it is worth. Most of the time (when we are blissfully ignoring the NSA, censorship, etc.) the front page is reasonably diverse. |