[leeoniya]

just out of curiosity, does anyone find these HN postings useful?

wouldn't your critical shit break long before you go read about it on HN? otherwise, why not just rely on their human-friendly status pages that get served if such a thing occurs?

i don't understand why this is on the front page, since it's not an infrequent occurrence.

[colinbartlett]

Misery loves company.

[toufka]

Also the posting comments become a 'place' to put suggestions, alternatives, and other measures to deal with the issue.

[leeoniya]

this is valid, though for stuff that occurs so frequently there should just be a sticky that can accumulate suggestions, not a clean slate submission for every time it happens.

[phpnode]

There is a reliable indicator of whether or not people found the post useful - the number of points the submission has. To be honest, I find comments like yours far less useful, and they are not infrequent either.

[leeoniya]

i find this indicator not to be consistently reliable. anything that gets to the front page (which will never be pure crap), will always get upvotes.

but many (all?) submissions that make it to the front page get there by being manually curated there, not by accumulating upvotes first. on the flip side of the same coin, a lot of good things never make it to the front page, even if they gain a lot of points.