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by cflyingdutchman 4136 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html "The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter."
2 comments
Killswitch 4136 days ago
Someone hacked together something and is sharing it. It's exactly what HACKER News is about. Heaven forbid someone do something relevant to the site and share it. Lets get some more X rewritten in y lines of JavaScript posts instead.
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nerdy 4136 days ago
While it has cute aspects it's also a very cheap, elegant solution to automation on a whiteboard which most people probably think of as out of reach.

It's somebody's project, not a cat video.

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cflyingdutchman 4136 days ago
It's a very cool/fun project and definitely not a cat video. I do believe that it's relatively "shallowly interesting" and I haven't read any comments yet that would indicate to me otherwise. I take the 550+ up-votes it's gotten as a sign that the value (for me at least) of the hacker news filter is slowly degrading.
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gammarator 4136 days ago
Sincere answer: I look and this and think: how did they do that? Do I know how to do that? Could I do parts of it "better"? Knowing this is possible, are there cooler things I could do with it?

If you're willing to think about it for a little while, there's much beyond shallow interest.

Snarky answer: Would you consider toy railroads relevant to hackers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club

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