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Hacker News and Information Overload

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Hacker News and Information Overload

#11
post #5

It's worse than that. Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.

Damn, that's a good post. I missed it. COuld you find the link to that fractal post?

Re: Hacker News and Information Overload

#15
post #6
post #4

I have noticed the same thing and wholeheartedly agree with you. Simple solution: categories with separate feeds.

That leads to the subreddit problem.

How about instead of having the submitter categorize the submission, everybody can categorize it, just the same as everybody can upvote?

Not sure what "the subreddit problem" is. Just wondering if that would help.

Re: Hacker News and Information Overload

#16
I can't imagine trying to read it via a feed reader. Like you said, that's a lot. What I tend to do is just use the site, not even use a feed at all. When I've got 15-20 minutes to spend reading articles, I'll come to the site. When I don't, I don't bother. If its a particularly good article it will be on the front page all day, so I'll get to read it then. If it isn't, well, it probably wasn't worth reading anyway.

Feed readers are good for something you want to read ever single post for. HN is not something you'll want to read everything on, you just (in theory) want to read as much as possible.

Re: Hacker News and Information Overload

#17
post #11
post #5

It's worse than that. Each time an interesting post (say a blog post on fractal dimensionality in the stock market) gets posted ALL of that persons previous work gets posted as well. So you have a head post, followed by 5 other follow up articles which just kills Signal to Noise ratio.

Damn, that's a good post. I missed it. COuld you find the link to that fractal post?

that one ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417463

It's quite a bit older than your account so I doubt you 'missed' it.

Re: Hacker News and Information Overload

#19

It's been mentioned before -- categories and adaptive thresholds (automatic gain) I think every other site has categories. They seem like a natural thing to do.....

Cue some johnny-b-goode to point you to the feature request link at the bottom of the page ;)

But you're right. For starters just two categories would do, hacking and everything else.

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