Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes lately.
While I have also noticed many duplicate articles, one way the community could try to avoid them would be by making sure that they are posting original sources (as suggested in the official guidelines), and not random blog posts (like the post a week ago).
Yeah, although sometimes it's not particularly obvious. I've noticed a lot of links to a site called http://ontwik.com/ being posted in the last few months (a Google search for ontwik on news.ycombinator.com shows over 100 results). It's a site that seems to take embeddable videos from YouTube, Vimeo and the like and turn them into pages like http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of-moz... .. I can see why people are linking these things up, even though it should be the original YouTube video getting the link.
I think this might show that stories disappear from the front page too quickly -- although of course slowing that down would result in frequent visitors seeing less new material.
However, the window for even a popular link to remain on the front page nowadays continues to shrink. It's akin to the "attention span" of the site dropping. It has its pros and cons but shows that the system that fit the audience in a certain way in the past no longer does so (at least, it does not yield the same results).
My personal and subjective judgment is that this certainly becomes a bad thing at some point due to the lack of cohesion between users' experiences. Instead of a large share of the user base sharing a similar site wide experience, instead we only share knowledge within threads that we happen to see and participate in. There are, then, entire "shadow" discussions occurring in other threads that cover exactly the same topic. Fragmentation.
Wow, I had no idea the ads were so huge and invasive. It made me wonder how much Ralph Lauren spent to have their ads take what seemed to be over 50% of the on-screen real estate.
It's interesting to see the typo fixes and how long different stories last. At 2:11 a story relevant to us all. I wonder (with regards to his point about things disappearing forever) if a distributed effort among "tech people" to catalog a lot of websites would work, different people run nodes that are given tasks. Would be neat to keep a track of the top 1,000 article driven sites for a year (not just news, reddit, hn etc.)
> Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour
This has happened to me a few times. Recently I had accidentally collected over 100,000 copies of a website over a 3 month period after forgetting the thing was running.
Perpetually.com solves this problem. In fact, they're already working with newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and for every major federally elected political candidate. More than just random screen captures, every article, every change, every link and state are preserved. It's like Apple Time Machine for the Internet.
Wow, completely agree about how the layout, and emphasis on different headlines, topics, categories, advertising etc.. are all huge indicators of society's interests and conceptions of the world. That said, I would be surprised to learn that the nyt doesn't store their front page every day into some archive? If they don't, then someone must!
The CMS has all the rankings. Rank meta data is stored with articles, including (if published in print) where it was in the physical paper and what editions(s).
On the web site front, there are internal process capturing the Homepage HTML and that goes back maybe 10 years at this point.
On a more public level you can still find the Homepage from a given date here:
Depends on what you define as "important", but with 6.5 billion people on the world, there are certain to be remarkable or notable events with great regularity and frequency.
Important to whom? What people find remarkable and notable varies wildly. What may be notable to one group (say the residents of X-town may find the mayoral election notable) might not be to another (Y-town doesn't care).
Something remarkable or notable may happen every day, but it's not necessarily the case that something remarkable or notable to a specific person happens every day.
Yes, because "the news" reports equally about all events around the world... riiiiight...
News is there to advertise, plain and simple. Whether it's paid "ads" or (anti)government policy or various lobby groups. It has very little to with 'world events', and more to do with "What will get peoples' attention".
Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes lately.