For those (like me) wondering what became of that P != NP proof. It seems to have generally been discredited (though not yet retracted). Note that I'm just reporting what I found here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458
But I don't keep up with this area, so maybe the status of that work is more contentious than Scott Aaronson makes it appear.
If you enjoyed this you might also like Wayback HN, a past project of mine! You can look at top posts by year, month, and day. http://www.waybackhn.com
One thing still bothers me as a techie is that the death of Steve Jobs ranked first, and Dennis Ritchie 8th, I know that Hacker News is about business as it's about tech, but I just think that the contributions of Dennis Ritchie to our modern world compared to Steve Jobs are much bigger, I hope they both rest in peace.
It's indisputable that Steve Jobs is more of a household name than Dennis Ritchie, even among techies, it's likely that Jobs and his accomplishments are more well-known. The other thing to consider is that Ritchie lived a fairly full life, reaching the age of 70. Steve Jobs died at 56. More importantly, he died while basically at his peak...Apple had surpassed Exxon to become the world's most valuable company in 2011, and by all accounts, Jobs still had plenty of ideas and initiatives. So there's a special amount of tragedy involved with Jobs.
There are a lot of unsung engineers and scientists who were happy to keep out of the public eye. One of the things that Jobs did well was publicize himself and make his ideas and opinions known -- and undoubtedly, his attitude and drive pushed Apple to success...coincidentally, such a characteristic gets more notice...so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jobs's death hits more people.
Whether or not you agree with it - the fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs inspired many more people than Dennis Ritchie did. This comment is not meant as an affront to Ritchie, but simply as an explanation for why you should not be "bothered." Get bothered over poverty and disease, not pop culture.
Well, you can argue that a couple of ways. From the business side, Steve Jobs built the largest company in the world that brings together tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars to produce tech products used by hundreds of millions of people. That's no small feat.
Larry and Serge have done a similar feat with Google, for example. Hopefully, Elon is on his way with Tesla and SpaceX.
I really don't want to have a nerd fight over Steve Jobs, I just want to make the point that by being a business leader, one can have a much larger impact than by being the smartest nerd in the room.
Jobs did that by good marketing and design plus use of sweatshops, lockin tactics, legal attacks on outside innovators, and hoarding of most cash results. The latter are a common way to make lots of money. The great design and marketing let him make more than the rest. The only real impact, though, is in a few areas: inspiring people to put desktops into phones (big one); lockin of those (another big contribution); one company's, balance sheet.
Alabama actually has pending legislation right now that finally takes the proper approach to this whole thing.
The state will simply record marriages reported to them. A person can be married to one other person and outside of writing it down the state is no longer involved. They actually cited the state getting involved with marriage licensing a hundred years ago as due to legislative desire to prevent race mixing.
Getting out of the process entirely is the most logical way to say "Enough, there is no debate. Move on."
My simplistic understanding of history is that this is how marriage was in the Western world for hundreds of years. Two people just said they agree to marry and the local church would record it. No ring, no ceremony, just two people agreeing.
I am not so sure about that. In many places you have a new wave of anti-gay sentiment, often connected to the "new right". Hungary even changed it's constitution to restrict marriage to man+woman in 2012.
The 2013 "NSA collecting everything you do" entry claims 611 comments and 1,689 points, but the thread linked to only has 1 point and is [dead]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133321
In casual observation, I've found that to be the case in every submission/comment site I've read (Slashdot, Reddit, HN, etc). The submissions that seem to gather the most comments are always the ones about politics, social drama, and "real-world" news.
Just taking a guess here: the really interesting technical submissions might just appeal to the users who are fond of that subset of tech, but the political ones have a broader interest? Or maybe it's that the technical submissions don't really cause the same emotional response (well, barring stuff like Heartbleed, or other serious issues in tech).
This is explained by political topics being a lot more accessible than technical topics. Also given technical topics require investment in them, more specific technical topics have a more limited available audience.
For example for a given topic say Scala your audience of possible commentators and upvoters you must draw from the entire population of HN readers that includes programmers, and from this subset you must draw those competent and interested in Scala.
So of course political topics will always be higher rated than technical topics.
Remember that the mainstream media made billions by figuring out how to match content to specific demographics. They hit as many political and emotional buttons as possible in the process. Human nature, esp the emotional brain, applies even on Hacker News.
"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert."
Outlawed by Amazon DRM ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392 ) tells the story of someone having their Kindle remotely wiped by Amazon with no explanation. Someone in the comments claimed to work on the Kindle and said some aspects of the story should not be technically possible.
Was there ever any followup to this mystery?
Either Amazon's explanation, or clarification of what happened on the device?
Some of the stories in the top make perfect sense. Other stories look a little odd in hindsight...
Something interesting is that the top score seems to have peaked in 2011 with 4339. No score since then broke 4000 and there were two that didn't break 3000.
One interpretetation is that there's a lot more posting going on and it's hard for a single post to maintain a top spot as well as potential changes to the ranking alogrithm. Another option may be less engaged users. Maybe a mix of both.
It's affected by algorithm changes. For example, the software now downweights any story that's 18 hours or older, with the intention of flushing the front page so that the stories with largest inertia don't just sit there.
I doubt it's that users are less engaged. It appears that HN had its most active Sunday ever today in terms of unique visitors. I've been meaning to look at some graphs of number of comments over time because it feels like those have gone up lately, too. If anybody else wants to make them, the data's public...
Ah interesting. I was thinking even if the algorithm didn't change the volume could have had a side effect on it. Do you expose the history of the algorithm?
It'd be interesting to get a median upvote count for the top 1000 stories by year...Perhaps the algorithm change most noticeably affects the very top end of the scale (e.g. by increasing gravity)...but perhaps this is less pronounced in the middle of the pack of top posts.
The other thing to consider is that no one of Steve Jobs's stature in the tech community has died since Steve Jobs. Or at least, died tragically. I hope Bill Gates (and his philanthropy) go on for many more decades, but I imagine his passing would be on notable to the tech community on the same scale as Jobs's.
Although maybe I'm completely overlooking someone who has died since Jobs, I would think the top deaths in each year would be among the top posts (e.g. Leonard Nimoy in 2015). My second most up-voted submission is Ray Bradbury's death...my top submission being a major drop in Linkedin stock price...Linkedin/MongoDB bashing is about as timeless as death :)
No matter what he did or how many mistakes he made, he deserves peace. We all made mistakes, maybe his was much public since he was famous, but that was not the subject of my comment.
But I don't keep up with this area, so maybe the status of that work is more contentious than Scott Aaronson makes it appear.