

Ask HN: why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? - hhm

This is something that I don't really understand well. Why do we have less science (or music, arts, whatever not directly programming &#38; startups related) content here? If I remember it well, we used to have about 50% programming &#38; startups, and 50% content that was interesting to hackers even if it was outside of those subjects. I even think the name change to Hacker News was to avoid focusing too much in startup &#38; programming content (the previous name was Startup News)... why did the community almost entirely drop it?<p>I think the problem isn't that we don't like it when it appears, but that for some reason people isn't posting it so often. I haven't had problems posting maths, science, etc content into the first page, so maybe if everyone is interested in this we could try to post such content more often?<p>What do you think?<p>(Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.)
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gaika
I think people are a bit afraid to post things outside of the main themes. The
quality and relevance of such posts is a lot more subjective, so you always
will see people complaining that it is not hacker news.

~~~
hhm
Well, I guess we can discuss whether science is one of the main themes or not
here... In my own pov, science is not only inherently related to technology,
but also it's a common interest of everyone I know that works on high tech.
Not so sure about general tech and web startups though.

~~~
jackchristopher
Science and technical stuff require a high level of intelligence to
understand. It's even harder to comment usefully in a discussion.

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nickb
I've been posting quite a few of them in the past (science, neuroscience,
cogsci etc) but they never got more than few points. People just don't seem to
care.

Another thing is that many business related links never propagate upward
either. I've started my own mini news site that will be all about
business/finance/management. I haven't give the link to anyone yet. Anyone
interested?

~~~
j2d2
What's the url?

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nickb
I haven't advertised it yet but you can find it here: www.newmogul.com

It's still missing some pages: about etc. but everything's functional.

~~~
j2d2
I assume you're using a tool to see when people make comments on your posts.
Got a link for it? I had considered writing one just last night.

Thanks for the link btw. This looks neat.

~~~
nickb
Yes, I use an RSS feed for comments. ycfeeds.com

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brentr
I have to agree with you. While I find tech news interesting, I am also a big
fan of science news. I'm not a hacker, but I hang around HN because the
community seems to filter out very well all of the garbage found on Digg.

I came to the HN because of YCombinator and my ambitions, but I am no longer
studying computer science (I have changed my major to mathematics and physics,
pursuing what I dropped my first go-around at an undergraduate degree). I stay
because this group shares many of the same interests in news. If science posts
were to show up, then all the better. If not, then it may be that this group
is more inclined towards tech news.

------
Alex3917
The reason there aren't more science submissions is probably just that there
isn't very much good science writing on the web. Most of the science articles
being written today are basically just poorly summarized press releases
covering cleantech, medicine, space, and the physical sciences. Most of the
announcements are bullshit to begin with, and the fact that the writers don't
know what they're talking about makes it even worse. If there were people who
went out and read interesting journal articles and wrote up the results in a
readable way then I'd be all for that, but the number of people doing that is
basically zero. Aaron Schwartz et al. were trying to do that for a while on
their blog Science That Matters, but they don't seem to even exist anymore.

~~~
hhm
There are some interesting blogs to follow though... Terry Tao's, and Scott
Aaronson's are two examples: they can be very technical, but when they are
more focused in the general public, they are great.

~~~
jackchristopher
John Baez's stuff, and Overcoming Bias is also good.

I'm _dying_ for non-technical science writing. I want to know what those guys
are _thinking_ , not read a popular write up.

They're usually good, even when it's outside their field.

~~~
hhm
Yes, I follow these too. Others are: The Unapologetic Mathematician, The
Reference Frame (if you can filter the hating), Symmetry Breaking, Gowers's
Weblog, Plus Magazine (sometimes), Not Even Wrong, Cosmic Variance,
Backreaction... also some Arxiv rss's.

~~~
jackchristopher
You literally just made my _week_.

And you make great submissions to HN too.

~~~
hhm
Cool, you're welcome! Uncertain Principles is cool too; from all these, go
through the links and you'll probably find a few more.

~~~
aswanson
Your submissions are high quality and technical, the way I like them. I would
ask you to continue to submit from your sources, especially since the stories
about what googlers eat for breakfast are getting old....

~~~
hhm
Thank you! Sure, I'll keep submitting whatever I find interesting in the
little time I have.

------
ojbyrne
I posted an article on my blog about how, at digg, science ended up being the
best quality category (largest promotion/submission ratio -
[http://owenbyrne.com/2008/06/05/yet-another-random-digg-
list...](http://owenbyrne.com/2008/06/05/yet-another-random-digg-list/)). My
impression at the time was that there was no money in science - So people post
crap constantly in other categories, because that's where the dollars are.
There's a lot less money in the promotion of science, hence less sock-puppets,
gaming, etc.

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davi
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift>

Maybe in a small population social news site, the 'norm' for content can drift
in a similar fashion to allele frequency in a small gene pool.

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bootload
_"... why do we have less science related posts now that in the past? ..."_

I don't know but every time I post an article detailing the hard science
behind say a wired, the economist, newsweek, salon or FT post it will be
ignored. The reason behind this might be the fact the real science doesn't
make for entertaining reading or more likely journalists explain difficult
things in an more entertaining way.

------
pierrefar
I think there are two questions here we need tease out:

1\. Are enough science stories being submitted? If not, why not?

2\. What happens to the science stories when they are submitted?

I can't answer the first question (anyone got data?) but from experience
submitting a few science stories is that they get a couple of votes and die.
This, I think, is an interesting observation.

The hint of an answer also comes from my experience: I get my science news fix
elswhere. HN, to me, is about things that make me think harder/better or see
the world in a new way. Granted that's not always the case, but the gems here
outclass any gem elsewhere I've seen.

So what think is happening is that we don't care for mainstream science news.
I think for a science story to survive here, it needs to be a slightly off the
beaten path subject with a very clever title - hackers are humans after all
and headlines can affect them emotionally to get them to up vote.

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mark-t
I think the bar for a non-programming, non-startup article to count as
"interesting to hackers" is a lot higher. Really interesting science articles
just aren't written as often as somebody blogs something useless about how
great closures are.

Your English is fine, by the way. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native
speaker if you hadn't said so.

~~~
hhm
About the bar, I think that while it's certainly higher for science than for
programming articles, it has dropped a lot for programming & startups so I
don't understand why people is so incredibly picky with science (even for good
articles) but an order of magnitude more tolerant with other subjects.

Oh, and thank you for your comment about my English :)

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gojomo
The average upvoter has become less sophisticated.

A top story for almost two days was a screenshot of a hapless fellow
complaining about mistakenly ordering the 'I Am Rich' iPhone app. (It got 59
story upvotes, and this was in addition to other news coverage of the app.)
The thread had multiple highly-rated comments that were no more insightful
than "ha, don't click 'buy' if you don't want to buy". (Two of those had over
20 net upvotes.)

The idiot hordes have arrived and are breeding like rabbits through mutual
upvotes. Death of News.YC predicted; news at 11.

~~~
thaumaturgy
This is an utterly predictable problem.

News.YC has been mentioned in enough places -- like Reddit, where I migrated
from -- that it's been gathering some influence from those places. PG has been
curiously adamant about not doing anything algorithmically to address this,
instead insisting that somehow this forum will just never accumulate the kind
of cruft that every other web-based forum accumulates.

I think that web-based forums have to follow one of the basic rules of
capitalism, in that it has one of three states: either it's dying, or it's
growing slowly, or it's growing quickly.

Interesting conversations and submissions happen as a way for people to signal
information to other people that they think might not be aware of it, and
might find it interesting. Assuming it were possible for a forum to never
either lose nor gain participants, eventually the participants would share
most of the information that they weren't mutually familiar with, and those
that were interested in external sources of information that they weren't
initially aware of would begin to follow them, and there'd be nothing left to
share. The forum gradually gets quieter, and dies.

Or, the forum can grow. It may grow quickly, as with Reddit or Digg or Fark or
what-have-you, in which case it has a natural tendency towards more mainstream
topics. Or, it can grow slowly, like News.YC, but it still gathers a little
bit of new blood, and inevitably, that new blood brings a certain fraction of
mainstream interest along with it.

The funny thing is, a forum in a slow state of growth will tend to accelerate
into a faster state of growth, as the gradual increase in mainstream topics
draws the interest of a larger cross-section of people.

So, the trick is to enforce a slower state of growth without killing it
altogether, and I haven't seen any willingness here to do that.

~~~
biohacker42
Captcha, but not for bots, for humans.

The way I found reddit was from a link in pg's essays. And boy was reddit good
when pg first linked to it. So we need a place where the only people are the
kind who would voluntarily read something like pg or steve yegge.

Perhaps a simple logic puzzle wrapped inside a question about programming?
That would require both factual knowledge of programming and at least a
modicum of thinking ability.

That's your captcha for posts and voting permissions.

The problem I see is how to generate the captcha question/reply pairs. Perhaps
something wiki style?

~~~
gaika
For each problem in Project Euler there is a forum that is open only after you
solve it. One of the hard ones has "First!" comment in there.

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lvecsey
Don't forget that hacker news has collected lots of media attention all those
numerous time that Y Combinator is mentioned. Paul Graham even pointed out to
the community here that the demographic would be changing, and perhaps it has
again a few times over.

The recent <http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html> is worth mentioning
because if the VC types appear in droves here to observe us, they indirectly
create a salting effect where we stop posting or otherwise behaving as
ourselves. i.e, we go elsewhere, possibly back to a chat room, or just keep to
ourselves until another collaborative opportunity presents itself.

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paraschopra
We don't consciously post things here trying to comply with the vision.
Historically, communities evolve independently of the vision their founders
had when seeding them.

So, you can't complain why there are less science related posts. It is just
the way because the community does not find science interesting. (By the way,
I personally love science). You can try seeding the community with science
related posts and see how we respond.

~~~
hhm
That's my point with posting this here. I don't want to complain, but I want
to make the correct people aware of this (if they weren't already). What I
think is: 1) interesting enough science articles go to the front page when
they are posted on the news queue, 2) there are people interested in science
here, maybe they'll care to start posting science related links again? I don't
know, it's just an idea.

I post my own articles when I have time too.

~~~
dcminter
Not directly pertinent to your original question, but since you're interested
in science articles, I'd recommend tracking the Ars Technica "Nobel Intent"
science news feed: <http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/>

~~~
hhm
Thanks a lot for the link.

------
DanielBMarkham
It's a totally different site than it was a year ago.

It used to be five or six votes could keep you on the front page for a while.
Now you submit the same kind of article and it dies with only a vote or two,
and other people coming in with the same link count as some of those votes.

Sadly, I'm left to conclude that it is not the quality of the article, but the
personal relationships between the posters that lead to upvoting or
downvoting. That is, the same article submitted by two different people would
get highly different scores based on the track record of the people involved,
not the community's feeling about the content of the article.

Speculation only, but it explains the answer to your question. We ARE seeing
just as many science stories -- probably more. It's just the wrong people are
submitting them. (on average)

~~~
tstegart
I don't find myself paying any attention to who the poster is though. Do you?
If the story is interesting or the question important, I upvote it, otherwise
not.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I don't either, but then again, I don't vote up and down a lot.

Just guessing, but I think there are probably three levels of visitors: random
browsers, occasional voters, and people who play the board like a video game.

I'm more occasional. For instance, I usually don't view things that only make
page 2

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aswanson
I still have hope. As long as people aren't posting game screenshots and cheat
codes, there is hope.

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gojomo
Do you have numbers from a comparative analysis over time? (It may be true;
I'm not sure and it would be good to quantify beyond anyone's vague
impression.)

~~~
hhm
No, I didn't do such analysis, but I think the difference is quite evident
(even if it wasn't 50/50, sure there was a drop).

------
wenbert
SCIENCE has failed the world!!!!

