
Þ - shawndumas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
======
ColinWright
Speaking to your question asked in the now dead submission about the ligature
(or whatever) - these are facts, and they are facts that are unknown to the
vast majority of people. It may be that you are discovering them, and you find
them interesting, and you wish to share them with the HN community.

However, it's not clear that they are "deeply interesting." It's not clear
they they contain material to make one think, to make one re-think. It's not
clear that they are specifically of interest to the intellect of hackers, as
opposed to the intellect and interests of intelligent people, not limited to
hackers.

I'm guilty of this, and frequently have to re-consider submitting items,
because while they are of interest to me, they are not of _deep_ interest (to
my understanding and interpretation of the term). Perhaps I don't refrain as
often as I should.

I have not flagged you here, I think I did flag one of the other submissions,
I can't say for sure, but I thought I would give my viewpoint on why some
people may feel these are inappropriate to HN.

I don't have any special status, I'm just providing a viewpoint, perhaps for
discussion, perhaps for disagreement, perhaps to be ignored.

~~~
shawndumas
Now that was a helpful answer. But what do you make of the 14 up-votes though?

~~~
ColinWright
Just as you thought it was an interesting fact in its own right, I have no
doubt that among the extremely large HN audience, so did others. Many will
have thought "That's interesting!" and up-voted it.

And that's the behavior that is now emerging (or indeed, possibly has always
been the case) that people up- or down-vote simply on preferences, rather than
on whether something is "deeply interesting." This isn't a criticism, HN is
what it is, and that is my personal observation. As I've discovered in a
recent email exchange, not everyone agrees with me.

So personally, I found it an interesting fact, and it led to some interesting
reading on related facts. But I didn't up-vote it, and I seriously considered
down-voting because of the "deep interest" question.

But this is getting a bit meta (too late, it's actually _very_ meta already)
so I'd be happy to hear from you via email me if you're interested in
discussing it further.

------
shawndumas
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3084503>

