
Hacker News: 2016 Top Stories - saycheese
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story
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danso
It's an eventful year when Alan Kay's AMA isn't even in the top 30 of
submissions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851)

With the meme that 2016 was a particularly deadly year for celebrities, it'd
be interesting to do a count of death posts that made it above a threshold of
up votes -- maybe 30? Like other similar metrics, it's limited by a selection
bias -- i.e. It consists of folks considered celebrities to the HN Crowd,
which apparently doesn't include Debbie Reynolds, but does include lesser
known pioneers in tech -- but it'd still be interesting to count. David Bowie
was the most popular death post in 2016. His death might be the most prominent
for folks who don't think Castro's death was bigger news.

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spacehacker
I like to search Algolia for PDFs from time to time:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf&sort=byPopularity&prefix=f...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story)

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jessriedel
Not that it's surprising, but it is unfortunate the highest slots are
dominated by politics and other emotionally charged topics, with
intellectually challenging topics much further down.

~~~
new299
It's great, because we should be more aware of the political and societal
implications of technology.

The top story, Apple's refusal to bend to the governments request to assist in
compromising security on the iPhone, was hugely important.

It's also interesting that Google/Facebook/Amazon have not made anything like
the same commitment to user rights and privacy.

~~~
jessriedel
> It's great, because we should be more aware of the political and societal
> implications of technology.

As one can see in the guidelines, awareness-raising is not the purpose of HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
new299
All stories are about raising awareness... even if it's about awareness of a
particular algorithm.

As for if politics is on-topic or not? The mods didn't delete the threads, so
I assume they were considered important enough, and on-topic enough not to be
deleted.

Personally I couldn't care less, creating and disseminating technology is
already a political act.

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saycheese
This is a better link since it's only for 2016, instead of the past year:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?%20%7B%20%7B%20%20settings.style%20=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?%20%7B%20%7B%20%20settings.style%20=%3D%3D%20%22experimental%22%20%3F%20%22experimental%22%20:%20%22%22%20%7D%7D&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&query=)

