
Hacker News Classics (2018) - dsalzman
http://jsomers.net/hn
======
Gatsky
'The PhD Octopus' is incredible. Can't believe the PhD was already a bankrupt
concept in 1903.

[https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html](https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html)

~~~
fiestaman
What a great speech. Can anyone tell me what the "Mandarin disease" referred
to by the speaker is?

~~~
ves
I’ll bet it’s a reference to the Imperial Civil Service Exam[0], which in its
later years became notorious in the same ways mentioned in the link.
Government officials, who had all passed the exam, were known as Mandarins (at
least to the West).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination)

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throwaway286
I enjoy that it's a long list that is loaded in its entirety instead of using
infinite paging or some sort of virtualization. It's simple and ctrl-f just
works, unlike on say, twitter.

~~~
Eikon
Infinite scrolling is the worst. It’s such a pain to be forced to open all
links inside new tabs as most implementations in the wild are breaking the
“previous page” functionality of browsers.

It’s such a joy to have to scroll down _n_ times to try to go where you were.
It’s even better when on some websites, the “infinite scrolling” is not
sequential but somewhat randomized.

I understand it’s way easier to scale pagination that way, but please, just
stop.

~~~
prox
Infinite scrolling, in its current form, needs to die. Please stop using it!

~~~
workthrowaway
infinite scrolling is very bad! especially on mobile because on mobile you can
accidentally tap on a link or whatever while swipping. happens to me all the
time with the youtube app!! infinite scroll needs to go away!

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toni
coincidentally, HN has his own "Classic" page too[1] But it is focused on
classic users. The idea is that users who have been around for a while will
post quality articles. I just don't know how the threshold works.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/classic](https://news.ycombinator.com/classic)

~~~
barrkel
Ranking (and thus visibility) is dominated by the majority of accounts, so
even if classic users submitted and voted on articles which reflected the
early character of the site, they wouldn't get to see each much of each
other's articles. Such a "classic" view can only work meaningfully (i.e.
generating content that reflected the classic userbase) if classic users use
it exclusively.

~~~
bonoboTP
Any link to read up on this? Like what is "classic view", how exactly it's
different from the main page, what are "classic users", what was the "early
character of the site" like etc?

~~~
barrkel
I write from memory when PG was doing these experiments, if you do a HN search
over PG & classic should be able to dig it out.

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motohagiography
The word I would use to describe this is, beautiful. Being able to place in
order, casual or niche ideas that would become relevant up to 100 years later
- as the effect of hundreds or even thousands of people reading them and
discussing them in a modern context - is really striking.

Many of these ideas (alexander, feynman, NASA typography) are the kinds of
insights that were only available to a rarefied audience at the time of their
publication, but would go on to be the foundation ideas for really significant
cultural changes. I'd say this has relevance well beyond this forum.

------
jszymborski
I thought this was going to be a collection of classic HN Posts/Comments, like
cperciva's Putnam comment[0] or the pessimistic dropbox comments (and the
retrospective by the commenters).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079)

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dvfjsdhgfv
Of these, I'm just reading
[https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket](https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket)
again, and can't stop wondering how pertinent it is.

~~~
sjcsjc
Very

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w0m
>How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub (2008)
(preston-werner.com)

... Welp.

~~~
thewarpaint
Nice read: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-
down-3...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-
down-300k.html)

~~~
333c
And the comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768408)

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DyslexicAtheist
wow there are some real gems there. Maybe to avoid the many duplicate url's
run the whole list through something like a

    
    
                         |
                         v
      cat output |sort|unique 
                        
    

otherwise it'll be a lot of links repeated. (example _" Bertrand Russell: In
Praise of Idleness"_ but many others)

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jljljl
This list is awesome, but if it wants to function as a long lived archive or
library, it should maybe point to the Internet Archive version? Many of the
links are currently broken :\

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Rerarom
If you were confused like I was: the list is in chronological order.

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Bouncingsoul1
I clicked the first 4 links, 2 dead 2 alive. Linkrot is a shame

~~~
jessant
Arhives for those 2

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170910220313/http://www.lhup.e...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170910220313/http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hollow/tamarack.htm)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20121216101917/http://www.yorkto...](https://web.archive.org/web/20121216101917/http://www.yorktownhistory.org:80/homepages/1900_predictions.htm)

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oli5679
Any way to sort by points?

Edit -
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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hownottowrite
If your subs appear on the list three or more times, you might have a problem
living in the present. (Spoiler: I do.)

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baobaba
Thank you for making this. I have opened a few links and all happened to be
outstanding. Saved for the weekend reading.

------
JimWestergren
107 comments from Feb 23, 2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888)

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kuharich
Prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442888)

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LeoPanthera
I was freaked out by the fact that it has a green topbar - and thought that it
had somehow sucked in my HN settings, which also specify a green topbar.

Turns out that it's just a coincidence. Yikes.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I wish the HN settings would also change the background of the Y icon to match
the rest of the topbar.

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maddy237
This is wonderful.

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dvfjsdhgfv
From [https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-
it-s...](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-it-seems-me-
i-am-more-left-you-mr-stalin)

Stalin (to HG Wells): Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us
suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce
unemployment to a certain minimum. But surely, no capitalist would ever agree
to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve
army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour
market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour.

~~~
pjc50
Surprisingly orthodox piece of economics there. The normal mechanism of
controlling (wage/price) inflation through interest rates works by that
mechanism indirectly.

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geuis
Methinks sir has misplaced their regex given that everything starts from 1900.

~~~
rgoulter
FWIW, it's sorted by the year. There are submissions with articles from as
late as 2010 at the bottom.

