
The Oblivion of Adam: What if you could remember every poem in the next life? - lermontov
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/01/the-oblivion-of-adam/
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mkaziz
What a delightful read! I'm going to check out the "Epistle of Forgiveness",
which apparently has a translation available on Amazon!

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obiefernandez
Why on earth is this on the front page of HN?

~~~
codezero
You should check out the submission guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

note that it says:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic.

This post doesn't fall clearly in the "Off-Topic" section, so it seems
completely appropriate.

~~~
obiefernandez
Okay, thanks for the explanation. It's just frustrating that something like
this that is somewhat offtopic makes it onto the front page for quite a long
time with only 18 upvotes and no discussion. Mysteries of the algo, I guess...
or abuse.

~~~
sdegutis
AFAIK the algorithm is very naive, only taking into account number of up-votes
and how long since it was posted to determine whether it goes on the FP and
how quickly, and humans manually moderate to filter reposts and other against-
the-rules content out of FP.

So basically, this is on the FP because enough people are interested in it.

Now if you're wondering why they're interested in this enough to up-vote it to
FP even though it's not about start-ups, techs, or futurism, well that's more
of a coincidence than anything else.

HN is ostensibly a forum for intellectual conversation, and that's it. This
link tries to do just that, so it counts. In reality though HN is a business
move. It's basically a niche forum geared towards the target customer base of
YC and YC's affiliates and start-ups. That's how they advertise to them.

The real mystery here is why I'm not putting this kind of knowledge and
insight to work toward making me a millionaire. I'm literally the same age as
Sam Altman, yet I'm barely able to feed a family of 7. FFS.

