I am so glad I found this site. My two other favorite sites are valleywag and peoplemagazine.com. The only thing I really needed was a site devoted to Erlang. I'm glad I found it. I'm adding it to my Internet Explorer favorites.
Being in Europe, I seem to have been sleeping during The Great Erlang Meme of 2009, so I was pretty disappointed to log in this morning, find what looked like a really juicy article about Erlang at the top of the list, and find out that 1) it doesn't really talk about the innards of Erlang, and 2) it's all a joke.
The innards of Erlang are fascinating, because they're really what make the language so good at what it does, and are fairly different from many other languages in terms of architecture.
I am in total agreement that all of these "boring" stories are far more interesting than most of the interesting stories have been.
Er, I think that makes sense.
Anyhow, maybe now we can pick a Language of the Day, or some other geeky topic to vote up on the front page each day of the week? Maybe C Efficiency Hacks, or Interesting Uses of Graph Algorithms, or ...
You don't need to pick. A weird unstable combination of the internet and the community on this site will do the picking for you. Furthermore, it will pick 29 other topics to fill your front page. Isn't that amazing?
1. If you upvoted all the Erlang articles yesterday, it has something to do with pg. I like Erlang too, but much of what made it to the front page was bullshit.
2. A day's worth of Erlang madness will do nothing for HN other than squash a day's worth of the usual stories. And when a few hundred users mass-upvote a few dozen stories for no other reason than that pg half-joked about it, I'd say that has more Reddit-nature than HN-nature.
Whether Erlang is worth learning about is entirely beside the point. The issue is whether it's worth sand-bagging the content for everybody on the tenuous theory that Erlang repulses "the wrong kind of people for HN".
Simply, it gets annoying when pg turn HN back into social-experiment mode.
Your second sentence is ad-hominem idiocy and doesn't merit a response.
Well, I did remove the hackernews rss feed from my homepage today. I generally like this site, but I find the comments to be on the verge of elitist. I think it's sad that you guys think I'm part of the "riff raff" that needs to be filtered from sites like this, but congrats, you guys filtered me out.
HN is a community of human beings. Human beings are prone to do apparently temporarily insane/irrational things such as follow memes, jokes, silly suggestions, etc. If you dislike that here, I'm sorry but you probably won't find it any better anywhere else...
Yeah, I realize that. I'm just (half-jokingly) saying that if the inside joke results in more erlang articles being posted, that wouldn't be as devastating as the kind of inside jokes that take over other sites.
It took me awhile to figure why\how this happened but now that I understand it, it is hilarious to see this in real time on the HN homepage. Well done.
I am so glad I found this site. My two other favorite sites are valleywag and peoplemagazine.com. The only thing I really needed was a site devoted to Erlang. I'm glad I found it. I'm adding it to my Internet Explorer favorites.
thanks