To the observation that this has been submitted before, agreed. Contributions to those previous submissions is now closed, however, because they are sufficiently far in the past, and I think this subject is worth re-visiting occasionally.
FWIW: I've upvoted the coments about earlier submissions - I'd like to reward such behavior. Not least, searching for previous discussions often unearths genuinely useful material and should be encouraged.
Yup, exactly so. To quote a slightly different bit of it:
... banal comments, old material being recycled,
and general lack of interesting stuff.
In short, the vast majority of repeated material is drivel. Fluff. Content-free. I'm trying to restore the balance a little with more technical, challenging and deep material.
This is probably controversial, but it's my last ditch effort to actually get some technical material back into Hacker News.
I honestly don't expect it will succeed, but then I can finally depart with a completely clear conscience that I tried my best and found that the so-called "Hacker News" no longer contains much I care about.
I hope I'm wrong, but I had to try the experiment.
random (drivel) hack idea ... create hybrid pages with iframes that combine a meaty technical article (e.g., a russ cox blog post) with a fluffy tech gossip article, and post these hybrid articles to HN. e.g., "Fast string matching with DFAs / new music social network for your pets launch party pics!"
FWIW: I've upvoted the coments about earlier submissions - I'd like to reward such behavior. Not least, searching for previous discussions often unearths genuinely useful material and should be encouraged.