I really should stop idly web surfing and get on with some housekeeping. But before I do I should make a note of something that I encountered on another site that i waste a lot of time on, Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/news
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@ArishMell Have to get a lot of interest to stay on the first page on Hacker News for more than 24 hours. It's mostly frequented by people like me in the software development field so there is a tendency for software and Internet related posts to get more attention. It was on the front page when I saw it, probably at about number 15. It's at number 78 now.
@ninalanyon It seems to dodge up and down the list, perhaps by numbers of views. It is in a much more stable location on the "lathes.co.uk" machine-tool archive, listed by the maker's name. I did though notice that IT-related papers predominate on Hacker News.
@ArishMell The rank of a submission to Hacker News depends on people voting for the article and writing and voting comments on it. So the rank varies over time but eventually sinks down the list when people move on to comment on a new submission.
@ArishMell It's because the point of the site i not the articles themselves but the discussions that occur. The formula for the rank is something like votes/(time since submission raised to some power). So submissions drift down the list if people don't keep voting up either the article itself or the comments on it. As people run out of things to say about a topic it naturally drifts down the list.
Click on the discuss link to see the discussion.
Within a discussion you can vote on the comments and highly ranked comments float to the top.
