Comment by dang
5 months ago
I turned off the flags on it yesterday, but that wasn't enough to make it go back onto the front page. Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.
Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
I checked the first 10 or so pages of 30, until reaching the point where all posts were much older, and there were enough of a similar age with fewer points that it seemed unlikely that all of them had been up-weighted.
Edit: Okay, it's rank 738, on page 25.
It spent half an hour on the front page and 90 minutes in the top 10 pages. You can call that 'hidden', but everything falls off the front page(s) after a while, so everything ends up 'hidden' that way.
The more important question is how much time on the front page(s) a story had, and whether it was too much time or too little. I think I've answered that in the GP comment and the other links there, but if not, let me know.