Comment by PaulHoule

(1) Answering "what is my motivation?" isn't simple because I got into this slowly. I really enjoyed participating in HN, around the time my karma reached 4000 I started getting competitive about it, around 20,000 I started developing automation.

When I helped write

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0308253100

in 2004 I thought text classification was a remarkably mature technology which was under-used. In particularly I thought there was no imagination in RSS reader interfaces and thought an RSS reader with an algorithmic feed. That December when Musk bought Twitter this was still on my mind and I made it happen and the result was the YOShInOn RSS reader [1] and I thought building it around a workflow where I select articles for my own interest and post some on HN was a good north star. [2]

It is self tuning and soldiers on despite changes in the input and how much time I vote to it. It spins like a top and I've only patched it twice in the last year.

Anything that gets posted to HN is selected once by the algorithm and twice by me. Reducing latency is a real goal, improving quality is a hypothetical goal, either of those involves some deep thinking about "what does quality mean?" and threatens the self tuning and "spins like a top".

My interest in it is flagging lately because of new projects I am working on, I am worried though that if I quit doing it people will wonder if something happened to me because that happened when Tomte went dark.

(2) I'll argue that scientific papers are better and worse than you say they are. Sometimes an abstract or an image tells a good story story, arguably a paper shouldn't get published. I think effective selection and ranking processes are a pyramid and I am happy to have the HN community make the decision about things. On the other hand, I've spent 6 months (not full time) wrangling with a paper and then come back 6 years later and come to see I got it wrong the first time.

I worked at arXiv a long time ago and we talked a lot about bibliometrics and other ways to judge the quality of scientific work and the clearest thing is that it would take a long time like not 4-5 hours of an individual but more like several years (maybe decades!) of many, many people working at it -- consider the example of the Higgs Boson!

Many of the papers that I post were found in the RSS feed of phys.org, if they weren't working overtime to annoy people with annoying ads I would post more links to phys.org and less to papers. I do respect the selection effort they make and often they rewrite the title "We measured something with" to "Scientists discovered something important" and sometimes they explain papers well but unfortunately "voice" won't get them to reform their self-destructive advertising.

I could ramble on a lot more and I really ought to write this up somewhere off HN but I will just open the floor to questions if you have any.

[1] search for it in the box at the bottom of the page

[2] pay attention if you struggle to complete side projects!