From the FAQ:
How are stories ranked?
The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
—-
Personally, I appreciate that the rankings are done at a site level, and there isn’t a bunch of tracking and manipulation to give me a personal “feed” to drive engagement. A lot of comments on this site complain about those practices on other sites. I don’t think it’s welcome here.
The idea is to discover new things you didn’t know you wanted to know - not consume more of the same
Why can’t a recommendation engine do that?
It’s much better the way it is - one of the last remaining high quality feeds on the Internet!
(PS please feel free to disagree and post other ones I don’t know about below!)
I agree too.
How do you organize technical articles you read?
I read a lot of backend and architecture articles and often struggle to revisit them later.
I’m curious how others handle this.
Do you: Use Notion or Obsidian? Bookmark everything? Keep markdown notes? Rely on memory?
What has worked long-term for you?
What hasn’t?
A directory hierarchy works well for me. I've described my setup online before:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/173314/31143
https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments/p75xlu/how_i_o...
I don't read everything I have from start to finish. A lot of this is for future reference.
Since that StackExchange post, I'm now up to about 36.6K PDF files in 4.4K directories, with 14.5K symlinks so I can put files in multiple directories.
I also have a separate version controlled repo with notes a bunch of subjects. I'm planning to eventually merge my PDF hierarchy and the notes to have a unified system. It's going to have to be done in stages.
How many GB is your PDF collection? Have you considered sharing it more widely?
I know about Sci-Hub, Anna's Archive, etc., but I'm not so interested in a giant landfill containing all papers ever written. I'm much more interested in a curated collection of useful papers.
The root directory of the archive is 142 GB large. It's not only PDFs, but mostly PDFs. It includes many things that were never online and some things that were online at one point but are not online any longer.
For copyright reasons I can not share the entire thing as-is. I have plans to share most notes in there and bibliographic data for most directories. Doing so would be a major project in itself as this was never designed for that. I have some information I would prefer to keep private in there that's going to have to be filtered out, and I would prefer to clean some of it up to be in a more "presentable" state.
As for how useful you'd find it, I think that depends entirely on the overlap between my interests and yours.
You might be interested in this project of mine: https://github.com/btrettel/specialized-bibs
> As for how useful you'd find it, I think that depends entirely on the overlap between my interests and yours.
If that specialized-bibs repo is any indication, there seems to be reasonable overlap.
> For copyright reasons I can not share the entire thing as-is.
Of course. But if you'd like to store a non-encrypted backup copy on my system, I would be happy to offer my data storage services free of charge.
Alternatively: I'm training an LLM and it's transformative fair use.
My email is in my profile.
> I have some information I would prefer to keep private in there that's going to have to be filtered out, and I would prefer to clean some of it up to be in a more "presentable" state.
Totally understandable. If you ever get it into an acceptable state, please shoot me an email and I'll be happy to help out logistically.
Shared ranking beats personalized engagement loops.
It's not meant to be addictive, even though it kinda is.
Because shills will game the shit out of it. That is why.
Because it doesn't serve ads so the point is the content not the engagement.
The whole site is an ad…
Because it's a bare bones forum written in the early 2000s whose purpose was mostly to show off the author's bespoke LISP dialect.
I think dang mentioned one time having random stories bubble up to give them visibility and encourage variety and people hated it.