The nytimes they are a-changin' | Hacker News Reader

The nytimes they are a-changin'

okayfail.com

67 pointssahillavingia25 comments

This did well on HN a week ago too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778219

Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes lately.

While I have also noticed many duplicate articles, one way the community could try to avoid them would be by making sure that they are posting original sources (as suggested in the official guidelines), and not random blog posts (like the post a week ago).

edit: I have just noticed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777508 , which AFAIK links to the same URL as this.

Yeah, although sometimes it's not particularly obvious. I've noticed a lot of links to a site called http://ontwik.com/ being posted in the last few months (a Google search for ontwik on news.ycombinator.com shows over 100 results). It's a site that seems to take embeddable videos from YouTube, Vimeo and the like and turn them into pages like http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of-moz... .. I can see why people are linking these things up, even though it should be the original YouTube video getting the link.

Or at the same times of the day but in different timezones.

I think this might show that stories disappear from the front page too quickly -- although of course slowing that down would result in frequent visitors seeing less new material.

Is that a bad thing?

That's a subjective judgment.

However, the window for even a popular link to remain on the front page nowadays continues to shrink. It's akin to the "attention span" of the site dropping. It has its pros and cons but shows that the system that fit the audience in a certain way in the past no longer does so (at least, it does not yield the same results).

My personal and subjective judgment is that this certainly becomes a bad thing at some point due to the lack of cohesion between users' experiences. Instead of a large share of the user base sharing a similar site wide experience, instead we only share knowledge within threads that we happen to see and participate in. There are, then, entire "shadow" discussions occurring in other threads that cover exactly the same topic. Fragmentation.

In terms of views, it did far better with this link than with the previous one. I was surprised, I only noticed when I looked it up on my analytics.

A big part of the problem is that it's abysmally hard to search for previous links on HN.

This is based on an incorrect assumption: ... no one is storing their frontpage layout data.

The Newseum has this covered for over 800 newspapers. A recent front page of the New York Times, for example:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NY...

The NYT also stores their data... see my reply further up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801652

Wow, I had no idea the ads were so huge and invasive. It made me wonder how much Ralph Lauren spent to have their ads take what seemed to be over 50% of the on-screen real estate.

Just to be fair, many of the most intrusive ads I saw there were interstitials - they show for a few seconds then disappear.

That's the least of it. I edited out six full days where the whole page above the fold was an ad.

It's interesting to see the typo fixes and how long different stories last. At 2:11 a story relevant to us all. I wonder (with regards to his point about things disappearing forever) if a distributed effort among "tech people" to catalog a lot of websites would work, different people run nodes that are given tasks. Would be neat to keep a track of the top 1,000 article driven sites for a year (not just news, reddit, hn etc.)

> Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour

This has happened to me a few times. Recently I had accidentally collected over 100,000 copies of a website over a 3 month period after forgetting the thing was running.

Somewhat off-topic: watching the Chilean miners story in the video was heartwarming as the number rescued increased.

Perpetually.com solves this problem. In fact, they're already working with newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and for every major federally elected political candidate. More than just random screen captures, every article, every change, every link and state are preserved. It's like Apple Time Machine for the Internet.

http://www.perpetually.com/

Full Disclosure: I advise this company.

Reminds me of Spock's Tricorder in the Star Trek episode 'The City on the Edge of Forever'. Playing back history at high speed. Very cool.

Wow, completely agree about how the layout, and emphasis on different headlines, topics, categories, advertising etc.. are all huge indicators of society's interests and conceptions of the world. That said, I would be surprised to learn that the nyt doesn't store their front page every day into some archive? If they don't, then someone must!

They do.

The CMS has all the rankings. Rank meta data is stored with articles, including (if published in print) where it was in the physical paper and what editions(s).

On the web site front, there are internal process capturing the Homepage HTML and that goes back maybe 10 years at this point.

On a more public level you can still find the Homepage from a given date here:

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/

you can extrapolate the rest:

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/business/

Those would represent the last view of the day before the date rolled over in the CMS.

The pace of news is the pulse of the day

Counterpoint: "news" is the lie that something important happens every day.

Depends on what you define as "important", but with 6.5 billion people on the world, there are certain to be remarkable or notable events with great regularity and frequency.

Important to whom? What people find remarkable and notable varies wildly. What may be notable to one group (say the residents of X-town may find the mayoral election notable) might not be to another (Y-town doesn't care).

Something remarkable or notable may happen every day, but it's not necessarily the case that something remarkable or notable to a specific person happens every day.

Yes, because "the news" reports equally about all events around the world... riiiiight...

News is there to advertise, plain and simple. Whether it's paid "ads" or (anti)government policy or various lobby groups. It has very little to with 'world events', and more to do with "What will get peoples' attention".

If they collected the html and not just screencaps, it would be interesting to see a word-cloud evolve and change over time too.

Too bad there isn't an annual follow up for every major story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com