https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097578 (which led to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097685)

Evidence that no one reads the FAQ! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Evidence that no one reads the FAQ!

Turns out you could confirm this suspicion with a poll.

Why would I read the FAQ if I don't have any questions?

For questions you don’t know you have. I read the iperf man page earlier for laughs, discovered the -B option which I’d forgotten existed.

Manuals make sense to read to learn something. I'm not going to seek out an FAQ unless I have a question. I guess I don't like FAQs in general. They're usually not really FAQs, but more of disorganized manual.

Ha! Although I have read the FAQ numerous times, but I don't regularly check it. Maybe it needs an RSS feed :-P

It's been there at least since 2008 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080518203408/http://ycombinato...

I thought the bit about polls had been there forever. Someone could check that via archive.org - but you have to use the older URL which was probably http://www.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

To guarantee no one reads it?

Evidence that there is room for improvement in HN's user interface.

Seems like a discoverability issue.

Are their guidelines on what should and what shouldn't be made into a poll question?

My assumption is that it follows general post guidelines:

--

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

What would be the catastrophic consequences of this guideline if HN started a TV channel with news that would "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"?

Thank you!

Wow... if I had made that statement, I would have been immediately down-voted and my comment removed for not "following the rules". And then I wonder why certain 'mods' or overzealous persons have it in for me...

I pulled down a copy of HN earlier in the year for analysis and was shocked to find polls among the data. It was a very small % of the total content, small enough I assumed it was an old feature that got removed.

For science: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25392036

And I did it wrong. I thought you had to enter 1,2, or 3 in the text box...

After seeing my comment that just had '1' in it, I figured it out.