I think a thing that has happened is that the community is actually full of people who have not learned all the fun computer science stuff that people like you and me take for granted, and that's why they're voting it up.
On the one hand, it's frustrating because, damn it, if you don't already know how to play with these concepts then why on earth are you calling yourself a "hacker", but then on the other hand http://xkcd.com/1053/
Re:Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms
by gamegoblin on Sunday May 04, 2014 @02:24AM
(#7693507)
I definitely agree with you. It's guess it's just difficult with the HN community growing every day, both in population and the diversity of backgrounds.
I think I'll write a little plugin that will hide all wikipedia links and I'll be happy. Maybe something like "hide all wikipedia links unless #comments > N" would work nicely.
The posts that just link to a wikipedia article about a topic that > 90% of the HN crowd is probably familiar with do get a little tiresome.
I bet this is not the case in this case. I can understand the attitude against plain Wikipedia links but at least I learned a new idea because of this link.
Re:Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms
by prezjordan on Saturday May 03, 2014 @10:00PM
(#7693054)
Because articles like this (and maybe even code golf) might spark an interesting discussion.
Check out ( https://hn.algolia.com/?q=wikipedia#!/story/sort_by_date/0/w... ) to see recent wikipedia submissions. Just recently someone linked to the wikipedia article for "Code Golf". At didn't get any upvotes, which is great, but I just don't understand the mindset behind submitting it. I guess easy karma? I don't know.
I'd much rather see content like "Here is my solution to problem X using ant colony optimization". This is the first time I've made a comment like this, because usually I just flag and move on. I guess I just needed to vent a little.