Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:
Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.[1]
Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)
A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:
Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto
Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:
1
word count
A Course of Pure Mathematics – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf] (gutenberg.org)
N/A—It is a book
107 points by bikenaga 4 hours ago | hide | 23 comments
2
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop (arstechnica.com)
1443
26 points by cpeterso 1 hour ago | hide | 2 comments
Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:
Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.[1]
Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)
A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:
Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto
Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:
See Paul Graham comment for their ranking algos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013.