"Siskiwit Lake, largest lake on the island; cold, deep, clear, and relatively low in nutrients. Siskiwit Lake contains several islands, including Ryan Island, the largest therein, which itself contains Moose Flats, a seasonal pond, which contains Moose Boulder. When Moose Flats is a pond, Moose Boulder becomes the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world."
I know this is straight from Wikipedia, but it is incorrect because the Caspian Sea is the largest lake. If you measure by volume, lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake. If you measure by area, lakes Michigan and Huron are technically one lake, and that lake is larger than Superior.
So there are a lot of reasons to dispute that Superior is the largest lake in the world.
Somebody should go to Vulcan point in Crater Lake and pee so we could have the largest lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island :-)
The Volcano Lake at Taal is a pretty interesting place -- it is a volcano, with the smallish crater lake, all inside the crater of a bigger volcano. Went there last year, a beautiful place.
In the english speaking world we refer to Australia as a continent, but I just saw a kid's encyclopedia from France which refers to Australia as an island.
There oughtta be 7 continents; without Aust there'd only be 6 :(
It looks to me like something I would go to Reddit to find. It is interesting and I would upvote it on Reddit, but it is certainly not what I would expect at the top of HN.
I can submit 100 stories that'll get people riled up about politics / amazing pics / funny-hah-hah! in the time you can write one article about monads.
The point is simple: off-topic content is far easier to submit than good content. There's way more of it, and it's of interest to far more people. It would be very simple, were there no controls, to crowd out "good" content with politics/pics/etc... Which means that doing the opposite: crowding out bad content with good content, is very difficult. It would require a significant amount of work to go find and promote good articles, as compared to "bad" ones.
If anyone actually thinks this isn't so, think about the mental effort and learning required to write a good article about monads vs the effort required to rant about Bush or Obama or post a cool/funny pic.
("good" and "bad" are simplistic. I actually thought this article was kind of interesting; I just don't think it belongs here)
I find it dubious that bad content is actually 'crowding' out good content. Which good real entry is this one higher than? The off-topic is just filling in the dead time between seriousness.
I don't think it is happening right now; it's just something that could happen easily, and is something of a counter-argument to the idea that instead of just complaining, you should try and 'crowd out' the silly articles with good ones: it's not so easy.
Oh, for Pete's sake: relax! People thought it's interesting and it is interesting (I had no idea you could go that deep). Hey, maybe if your elevator pitch doesn't work you can try to impress a VC with this tidbit, I bet this would get more attention than a lot of pitches.
Articles in this vein can spur thought which leads to unexpected ideas.
This is perhaps a point of overlap between reddit and HN and really has very little direct relevance to startups, hacking, programming.
The piece in question here was not particularly deep but made for pleasant lunchtime thoughts about recursion and that fun little Linux fractal viewer that I havent played with in ages (xaos). I wondered how the guy figured this out and whether or not the Capian Sea were really the largest lake... Then when I looked at the comments I saw a few good points and this metacomment.
Not terribly deep thoughts. But I am not so sure that articles like this are irrelevant. It is good to have ludic content that generates seemingly random thoughts.
I used to follow a site called everything2.com - which i imagine lots of people remember (or still use).a simple Perl driven site that if I remember well was related to the slashdot engine(slashcode).
Spending an hour on the site following tangential entries could be really fun but beyond that could be a way to get unstuck when in a mental rut.
HN has that ability at times. In recent months articles on airplane safety; playing GTA with one's 4 yr old; pneumatic brass tubes at Stanford; Feynman on Science and religion have had that affect. None of these articles were particularly 'relevant'. But I am glad to have stumbled across them.
The Everything Engine which runs E2 wasn't much related to Slashcode at all. It did come from the same company, but it was completely different code. A fork of that still runs PerlMonks today.
Those people can upvote other stories they think are more relevant or interesting. The "newest" page at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest always has interesting submissions waiting to be upvoted.
Not all users can flag, and flagging is more to deal with spam and trolling. (The guidelines mention offtopic posts as well, but community consensus is that flagging is not downvoting.)
Flagging is not downvoting, but it is the sanctioned way to register your opinion that some content does not belong on the site. If your efforts to combat off-topic posts are limited to ranting in the comments after they're posted, it's too late.
Well, then you have an issue not directly with this story but the way HN is designed. Start a submission of your own, citing this example, about this issue and get the discussion rolling, if you feel passionately about this.
My first thought when reading the question was "Ooh, shiny!". But I didn't think anyone would get it and it would get downvoted as smart-assed. More eloquently: I think it falls under "anything engaging" (or whatever that phrase is in the guidelines).
I can't believe that no one's tried to make an Xzibit joke yet. This either shows that HNers are 2 years behind in internet memes, or have the common sense to not use them everywhere.
"Siskiwit Lake, largest lake on the island; cold, deep, clear, and relatively low in nutrients. Siskiwit Lake contains several islands, including Ryan Island, the largest therein, which itself contains Moose Flats, a seasonal pond, which contains Moose Boulder. When Moose Flats is a pond, Moose Boulder becomes the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world."