On my first 'big' job I printed 927 and posted it on a random blank wall. Recently I visited the office again, even though I haven't worked there for ~2y. Wall is still blank, except for that comic. It brought me joy to know people still see it from time to time.
One way to find an answer on the Internet is to be wrong on the Internet: unless there's a voting system involved.
Click to disagree anonymously, the whole thing is automatic and effortless. You don't have to organize your thoughts when you have a button to express your feelings.
If you are just wrong, and do not actually ask a question, then the responses may be interesting, or not, but they might not answer your original question, which only exists in your own mind, unexpressed, and perhaps not even posed to yourself.
No disagreements with an absence of opinions. Automatic.
No answers to an absence of questions. Effortless.
I would think that the most upvoted comic would be the "most loved", but that was not even considered. Posting is easy, garnering upvotes is the "love" signal.
As is usual with statistics, the methodology greatly affects the outcome.
(author of the blog post) I would have loved to take into account each comic's age and compute some kind of normalization/weight but never got around to doing that. It's hard to do this kind of normalization correctly since HN's population size isn't a constant over time.
I gave every new consultant and programmer https://xkcd.com/1205/ when they start. They were all over our building. When asked about fixing some process, I'd pull out my laminated version (one that was enlarged to be 8" square) and I'd ask the two questions.
A lot of "optimizations" didn't get done, and the ones that were huge wins got moved to the front of the line.
I'm pretty sure your right. The math here assumes an equal amount of people learn it each day, but in reality it's weight towards infants, toddlers, children, teens, etc that haven't come across that info yet.
But that doesn't change the validity of the conclusion: When someone doesn't know about something, it's always best to excitedly show them the information than to mock them for not knowing it.
"Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say."
Where were people arrested? Or their talk declared illegal?
Visibility on some plattforms was reduced and you can argue, that it is a slippery slope, if government intervention with cooperations that host those plattforms, happens in a nontranparent way. (I do think this was bad, opening ways for secret manipulation)
But people could (and did) continiue to talk about their alternative theories for ages.
