The Barometer of Hacker News Knowledge Half-life

llimllib 16 years ago |

My favorite bash aliases:

alias aack="ack --all"

alias rack="ack --ruby --follow"

alias fack="ack --actionscript --follow"

alias jack="ack --js"

alias pack="ack --python"

(mentioned because aack would have prevented his searching problem)

shalmanese 16 years ago |

Wow, it seems like Zed just discovered branding. A brand is established by owning a word/concept in the consumer's minds. In Fret Wars' case, it was randomly generated music. It doesn't matter if this is now no longer the case in reality, it's still the established brand.

rapind 16 years ago |

The whole snap judgement based on passed impressions brings to mind something I've been suspecting for a while now.

I'm tired of beta. I can't get up the energy investment required to check and re-check web applications other than a few I've already internally flagged as important. Am I alone?

When I miss-label Fret War it's unintentional. I'm just being rationally lazy to save some juice for other things.

bugs 16 years ago |

This article comes off as rather offensive to me, it must be the language and constant ego bashing of nerds, but one thing that doesn't make sense is when Zed Shaw said he put his ego aside as he obviously didn't and was angry that his about page had fed these random music comments and is obviously upset that people took his about page seriously.

lonestar 16 years ago | |

He said he put his ego aside in regards to redesigning his webapp to appeal to a wider audience, rather than what he wanted.

It doesn't seem terribly egotistical to want to correct people who are spreading an inaccurate representation of his product.

bugs 16 years ago | | |

It does when he is angry at people for stating information in the about page and he expects those people to know his about page is wrong.

He may actually be sincere in his thank you but the whole article made his tone snobbish in my mind so I didn't take it as real.

dandelany 16 years ago | | |

At least to me, he doesn't come off as angry at anyone other than himself for forgetting to fix his About page. In fact, he says several positive things about HN readers:

"the value of a natural feedback system is greater than any promotional value I would get out of submitting things myself."

"...an excellent positive result of the HN barometer"

"I think of HN as a barometer of what people think."

"Thank you Hacker News"

On the whole, the post is about how Hacker News enabled him to get a read on community sentiment about Fret Wars. This is absolutely a positive thing. He's not blaming HN for continuing to think the site is about randomly generated music, he's blaming himself, and praising HN for helping him discover his mistake.

Now if I was a guitar player, I might be offended... :)

pohl 16 years ago | |

It came off entirely different to me. I thought it was a hilarious tale of a forehead-slapping revelation and subsequent frustrations in trying to put a genie back in the bottle. Paragraph 5 about guitarists really tickled my funny bone, in a you-laugh-because-it's-so-true kind of way.

I had just been thinking about some of the themes in the article. Yesterday's thread about how Emacs is now using Bazaar for source control illustrates this well: people believe that Bazaar is a fork of arch (this hasn't been true for a couple years). He's absolutely right that it's hard to get our demographic to update our opinions.

logicalmind 16 years ago | |

The way I interpret the article is that he is riffing on the fact that Hacker News members are generally interested in startups and likely believe in the constant release and iterate cycles that are used to determine a viable concept or product.

He might be pointing out the fact that those kind of people are stuck on the "random music" idea he used initially and not giving him valuable feedback on his evolving idea. But I'm just guessing.

jeffreyg 16 years ago |

this is about fret war, the randomly generated music thing, we've seen it before

pchristensen 16 years ago | |

Somehow I knew that would be the one comment

jbronn 16 years ago |

> ack didn’t pick it up because that’s a text file. DAMN!

`ack -a` is your friend, Zed. No snark intended, that's all I have to say.

tptacek 16 years ago |

The barometer of Hacker News knowledge half-life is how well it tracks the state of a Zed Shaw side project.

chrischen 16 years ago |

If you're a public persona, and stuff like your personal posts about moving to San Francisco get re-posted, then the reposting of your work is probably not a very accurate barometer of your work's individual merits. Instead it's simply a measure of your overal notability.

axod 16 years ago |

"But, that’s the price you pay for being a public persona with fans."

Srsly? Public Persona? with fans...? Who? Maybe that bit was meant tongue in cheek. I really hope so.

jcl 16 years ago | |

From the numbers, we can conclude that Zed is at least somewhat awesome:

http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points

axod 16 years ago | | |

Within the niche of HN which is in itself a niche of 'tech'.

OK, point conceded. These people are truly 'famous' :/

olefoo 16 years ago | | |

In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. -- A. Warhol

Clay Shirky updated that with "In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people."

It is obviously more complex than that, but Zed Shaw probably has a nationwide Q rating higher than your local newsreader for your local broadcast television channel.

So, for some values of 'famous', yes.

mynameishere 16 years ago |

Zed playing/singing:

http://fretwar.com/static/data/player/1/round/40/submission/