Seriously, I found a few of the conclusions drawn from the data here to be pretty odd. I was hoping for some interesting insight but the article is really disappointing.
> "The language in the former is more neutral and about the content of the article (apparently Hacker News users really like to talk about Open Source software), while the submissions about gender and diversity trend to talk about tangent topics."
Does the author _really_ find it surprising that combining all topics will lead to, on average, more "neutral" language than a topic that (ostensibly) doesn't require any expertise/knowledge of esoterica? It should be obvious that the number of people who have an opinion about diversity in tech will be higher than the number of people who feel the same way about "Show HN: Virtjs, an ES6 emulation library " or "The amazing progress of LEDs" (both from the front-page right now).
Note: I'm not suggesting that the latter two aren't as _interesting_, but that contributing a comment of substance is obviously going to be more difficult and thus have less people go ahead and do so.
Is it just me who finds the latter two far more interesting?
It seems the biggest problem with HN becoming more popular is that it's picked up all of these politically charged topics which were very seldom before (from memory). If anybody could run the numbers on the percentage of topics featuring 'diversity' from 2014 compared to earlier that would be very interesting to me.
There's no shortage of places to discuss diversity and the usual political issues, but far fewer places to discuss difficult business and tech issues and having HN taken over by these 'interesting' topics is very unfortunate. Is this the case though?
> "The language in the former is more neutral and about the content of the article (apparently Hacker News users really like to talk about Open Source software), while the submissions about gender and diversity trend to talk about tangent topics."
Does the author _really_ find it surprising that combining all topics will lead to, on average, more "neutral" language than a topic that (ostensibly) doesn't require any expertise/knowledge of esoterica? It should be obvious that the number of people who have an opinion about diversity in tech will be higher than the number of people who feel the same way about "Show HN: Virtjs, an ES6 emulation library " or "The amazing progress of LEDs" (both from the front-page right now).
Note: I'm not suggesting that the latter two aren't as _interesting_, but that contributing a comment of substance is obviously going to be more difficult and thus have less people go ahead and do so.