From ChatGPT's launch to the February 2026 peak, monthly Show HN submissions jumped from 0.9k to 5.8k (6.3x increase), however Show HN posts reaching 20+ points rose by only just 1.6x
Great work! I'm doing something similar, but using upvoted submissions I did so I can rank posts better, filter out posts about AI but most importantly flag potentially interesting submissions in New that couldn't have made frontpage.
on the other hand, there are much more links than baseball players. also there are only around 1k hall of fame links, the rest are candidates (i.e. have not met all requirements - 5+ submissions · 3+ distinct submitters · 3+ active years · 2 qualifying breakout events from different submitters at least 720 days apart)
i do accept thought that i have exaggerated in the title)
Learning basic variations of even one opening for white and for black can be extremely useful. There's not much tactics in first moves, but knowing how to set up a solid position will help a lot. Just learn basic stuff, no need to go into the weeds too much. Also the names of the openings are pretty cool
Every time i re-read 'The Lord of the Rings' I'm amazed at how 'racist' it is in the literal sense of the word. Everything is built around races: the good characters are from the north/west, while the bad ones come from the south/east, etc.
And rather misogynist, and monarchist, and a boatload of other things.
Many of those I'd write off to Tolkien being a product of his times. At least his heroes seemed to have many ideals which are still accounted virtuous.
Tolkien's monarchism, though - even in the days of the Old Testament, it was obvious that hereditary monarchy never, ever worked for long. Because the heirs of great men always regressed to the mean. Pretty damn fast. (After King George III, Britain mostly solved that problem by turning their hereditary monarchs into mostly-symbolic figureheads.) And Tolkien served in the hellish trenches of WWI - a war which dug deep, dark graves for both hereditary monarchy and European superiority.
Hmm...in many ways, I could argue that Tolkien's fantasy writings were mostly escapism for him - to a old-fashioned romantic utopia, where "land of milk and honey, and the kingdom is powerful and prosperous, and the king is always good" was at least possible. And consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...
Monarchy never really works for long in Tolkien's works either. The history of the kings of Gondor is all strife and crises, and in Tolkien's abandoned sequel already 100 years later “the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse.” (Letter 256)
> consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...
Tolkien called conlang'ing (and by extension, worldbuilding?) "the solitary vice": a phrase which would have had a different denotation in his Edwardian childhood than the rather literal denotation we ascribe to it.
Exercise for the reader: how solarpunk would wider europe be now, if the British Empire and the German Empire (and their descendants) hadn't played Sith Master/Apprentice games, not once but twice, last century? (1914-1918 and 1939-1945)
Since we readers are products of a time where we're incessantly propagandised (albeit more for economic than political ends), we ought to habitually be reading for both explicit text and implicit subtext.
Mordor: "[that] amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic"
Here are similar works, anyone have potential additions?
Grendel
The Persian Version
Snow, Glass, Apples
(I have half a mind to write an epistolary short story from the point of view of one of Winston Smith's coworkers at the Ministry of Truth, dismayed about Smith's paranoiac reactions to normal office routine —colleagues transferring, etc.—, his labile personality[0] in general, and his conspiratorial mindset[1] in particular. All the objective events of Parts 1 and 2 can easily be explained much more rationally than in Smith's interpretations, but Part 3, being so explicit, has thus far resisted such treatment)
EDIT: also, Bulgakov's hard-boiled detective version of the gospel (his who-dun-it has a pragmatic advantage in that although christians and jews both still exist, no extant groups claim to belong to the Senatus PopulusQue Romanus)
[0] consider how quickly he hooked up with somone who merely dropped papers in front of him?
[1] want someone to kill people in a random pizzeria for conspiracy reasons? Smith's your man.
>short story from the point of view of one of Winston Smith's coworkers
I like the idea. I think the part 3 can co-exist the new interpretation of parts 1 and 2 -- Smith can be a conspiracy nut amid mundane reality but Big Brother's security apparatus nonetheless exists and for some reason eventually gets interested in Smith.
On the issue of how Tolkien thought about race in his works, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, by Robert Stuart (2022) is very good. Despite its slightly clickbaity title, the author does a careful analysis and avoids polemic.
