Last night I submitted a story on this blog – about P=NP – to Slashdot and today the submission was accepted and in a few hours I have had perhaps five times more visitors than in the previous two and a half months.
But, thanks to WordPress.com there was no “slashdotting” – instead the site has stayed up and running throughout.
Slashdot has a reputation for flame wars and ignorance, but actually the discussion has been great – I wish I could get a few more articles from the blog on to /. as then I would benefit from the clever people who hang out there: yes there is a lot of noise, but there’s also good signal.
The other thing it has reminded me of is the need to avoid imprecision in scientific writing. A few flames have been aimed at me and articles on the blog: one item being called horrible when, actually, what I think what was really wrong was a few corners cut in an effort to make the exposition a little less cluttered.
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