I don't know, "random" wikipedia articles often pop up on the front-page.

It's been speculated that some groups use random wikipedia articles to test-run their botting. I think a more charitable explanation is often that it's something or relates to something that's going viral on other media, and we get to experience the wash of that, turning up here.

The HN ranking is also very enigmatic. You sometimes get articles whose presence you can't fathom, but by the time you refresh it's disappeared entirely. It feels like the live front-page is built for reactivity, not for stability.

That's perhaps for the best given there's no "recent trending" type page for that.

Edit: This one was submitted 2 days ago, and randomly got front-paged today. It shows "2 hours ago" but mousing over shows the original meta-data of 2 days ago, so this returned via the second chance pool.

Genuinely worthy or a fat-finger I wonder?

I vote up "random" articles if I've found them interesting and learned something new. Occasionally I'll post an article and I've had some great discussions over random things. After all, according to the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I think it's cool and weird that there is a hybrid celery/lettuce cultivar out there. I would never have found this otherwise.

While I love a wikipedia spelunk as much as the next person, hitting the random button rarely gets you truly interesting articles. You're more likely to get a random soccer player or an unremarkable neighborhood in India. None of which would end up on the front page.

Another way to detect the odd way HN handles articles it re-pushes to the front-page, the wikipedia submissions page, and the submitter submissions page show the original 2 days ago submission time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe

Because people clicked the upvote button. It means people thought it was interesting.

I see these sorts of comments all the time and I have to say that I don't find they add much to the conversation.

> I see these sorts of comments all the time and I have to say that I don't find they add much to the conversation.

I think it's a valid question—sometimes things end up on the front page just because. And sometimes there's an actual reason that not everyone is aware of—maybe it was mentioned in a popular article, or in a movie, or a viral tweet, or whatever. And in those cases, someone will respond with "here's why people are interested in this right now."

Asking "why is this on the front page" doesn't always mean "this doesn't belong on the front page", it can mean "is there some context here I'm unaware of?"

That's fair. Although the replies to this comment I've read seem to have read it the same way as I have.

I won’t say the original poster meant in the sense that I’m talking. Just that, regardless of how it is meant, I often find it a question that gathers useful answers.

Wondering the same thing. It's a pretty standard, mundane household vegetable you can buy at most Asian supermarkets.

It’s new to me!

I clicked because from the name I thought it would be some new genetically engineered form of lettuce, one with perhaps the capability of destroying our ecosystem as we know it. I am now upvoting because it is funny.