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Poll: What was your reaction to this item?

20 points by RiderOfGiraffes ↗ HN
Yesterday I posted a link to a small script I wrote and, as expected, it pretty much sank without trace. I'm always interested to learn more about the people here on HN, what they find interesting, what they might find useful, so I thought this would be a good litmus paper test. Did you see it? And if so, what was your reaction?

I'll put a link to the item in the comments, and thanks in advance for letting me know.

ADDED IN EDIT: I'm finding this really interesting - thanks to everyone answering. However, if this item doesn't get to the front page then it too will sink. Please upvote it, and if you don't want me to get the karma (which I understand) then downvote the scapegoat comment further down - thanks.

11 comments

[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] thread
jacktasia
I agree that it sucks when you make something that you think is cool and no one seems to care (or notice) even when you actively try to share it. That said, it happens all the time...and it makes it that much sweeter when people actually do care/notice.
mbrubeck
Cool project. If I'd seen it, I'd have clicked the link based on username recognition - but the title didn't give me much to expect. Something just slightly more descriptive would have piqued my interest more ("predict time-to-completion of shell commands based on their output"). Also, I find that known community members get more clicks by making it clear it's their own project ("Tell HN" or "My script to..."). I didn't recognize your domain name in this case.
RiderOfGiraffes
Scapegoat comment ... if you upvote the submission and don't want me to get the karma, feel free to downvote this comment to balance it out.
macemoneta
I saw the item but didn't follow the link, because the description didn't sound interesting. If the description were more clear, I probably would have followed it.

For example: "A script to estimate the time at which a process will complete".

I skim through several thousand RSS/ATOM feed entries each day; unless the meaning is clear and interesting to me, I usually don't waste time trying to decode it.

wglb
While it is clear what the value of this is, I needs such estimates so rarely that I just do them mentally or just go off and do something else.

My long-running things are either known in length or short enough to flip to hacker news to read a couple of items.

csmeder
many people don't know what an end time is maybe start with an interesting paragraph describing end times and why they matter. I dunno?
vsync
I hadn't seen it before. The description in the original submission should have been clearer; also: don't apologize and predict sad things in your submission.
thepsi
The RSS feed just shows the title; my reaction was along the lines of "endtimes... of what? next!". Didn't get as far as the description.

Having taken a look now, sounds handy!

arantius
I use "pv" (pipe viewer) for this. So the example would be:

pv tarball.tar | tar xf -

And the output is great.