This week on CodeFaster, I switched from jq tutorials, to sed tutorials. I was hoping my similar title "mastering sed: part 1" would get the same hacker news attention as "mastering jq: part 1", but alas, it didn't even get a single upvote (unlike mastering jq which got 205). It's probably that people are less interested in sed, an old cryptic unix text manipulator vs jq which is a new json, easy to use json manipulator, but I'm still surprised it got none, I expected maybe a few. In any case, I still think sed is important, so I want to keep writing about it. One other thing on my mind is the emotion in my writing. I like to write brief and to the point, no need to fluff up content with empassioned speach or frivilous information, and I appreciate brevity in other writing, but maybe that turns off my target audience? What do you guys think? (This week's post can be found at https://codefaster.substack.com/p/mastering-sed-part-1)

I think you're too focused on metrics. Feedback channels in this universe work too imprecisely for this level of focus. For all our society's emphasis on being data-driven, there often isn't good enough data. In this case, HN behavior is often highly dependent on the first 2 or 3 votes a story gets. If they come quickly it has more time to rise. Selection bias on who happens to be browsing the new page at any time compounds the noisiness of this signal. You should just write about what you think is important. You may be surprised by how this sed posting does when somebody submits it to HN in 6 months time.

Sounds like I need more data to have a meaningful conclusion, and in the absence of said data, I completely agree, what I think is important (and like) takes priority

(i agree with kartik, but) i think the biggest issue from a marketing perspective is that jq has some mindshare with motivations already. it would be helpful if this article started with some info about why i should care about send when i have more modern text transformation tools available

sent it to my partner who spends a lot of time in

awk

and she was excited to read it… but she’ll never ever be a HN reader 🙂