I don't think that's why. I think it's typical linkbait.
Anyone who is serious about learning will follow the obvious trails of references in papers they read, course listings and book requirements for those courses at university websites, Wikipedia links, and so on. Anybody who found HN can find CS courses.
If you'd look closely these resources are grouped around a single topic, and carefully selected by an expert in a highly specialized field. It saves me, personally, a ton of time reading marginal papers and browsing through a clusterfuck of references.
I did look closely at this list. I commented because it's such a typical example of unearned upvote candy.
I could have assembled this list (as a non-computer scientist) in less than an hour just by looking at the usual places I look for lecture notes and following the typical linkbait-maker advice of leaving a brief comment and headings. The author admits s/he is still working through the material and the details on each are minimal, so this curator ≠ expert.
Nor is the field "highly specialized". arxiv/math.QA is specialised. Welding less-than-1cm aluminium for a particular part in powerboat engines is highly specialised. Computer Science Major is an extremely broad area of study.
To me this is exactly a "clusterf_ck of references".
Ok, I should have renamed it from the original title given by the author to "Excellent List of Distributed Systems and Relevant CS Courses With Good Lecture Notes, Assembled by a University of Cambridge PhD in Mobile Distributed Systems, Zookeeper Committer and a Glorious Systems Engineer Who Lives and Breathes Distributed Systems at Cloudera" to get less upvotes.
Just read the rest of his blog. This is not a trivial list of references that you can compile by googling without thorough understanding of the subject matter, trust me, I've been digging this field for too long [1]
Alternatively you can ask hundreds of people who re-tweeted this link[2], bookmarked it on their Delicious [3], or those who study it now, why did they think it was good. Look at their profiles, what percentage of them are dumb link-followers?
Or simply try to compile and post a list of courses with the same title and see how many upvotes/retweets/bookmarks it gets and how quickly it disappears from the front page if it gets there in the first place. HN users are largely linkbait-averse, that's what I like about this community.
helwr, I respect the fact that you're intelligently and politely continuing this debate. Maybe it is not worth your time because of my cynical attitude.
I have very little respect for Quora, HN, retweets, or bookmarks which are accomplished with a click. If it makes you feel better, something I wrote also reached the front page of HN and received an undue number of upvotes, retweets, and social bookmarks by people who I guarantee have not read even 1% of the works I pointed to -- all because the blog post followed the linkbait formula.
I Truly Believe that people bookmark/upvote/retweet things they "intend to read" but never actually read, and that this systematically increases the level of noise masquerading as signal on the web.
Having stated that background - some of the response you got on Quora looks fine; the intelligent professors retweet just as sheeply as everyone else since the private cost is $0; and bookmarks signify nothing more than that this story reached the front page of HN.
Cheers, thank you for the rational back-and-forth.
