If that was the case, I'd worry about the buckets becoming like German universities - the best minds can't get together, so we all lose out.

Maybe, if there are not enough geniuses. Now I'm thinking about the relationship between birth of lives and birth of communities, and why we must rush into a crowded place.

In the past, people like to read newspaper in the streets. Now, we read news from HN. If there is no comment box any more, no one can try to be a superstar in such a prominent place. Then we can just upvote and downvote a news, then talk about it somewhere else. And HN can let the submitter recevie links about discussion from others and show them under the post. Or just receive any links, then the submitter can place it at another positon.

I don't think most HN users know anything at all about German universities, much less any bucketing they might do, so that's probably not the most helpful analogy.

I learned about that particular situation from one of pg's essays (something I figured I could assume was common knowledge around here).

I've read most/all of pg's essays as well, but I have no recollection of anything like that, so...

> German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality. The downside is that none are especially good.

http://paulgraham.com/america.html

Only 2 sentences? No wonder I don't remember it at all.

Can someone explain the German university thing to me? It sounds interesting.

Well, I searched on HN and googled it, but nothing found easily. So this is why I don't like slang sometimes.. :-$

See my reply to gwern above.