Hmm, it looks like "Free Textbooks on [choose subject]" submissions are an easy way to get some link karma on HN.
I've seen this happen quite often lately, and usually these kind of posts go up in the ranks pretty quickly -- they also generate near zero discussion :-)
Well, I was looking for some implementation for Locality-Sensitive Hashing, then I landed on metaoptimize.com from Stackoverflow, thereby clicking on 'Hottest' gave me this first link, and I know that HN people love this sort of stuff, in fact while submitting this link I had this intuition that it has already been submitted earlier.
As far as the title is concerned it is intact from the source, but if you consider this template : Free textbooks on [choose subject] , then the only thing which matters and can attract people is 'subject'.
Personally i don't care about Karma on HN and what others Karma is. All i care about is good link to something useful - technically atleast. "Title" of the post matters a lot.
Discussion: guess somebody will post more links to some good technical material or post some useful comments.
1) So what? Personally, I don't give a shit about karma and would rather not see it, account age or even usernames, but that's another discussion.
2) Perhaps you're being shortsighted. Popular educational submissions now could seed wider, educated submissions/discussion later. The immediate number of comments doesn't necessarily encompass the entire value of a submission towards discussion on HN.
I've seen this happen quite often lately, and usually these kind of posts go up in the ranks pretty quickly -- they also generate near zero discussion :-)