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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#111

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nekopa wrote: post #85
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #24

You post a list of the best comments on HN without putting The Wisdom of Bane on the list? Seriously, how did The Wisdom of Bane not make it one here? That is one of the best comments on all of HN. For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

Heh, I prefer to refer to that whole comment as Bane's Rule. I have had many interesting discussions with IT managers face to face after having them read that, especially regarding the idea of having vendors show that their product beats out the current system. For programmers, I think one of the key takeaways from that comment is not the clever coding, but the direct tie into business results from the coding. Not ju…

It's about some of core principles of software: Keep it simple, use the minimal code (if it's not there, it can't slow you down), see where speed problems are before optimizing, optimize before scaling up.

It's common sense, but it's rare to actually follow it.

Actually, I'm guilty of this myself. I was finishing last year's Advent of Code, and was given a problem which I tried to optimize, as I assumed the naive approach would be too slow. Then I realized I was trying to optimize Travelling Salesman, so I bit the bullet and went for the O(n!) solution. And it ran in less than a second. In interpreted scheme, no less.

I felt kind of silly later.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#112

Post by teekert »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #3

HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too. It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who…

It's also full of people who readily classify deviating opinions under naive political opinions, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new.

I do agree with you second statement though, often before forwarding a link to colleagues I read the comments and see if my enthusiasm is not easily killed, it often is (and rightly so, in most of the cases).

Re: HN comments are underrated

#113

Post by [deleted] »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #3

HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too. It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who…

[deleted]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#114

Post by tptacek »

VodkaHaze wrote: post #82
shawnee_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business startup ideas are essentially experiments in economic theory. Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics. It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the incentive here lately has been t…

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments. Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment.

I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better than the median Reddit thread.

Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and diversity of topics.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#115

Post by planteen »

Chathamization wrote: post #51
witty_username wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too. I've seen plenty of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" in the comments and complaints about engineers always trying to use the newest technology.

It depends on the subject. Take Mars colonization or self-driving cars. There's recently been a few posts (with a large number of upvotes) that were more or less press releases from companies, with the majority of the comments being very positive and the most up-voted comment in each post complaining about the existence of a few comments that were skeptical.

Yep it seems anything by Elon is sacrosanct with much of the HN crew.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#116

Post by ghaff »

wfeui3 wrote: post #71

I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology for fraction of price. And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees. But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every year.

But it should build lots of housing for tech workers for whom life just isn't worth living if they have to be anywhere else on the planet.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#117

Post by burntsushi »

eternauta3k wrote: post #89
Jimmy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go…

> only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits Any recommendations?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ is unrivaled in its signal-to-noise ratio.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#118

Post by AlexCoventry »

VodkaHaze wrote: post #82
shawnee_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business startup ideas are essentially experiments in economic theory. Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics. It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the incentive here lately has been t…

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments. Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

What's an example of a pure economics discussion?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#119

Post by mortehu »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #90
blt wrote: post #47

I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.

Maybe have a [jokular] tag and let readers flag a comment as such, then allow [jokular] comments to be hidden for the people who find them noisy. Edit: this comment deservers the [overengineering] tag...

Slashdot has something similar. Moderators' points have to be tagged with "Funny", "Interesting", etc, and users can choose how to weigh each type of point.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#120

Post by lorenzhs »

The comments on that "Lenovo is blocking Linux on some new laptops" story a while back were truly abysmal. I think that's the only time where I was really disappointed by HN comments. Now obviously (and as many of the more thoughtful commenters pointed out) this was just a case of missing support in the Linux kernel. There was no "secret deal" between Lenovo and Microsoft that the customer service rep on that forum revealed. Intel posted some patches to fix this a few days ago: http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=147709610621480&w=2

The thread I question, with over 1000 points and 500 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545878

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