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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#211

Post by nickpsecurity »

forgetsusername wrote: post #199
yxhuvud wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, i find hn a lot more balanced than any other forum I've seen when it comes to finance in general and HFT in particular.

I can't argue with that. I think the population's general level of financial knowledge is low, which is sad considering the influence it wields. I suppose my expectations of this place is higher because...it is a great comment section. But the financial discussion is heavily conspiracy laden.

The articles I read have everything from people with a passing knowledge of finance to finance professionals to people apparently involved in HFT shilling for it. Just as an anecdote, most sites I see on the topics are more polarized in one direction or another. I won't say it's the most diverse crowd here but all the counterpointing brought my attention to many different aspects of the finance and HFT problems.

Curious, what discussion site(s) in finance would you recommend that has more diverse opinions from known experts or veterans whose writing is accessible to non-experts?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#212

Post by jdherg »

dilemma wrote: post #2

The first and second paragraphs seem to contradict each other. Comments (and previously blogs, but not so much anymore) can have more insight than news articles because they're based on first hand experience. Journalists don't have that, and the organization they work for often has problematic incentives which they push onto the writer. HN comments are indeed very terse, to the point of being unfriendly. It bothered…

> The first and second paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

The assertions that "HN comments are terrible" and "I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary" don't seem contradictory to me if you allow the implication that all other (known-to-Dan) public internet forums have technical commentary that's at best also terrible.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#213

Post by solipsism »

zzzcpan wrote: post #177
wpietri wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first bit is true, but the second is pretty much the opposite of what Google found: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... In particular, Google found that psychological safety is a key component of successful teams. Indeed, I think in an environment where rudeness is the norm, it's much harder to get people to share negative thoughts. Sure, you'll have a few alpha-dicks who will say what…

> you need positive, supportive environments Google's research doesn't conclude that at all. Safe place to speak up is not necessarily a positive, supportive environment.

Yes it does. Positive and supportive of people doesn't require being positive and supportive of every idea.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#214

Post by ericolo »

I come here for the content. Before I started frequently coming here, I used solely reddit. I didn't "get" HN at the time. But at some point it started growing on me, I started coming here more and more often, and right now it's my primary source of random information. I still reddit, but more for leisure and time wasting than anything else.

I don't check comment much, thought.

As a side effect, it had also changed my browsing customs; before it wasn't difficult for me to go down to the 10th page on reddit.

Nowadays I'm barely past the 2nd page.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#215

Post by forgottenpass »

hellofunk wrote: post #74

> comments are often gratuitously mean, and people will often defend gratuitously mean comments by claiming that it’s either impossible or inefficient to convey information without being mean. > Most of the negative things you hear about HN comments are true. I think it is interesting how the relatively anonymised nature of the internet has a similar effect on people of all stripes. HN readers, I believe, are among t…

I think it shows in a strange way that people just have a lot of negativity to vent

Is it venting, or is it just a reversion to the indifference that we hide in face-to-face interactions with manners and artificial civility?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#216

Post by veddox »

internaut wrote: post #196
veddox wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anti-white racism. It's identical to the antisemitism of the far right in the 30s and 40s, except it is with whites. Wow, I officially have a new "worst-comment-seen-on-HN". Sir, have you ever experienced anything close to racism? And do you have any idea what antisemitism in the 30s and 40s actually was like? I am a young white male who has spent several years living abroad in the Third World. And yes, I have expe…

It's a single sentence and you read things into it I was not quite thinking of. Obviously the death camps are not presently open for business. My original post (which I shortened to that) explained my thoughts more clearly but I opted for brevity and in the name of brevity sometimes... I was thinking of two things. 1. The rise of antisemitism in the early 20th century, and 2. An accompanying diabolism, the antisemiti…

> It's a single sentence and you read things into it I was not quite thinking of.

Quite possible. However, if you insist on bringing up a Nazi comparison in a three sentence comment, it can be hard not to be misunderstood...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#217

Post by tptacek »

VodkaHaze wrote: post #168
dsacco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to agree with you, but I don't go on reddit much. Can you supply a few reddit threads you feel are exceptionally high caliber? I mostly consume /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. One of the problems I have with reddit (and this might come from not working hard enough at it) is not knowing how to find active, high quality, specialty subreddits.

You want to find the niche expert subreddits. The ones you named are good. So is /r/badhistory, /r/badeconomics [1] which are generally hangouts of experts to make fun of people claiming things. /r/netsec is generally good, so is /r/machinelearning. Even niche job-specific subreddits (like meddit or /r/protectandserve) are interesting to observe. Because economics gets politicized so much, it's very rare to find soun…

I didn't know about badeconomics, and I'm enjoying a lot, but I can already see ways in which its moderation reduces the average comment quality. For instance: there's a whole lot of insubstantial snark. A lot of it is funny, but you have to pick through it to find the actual information.

That's not a criticism of badeconomics! Just an observation on how moderation choices can affect total thread quality in different ways. It is also totally legitimate to optimize for highest-possible-highs.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#218

Post by parasubvert »

zzzcpan wrote: post #177
wpietri wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first bit is true, but the second is pretty much the opposite of what Google found: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... In particular, Google found that psychological safety is a key component of successful teams. Indeed, I think in an environment where rudeness is the norm, it's much harder to get people to share negative thoughts. Sure, you'll have a few alpha-dicks who will say what…

> you need positive, supportive environments Google's research doesn't conclude that at all. Safe place to speak up is not necessarily a positive, supportive environment.

I'm having a severe case of cognitive dissonance here.

A positive, supportive environment is one that allows people to speak up, supports people to be critical and allows both success and failures but doesn't perpetuate failures - meaning the initiative or product is separate from the person.

A negative, unsupportive environment generally makes people feel like shit until they quit or are fired, perpetuates failed initiatives out of ego or spite, or otherwise tosses out people along with a failed initiative, etc.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#219

Post by nickpsecurity »

jomamaxx wrote: post #124
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…

"Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics." I find that HN is pretty weak on economics. But it's a tech blog, so ... And I'm not so sure that 'business ideas' are about economics. Usually, they are simply about doing things using newly available technology, in ways that are obvious in hindsight. I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science - it's the gre…

"I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science "

People have been doing what they're doing on individual or household level on ad hoc basis for decades. The problem persisted all the way up to AirBnB's time. There was no efficient, integrated, widely-available solution to the problem. They provided that. They exploded in growth followed by other founders looking for similar problems in unrelated markets like business trips. Several markets forming as a result.

Basic concept is simple and was always there, though. Just needed someone to solve it in an economical way. :)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#220

Post by qb45 »

lorenzhs wrote: post #120

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 r…

There was more to it than missing support in Linux.

These SSDs have two modes of operation: AHCI (supported by any OS) and proprietary (requiring special drivers). Lenovo chose to hide the corresponding menu in UEFI setup and hacked the firmware to revert changes made through UEFI variables so that the SSD was permanently stuck in proprietary RAID mode, at that time supported only by Lenovo's modified Windows 10.

Ultimately Lenovo said they did it because RAID mode performs better, but they only published this explanation after the outbreak of Internet drama.

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