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HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#251

Post by jacquesm »

tedmiston wrote: post #250

I really think the author is onto something here. Recently I've been thinking about doing a couple blog posts that summarize the HN thread for a given article* in perhaps ~1500 words. I think of it like the approach that r/tabled uses for AMAs on Reddit (example: [1]). Would others find this interesting, or would you rather just read the comments yourself? A second idea is — a daily / weekly update of comments from a…

I did this once:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-sell-your-company

It's still one of the most visited pages.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#252

Post by tedmiston »

anton_tarasenko wrote: post #11

When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those projects had more upvotes. The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users reduced the quality of judgement. So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN. I also suspect that early com…

One consideration I'd like to point out is how the audience changed over time. I'm not saying anything like "HN is getting worse every year", but rather that it started at a startup accelerator, before startup accelerators were popular and at a time when startups weren't as popular as they are now. The crowd was more insiders at the beginning, and insiders may have more insight into what will / won't succeed from their experience.

Another point, and I wish I had data but this is purely anecdotal, is that it seems like the side project --> startup transition is happening less. People are content making small side projects, doing hackathons, etc but not making that business their life (upsides and downsides to this).

Re: HN comments are underrated

#253

Post by tedmiston »

tgb wrote: post #97
anton_tarasenko wrote: post #11

When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those projects had more upvotes. The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users reduced the quality of judgement. So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN. I also suspect that early com…

Interesting, but when I upvote Shown HN posts, it's because it contributed to my enjoyment of reading HN. That's largely orthogonal to whether it would be a good product, and often times is directly contradictory towards it (fun tech demos -> upvotes, products -> meh). I don't think that's a decline in the quality of HN, it's just a different focus. I use HN as entertainment rather than as a prediction market. But I…

You raise an interesting point; in comparison, Product Hunt is essentially the opposite.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#254

Post by bane »

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

Aww shucks. Thanks for the shout out.

I realize reading this again that I owe a more significant writeup -- I started one not long after this and wasn't happy with how it was shaping up. Maybe I'll have another go at it.

Since writing that comment two years ago I've added a couple more examples consistent with the ones in the original post.

One thing I keep seeing is how teams seem to think that the planning stage of this kind of work involves figuring out how to shove the problem into the big-data platform du jour instead of figuring out how to solve the problem that has the business need. When they're working with the platform, and hitting the inevitable and unplanned for performance issues (because, you know, just shove the node to the hadoop cluster and it'll magically take care of that), the solutions never tackle the algorithmic bottlenecks but instead seem to focus on messing with the platform or changing platforms, or changing run-time languages or throwing more hardware at it.

If you are having trouble taking the nuts off your wheel to change a tire, using a bigger hammer or a blow torth isn't going to help. Take the time to find the wrench, of the right size, and then things will work much better.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#255

Post by pavlov »

I second Dan's advice of blogging more.

I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case studies at best... So my comments certainly won't make anyone's "Best of HN" list.

Last week, after the news broke that Salesforce walked away from buying Twitter, I was about to write a HN comment about what Twitter could do. The text got long enough that I decided to expand it into a Medium post instead: https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-mozilla-e7...

To my surprise, the post has 28,000 views and 755 recommends so far. If I had written it as a HN comment, it would have got maybe 5-10 upvotes and perhaps spawned a short discussion thread about how unrealistic my idea was. (Please don't bother to criticize the content of the blog post in replies here -- I'm just using it as an example of blog vs. comment.)

I love reading HN discussions... But maybe there could be a site that slots between the HN and Medium formats, and lets you expand your comment into a blog post with minimal friction? Call it "HN Long-Form" or whatever. Ideally it would interface with the HN comment system so that you could mark your comment with something like "Promote to long-form" after you've written it. That would create an editable post on the long-form site. You could then later expand your comment there, and publish it on the long-form comment aggregator site. (Maybe I should just build this myself and see if it feels right.)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#256

Post by nickpsecurity »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #243
nickpsecurity wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. That was an amazing comment that should be required reading for all these people thinking about throwing datacenters at their problem of choice. It's actually about the same as the advice and methods used in the Beowulf clusters back when all this crap was starting. They did come up with creative ways to scale out while NUMA vendors (esp SGI) kept scaling further up. However, they also identified…

There's a reason it's a classic. The best summation I heard of it was, "If you can't get the solution to a problem to fit on one machine, you probably don't understand the problem well enough." This is probably one of my favorite quotes in software. I'm probably slightly misquoting it here, but I don't care.

It's been formalized past that into the COST methodology of assessing distribution solutions: Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread. If that configuration doesn't exist, just ditch the solution in favor of a single thread. :)

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...

It just gets more hilarious the more you read the measurements of all these tech vs a single thread.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#257

Post by nickpsecurity »

grzm wrote: post #245
nickpsecurity wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as well." That's a good point. In my classes on it, they called it active listening. Anyone interested in following up on your point should type that phrase into Google to find all kinds of inter…

Thanks for the Principle of Charity link! It calls to mind Anotol's Rapoport's rules, summarized by Daniel Dennett as: > How to compose a successful critical commentary: > * You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way. > * You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of…

Yes, Rapoport's rules seem comparable. Succinct too. Bookmarked. :)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#258

Post by tedmiston »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #13
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 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 invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me This is pretty much why I use…

^ Very similar for me. A good criticism that invites me to better understand a different viewpoint is worth a lot.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#259

Post by veddox »

mooreds wrote: post #247
veddox wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that idea! The only problem I see is that great comments are often embedded within an extensive discussion - how do you give readers of such a digest the necessary context without too much bloat?

I can think of two options: * Embed enough to give the reader context (maybe a link to the original article or quoting the parent or grandparent is enough) * Only include those comments that are stand-alone. It'd be quite a lot of work, but even if you highlighted 10% of the great comments, you'd provide a great service.

Absolutely! If you do it, I might just subscribe :-)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#260

Post by tedmiston »

frik wrote: post #159
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back. Your wish has been granted, you have a "karma: 4406" line

I meant the karma ratio (or what it was called) that was on the profil page, a percentage value as far as I remember - ...maybe dang can explain it?

Here are the comments he made in reference to removing average karma [1][2][3]:

> dang 781 days ago

> It's based on comment scores only. My sense is that it's an irrelevant distraction and we should get rid of it.

> For example, we caught a bunch of users who were gaming it by deleting any comments that brought their average down. We fixed that by treating deleted comments as comments of score 0 for average-computing purposes. It's an example of how, once you publish a metric, people start to care about it and do things based on it, regardless of how meaningful it is.

> Comment average used to be used by a few algorithms (like comment ranking) but we turned that off as an experiment a while ago and nothing seemed to get worse. If anything, I think it may have helped a little.

---

> dang 572 days ago

> What brudgers said is correct, but I'll add that we're probably going to get rid of comment averages. We've looked at the data extensively and it hasn't proven to have much value. We've phased out the code that used to rely on it, and what's left (which is only for display) is probably not worth the cost.

---

> dang 567 days ago

> ... We got rid of average because (a) after looking extensively at the data we didn't see any value in it, (b) we had evidence of people gaming the metric, (c) its implementation was complicated, and most importantly (d) we think upvotes are wrong thing to optimize for. Optimize for saying substantive things.

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[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297678

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264220

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322256

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