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HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#271

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #265
VodkaHaze wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> /r/badeconomics The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments? No thanks. This is a non-negotiable requirement, no non-democratic entity should have power over the highest democratic entity. That’s the fundamental issue that makes traditional ISDS problematic, and why ICS and the new ISDS alternative in CETA were created in the first place. But /r/bad…

[deleted]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#272

Post by tedmiston »

jacquesm wrote: post #251
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.

This looks excellent, and very thorough. Thanks for sharing.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#273

Post by david-given »

pavlov wrote: post #255

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 stud…

I completely agree.

In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven years later it's still one of the most popular pages on my website, although luckily it's been eclipsed by better content.

If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I have seen a tool which allows a HN thread to be used as a comment on a external blog post --- it came up a few weeks back. I don't know if this worked by screen-scraping HN itself or whether there's an API, but either way it suggests that your idea would work.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#274

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

bane wrote: post #254
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…

I mean, you get shoutouts every day. Thanks for responding to this one.

>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.

Ahhh yes. The "when X is your hammer" problem.

In this context, I think the appropriate incarnation is, "When Hadoop is your hammer, everything looks like 1000 nails to be hit very quickly, using brute force."

Re: HN comments are underrated

#275

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #256
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A single thread frequently has less code: less code means less code being executed. This is a contributing factor to speed. The less instructions you have to execute, the faster it runs, give or take. Not that instructions executed do not necessarily correlate to code size (a loop is only written once, but executed many times).

By the way, bane responded to my original post: it's worth reading.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#276

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #266
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...okay. You're welcome, I guess, but I'm not sure what's so hard about articulating it that makes doing so praiseworthy. Or were you just being nice? If so, that's totally fine, never mind.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between the right phrasing and the almost right phrasing is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. We're here for the lightning.

...And that was totally the right phrasing.

Thanks for explaning so well.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#277

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

tedmiston wrote: post #258
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's worth more than any other type of comment, IMHO, save maybe construtive criticism. All that's left if you take those out is banal agreement, something some of the more aggressively PC communities out there don't realize, IMHO.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#278

Post by mooreds »

veddox wrote: post #259
mooreds wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Same to you :)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#279

Post by david-given »

zzzcpan wrote: post #229
parasubvert wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Obviously, positive and supportive mean different things to different people. I, for example, don't see how you can be positive, supportive, but criticize other people's ideas and work they are doing at the same time. So, at best it's a neutral place, leaning towards negativity, since expressing criticism substantially is a lot of effort, it's easier to simply call bad ideas as bad and move on. The research is actual…

...I find myself telling this anecodote more or less at weekly intervals, but:

Where I work all code is reviewed. Like, it has to be reviewed before it gets checked in. Everyone does reviews, everyone has their code reviewed.

One of the people I work with has an amazing talent which is that you go through a review with them, and at the far end you feel enthusiastic and pumped and really keen to throw all your code away and rewrite it from scratch, because they've just pointed out all the incredibly stupid stuff they've done wrong, but they've done it in such a way that you feel really good about all the stuff you've just learned.

Meanwhile I've gone through much less severe reviews from other people that have left me depressed and completely unenthusiastic, even though they thought my code was fine.

Positive, supportive, constructive, and critical: it's totally possible (and I need to learn how to do it).

Re: HN comments are underrated

#280

Post by mratzloff »

ghaff wrote: post #202
edmccard wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In places where great work is being done, the attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic It can be tricky, though, to be critical and sarcastic without using a jeering tone.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/789066303566929920

Critical and sarcastic seem to be two rather different things to me. Constructive criticism is certainly important in all sorts of contexts. You don't want to be all "Oh that's perfect" when in fact it's fundamentally flawed in some way. Sarcastic is more a matter of style than substance. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." Which doesn't seem necessary or necessarily positive.

That's not sarcasm.
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