HN comments are underrated • Hacker News Board

Re: HN comments are underrated

#291

Post by closeparen » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

hiou wrote: post #172

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…

Nope. Seen both many times. The positive enforcement causes no one to share any negative thoughts after a while and the company smiles it's way out of business. Unfortunately people who will not speak up out of fear are toxic to company culture. The creative process is immediately destroyed when people need to second guess everything they say or do since it is impossible to know if you are about to say the wrong thin…

Yup. My team has vigorous disagreements about architecture and design. We all take an "engineer's mindset" - "I'm not married to this idea, just throwing it out there because a, b, and c - what do you guys think?" - and debate the ideas separately from (and usually without harm to) the egos of the people who generated them.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#292

Post by kuschku » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #25

Semiapies wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster". And you see a lot of xkcd 927 and "I can't help thinking effort would have been better spent on an existing project" when someone writes any program of any type where other examples exist.

I only post a 927 when there are >6 different standards in the field, and there's no way a new one will catch on. As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those. Instead post about how great emacs is compared to vim: you're more likely to spawn useful discussion.

> As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those.

Except, the issue is when there’s already dozens of standards in the field, and someone decides to make yet another one, and publish factually wrong articles about existing standards to get an advantage.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#293

Post by wpietri » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #286

me34llama wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating respect with a lack of conflict. This mistake allows you to pretend that "respect" consists solely of being nice, never putting anything down, and generally being ineffective. > If someone can not tolerate cynical and sarcastic comments they need to be removed quickly. This is very different from mean spirited put downs and intentionally hurtful comments. If somebody belives that cynical comments a…

Isn't this essentially a tone argument?

It's just the opposite. It's a context of respect that expands the useful ranges of tone.

If a stranger shouts at me, I'll instantly ignore them. If a person who I don't trust shouts at me, I'll be planning my escape, or possibly shout back. If a person with whom I have a respectful relationship shouts at me, I'll immediately move to deescalate the situation, calm them down, and get us back to the sort of discussion where we can jointly discuss and solve whatever has put them in such pain.

Long-term, large-scale problems require creative team-oriented approaches. Jerks eat away at social and cultural structures that make that possible. A book that covers the details is "The No-Asshole Rule": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OT8GV2/

Re: HN comments are underrated

#294

Post by kuschku » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:34 PM UTC

VodkaHaze wrote: post #281

kuschku wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> /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…

This: > The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments Is a massive strawman if you're referring to ISDS (which is what it seems). If you want a trade agreement, the terms need enforcement to be unilateral. But political actors in each respective countries will be incentivized not to respect that by internal pressures. So there needs to be a way to settl…

> Go look at supreme court cases

The supreme courts are democratically determined and justified.

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing.

For ICS courts, all the judges are appointed by the nations taking part.

That’s why ICS is acceptable, but ISDS is not.

> Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity

Correct, but democratically elected governments are put under checks and balances to prevent them from doing so, foreign companies are not.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#295

Post by cybertronic » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:35 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #31

> 1838 days ago Trivial improvement to HN: after more than 30 days, render time in number of years and months instead of just days.

Even better: actual time and date of submission

Re: HN comments are underrated

#296

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #275

nickpsecurity wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#297

Post by pavlov » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

On second read, I'm not sure I agree with the first paragraphs of Dan's post at all. He seems to be saying that HN is terrible, but a handful of comments from star posters rise above the muck. I just don't think that's fair.

Yes, the cliché is that HN is a place full of mean, entitled semi-autists who will criticize your site's CSS whitespace formatting when you ask for business feedback... And of course there's a grain of truth to that (persistent stereotypes usually don't come out of thin air), but it misses the mark on two dimensions.

The first is that the criticism you get on HN is no worse than what other aspiring creative professionals suffer. I went to an art and design college, and the critique you'd get from students and even teachers was 99% of the time harsher than the HN style, yet no more guaranteed to be useful.

Consider a first-time novelist who spent years on a book. One day it gets critiqued in a newspaper. The professional critic might find that the author has a clumsy style, poor research, paper-thin characters, and seems to lack the life experience to even write about the topic. What do you do after that kind of criticism? You suck it up and go back to work on the next novel.

Making use of feedback is all about filtering and reducing multiple sources into something actionable. Nobody is right all the time. Your parents were wrong. Your teachers were wrong. Your peers were wrong. Your professors were wrong. Your boss was wrong. Your cofounders were wrong. Your investors were wrong. HN commenters were wrong. Still it's worth taking in all these inputs as much as you can.

The other dimension of HN comments is that they can be surprisingly deep. When an arts or culture topic makes it to the front page, it seems like someone comes out of the woods with the perfect personal anecdote. Whether it's Mondrian, Messiaen or Modiano, there's always someone on HN who happens to have a passion for it.

HN comments are underrated, but it's not just because of star power: it's everyone's contributions that make it consistently worthwhile for me.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#298

Post by elbear » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:43 PM UTC

hiou wrote: post #187

xenadu02 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First your anecdotes are not persuasive compared to two incredibly successful companies and one incredibly successful industry. Second, you missed the point. It isn't about prohibiting anyone from expressing a negative opinion or sugar-coating things. That's a false dichotomy. It's about not attacking the messenger and not looking to place blame. It also means accepting valid criticism. You can be 100% honest without…

The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and place their own concerns way above those of the team. I wonder if there is a language barrier but cynical and sarcastic is very very different from putting people down.

You can be critical without sounding cynical and sarcastic. When you say something sarcastically, you're implying that you consider yourself better than that person.

Do you think it's healthy to speak to a child in a cynical way? It shouldn't be any different when relating to an adult.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#299

Post by wpietri » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

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, 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.

I think it's the only way you can really criticize usefully. Negative feedback is always difficult to hear, much more so from somebody you don't trust. And trust is built up over time through positive interaction.

I am just back from my nephew's soccer game, the last game of the season. The coach gave each kid a card congratulating them on the great season. Each card had detailed, specific praise, as well as a couple of things they need to work on. It's clear he's been doing this all season: gobs of positive feedback, plus actionable negative feedback. And that's appropriate. What they're doing is mostly right, and what they don't do right they generally notice themselves. The small amount of negative feedback they need to hear is about the things they can't see. And for them to believe they are really missing something, it helps if it comes from somebody they really trust.

I should also mention that there are other ways to get improvement than critique. E.g., there's a technique called appreciative inquiry which is mainly about focusing on the things in a situation that are going well. Or you can just discuss someone's work and ask people what they see in it. Often they'll provide plenty of criticism on their own; you can then agree with the parts they should work on soon. Or you can set up feedback loops so that they experience quality issues sooner.

It's not, by the way, that I'm opposed to critique as a technique. But I think it's a dangerous one, in that a lot of people do it not because it really helps, but because it lets them feel smart and powerful at a colleague's expense.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#300

Post by elbear » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 8:50 PM UTC

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…

You can be supportive of the person while criticizing something they did. Also, when you criticize, you can do it with arrogance or with kindness.

As a signal of good feedback, I would use the number of adjectives in your feedback. Instead of saying that something is bad, stupid, lazy, you can say that a function has too many lines or too many branches, or that 2 modules are too tightly coupled.