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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#341

Post by johnfjacobi »

witty_username wrote: post #4
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…

> 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.

I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#342

Post by johnfjacobi »

planteen wrote: post #115
Chathamization wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.

It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.

It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.

For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.

But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#343

Post by e12e »

berntb wrote: post #20
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…

Cool. And sad. But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is. (One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( ) EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won…

I always find it strange when people do that. I mean, it's a wiki - if there's an obvious, glaring error - just fix it? Then that particular article will be more correct?

Wikipedia is absolutely useless as a dead book - the level of (professional) work that goes into vetting "real" encyclopedia articles is much higher - and the errors that slip through much more permanent.

The great thing about Wikipedia is the potential steady improvement. When people complain about its accuracy it often just sounds like whining.

Granted, there are a few articles that are "contested", and I understand why people don't have the time or energy to fix all of Wikipedia.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#344

Post by dancek »

BeetleB wrote: post #328
dancek wrote: post #29

I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his favorites. The top root-level comment for each comment page is obviously easy to see, but good comments deeper in the comment tree are easily lost. Would be great if e.g. the top 5% voted comments o…

>I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his favorites. An idea: A full 24 hours after the submission, the top N comments on a given submission should be displayed. Waiting 24 hours will discourage people who are looking for instant highs, an…

Great idea. This would also give a longer lifecycle to submissions. Now most tend to die quite fast, so you don't get answers to comments any more if you're late to the party.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#345

Post by DrScump »

angry_octet wrote: post #140

I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images. Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin ) really helped. The…

"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..."

Me, too. My presence there began in 1987.

Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and a sense of community.

There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the exception, not the rule. Even passionate arguments were mostly civil (ah, comp.lang.c was quite a lively place as the ANSI standard was being discussed... even just the NOALIAS debate alone).

Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing (interleaved posting, as Wiki calls it).

As the AOL bridge and the top-posting mongrel horde of Outlook posters flooded in, there went the neighborhood... damn neighbor kids messing up our lawn!

Re: HN comments are underrated

#346

Post by karussell »

> HN comments are terrible.

The truth is that more articles than comments are waste of time (as comments are often a lot shorter or simpler to grasp) so I have to disagree here: I often find myself reading the comments before clicking on the article to save me time. And I'm not the only one.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#347

Post by lisivka »

lorenzhs wrote: post #224
qb45 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ult…

I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy. No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and missing driver support in Linux. But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

If deal is secret, how you know?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#348

Post by kuschku »

cperciva wrote: post #323
kuschku wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 elec…

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing. The ISDS provision in NAFTA uses a panel of three arbitrators; one appointed by each of the nations involved, and one which is appointed either by consensus or from the third NAFTA nation if consensus cannot be reached. Investors don't get to appoint any arbitrators.

That's then closer to CETAs solution, too.

Classical ISDS trials have 1 determined by the suing company, 1 by the nation sued, and one both have to agree on.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#349

Post by lorenzhs »

lisivka wrote: post #347
lorenzhs wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy. No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and missing driver support in Linux. But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

If deal is secret, how you know?

Because you can now boot Linux on these machines. If there had been a deal, it would have failed its purpose. Occam's Razor leads me to conclude that almost certainly, there was no conspiracy. Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#350

Post by lorenzhs »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #334
lorenzhs wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy. No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and missing driver support in Linux. But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

I'm around a quarter through that thread which I missed previously cuz this dude bought an Ubuntu Dell that lasted 8 years. So, the situation seems to be they intentionally changed BIOS setting to not allow alternatives to their proprietary image or something like that. A lock-in technique in an industry that's had one after another exposed going back over a decade. So, what is going on the thread posits. Let me go t…

I'm not arguing about the voting scheme, and it's impossible to reconstruct what that thread looked like while it was active. It's also not about Microsoft's shady business deals, as the whole thing was about crazy (and dumb) firmware things that Lenovo did. The claim was that the whole thing was due to a secret deal with Microsoft, and the only evidence (apart from historical crap that MS pulled) was a community support guy's post.

I believe (and the patches posted by Intel seem to confirm) that the whole thing is a mix of incompetence and missing drivers. The usual test procedure for laptops is "Does it boot the latest Windows? Then ship it!". They probably never even tested whether it can boot Linux. Lenovo has nothing to gain from ruining their reputation with something like this. They do have lots of money to gain by not testing and fixing their stuff to work with Linux, because that would require effort and time of skilled people and the whole thing would be rather expensive. With the margins in the PC business, I can't blame them for deciding against it, although of course I wish they wouldn't.

Let me list some of the less than stellar top-level comments from that thread. After a day or so the comment ranking seems to have brought the more considerate comments to the top, it wasn't that way when the thread was a few hours old. Its early hours were quite disgraceful, and I stand by my position that it was one of, if not the worst thread on here in the nearly three years I've been reading this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546291

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546499

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546096 - this one is particularly absurd, comparing Lenovo's behaviour to the Holocaust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546306

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