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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#371

Post by busterarm »

WorldMaker wrote: post #370
Camillo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to start blogging, but I'm concerned about giving control of my content to a third party. At the same time, I can't be bothered to register my own domain (mainly due to the herculean task of finding a decent name).

One relatively easy option is to use Jekyll on GitHub Pages. You can eventually CNAME your own domain to it. The content is in a git repo you can easily clone and take with you somewhere else such as Netlify or other hosts that compete in this space, if/when your needs change.

Octopress!

Re: HN comments are underrated

#372

Post by nzp »

johnfjacobi wrote: post #342
planteen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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?

To be fair, that's not a good characterization of why he's into Mars colonization. He's not advocating colonization so we can disregard life on Earth. He seems very much into preserving life on Earth. Mars colonization is a backup plan (or the initial stage of a backup plan) for the inevitable moment when Earth will have to be abandoned regardless of how well we behave.

Regarding “a lot of people dying” angle: the difference is in magnitude of “a lot of people”, and choice. However many people die on SpaceX spaceships, the number can never reach millions or even billions that would result from the collapse or technical decline. People also, in general, will choose to get on a spaceship and dwell on Mars, but they neither choose to be involved in dying from civilization collapsing, nor to have to fight for survival in such a situation — it would be completely forced upon them.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#373

Post by cableshaft »

tptacek wrote: post #114
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.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement…

/r/boardgames is pretty much always a positive community, unless you proclaim your love of Munchkin. Anything interesting news or links about board games tends to get posted there too. But there's also people asking the same questions over and over again (I like blah and blah, and don't like blah, what should I buy next?), but I don't mind that personally.

I remember specifically when GamerGate discussion was poisoning just about every video game community and someone tried to bring it to the board games subreddit and tie it in with board games, and the admins made an executive decision to squash it. Probably one of the best things they ever did, because the board has remained very civil and friendly since.

I've had good experiences with /r/keto too. I almost never check anything else there anymore.

But yeah, niche subreddits.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#374

Post by e12e »

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 never really got into usenet (proper news clients) - but I still read (and occasionally participate) on email lists.

Just in case there are some readers here with an interest in news, but unaware - the d-lang forum software is open source, and built around usenet technology:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Re: HN comments are underrated

#375

Post by e12e »

Tomte wrote: post #353
e12e wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poten…

No, your fix will often be reverted by those one or two authors who consider the article "theirs". If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.

Do you know if anyone's done quantitative research on that? Should be pretty straightforward to sample some articles and see if that pattern is common? (I'm not trying to passive - aggressively suggest you're wrong, I'm honestly curious)

[ed: I should add that I've started to form a habit of looking at the revision history and talk pages of wp articles - in addition to references. And I really do think the added transparency is a very real added value over dead tree encyclopedia. ]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#376

Post by cpach »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #321
tptacek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky). But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only star…

I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).

AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#377

Post by lisivka »

lorenzhs wrote: post #357
qb45 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal. Nobody said it was secret, besides you. I think it was parent's point that you are strawmanning here. This was also the sole reason I responded to your initial post. You misrepresent people's position and then complain that what you presented is "abysmal" and "disappointing".

That wasn't my impression reading the original submission or the comment thread. Lots of things that would adequately be explained by lack of Linux drivers and stupidity on Lenovo's side were attributed to malice and purported as fact. Also, the source of the entire story seems to have a background of baseless accusations about vendors maliciously preventing Linux: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/778680150812536833

But we also know that MicroSoft bribe officials for looong time. See link[1] for example. MS can just bribe someone in Lenovo directly. Or, maybe, someone in Lenovo is a huge fan of MS, so he can act against Linux just in case (I saw this in my own company).

[1]: http://techrights.org/2016/02/15/microsoft-bribing-officials...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#378

Post by berntb »

e12e wrote: post #375
Tomte wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, your fix will often be reverted by those one or two authors who consider the article "theirs". If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.

Do you know if anyone's done quantitative research on that? Should be pretty straightforward to sample some articles and see if that pattern is common? (I'm not trying to passive - aggressively suggest you're wrong, I'm honestly curious) [ed: I should add that I've started to form a habit of looking at the revision history and talk pages of wp articles - in addition to references. And I really do think the added tran…

I referenced this earlier, but got no answer. It is from 2005. I haven't seen anything after that.

"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."

https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...

(Please Google a better source for that paper. :-) )

I am willing to believe that "sensitive" information about living (and relative unknown) people along with companies/political parties is being more gamed in Wikipedia today, than ten years ago.

I'd just see some good references for that...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#379

Post by frik »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #352
LukeShu wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also buggy. On several occasions, I'd post a comment that got voted several points higher than my average, but the average went down; or vice-versa.

It may have been a moving average of the last N items.

It was, at least from my observation

Re: HN comments are underrated

#380

Post by johnfjacobi »

nzp wrote: post #372
johnfjacobi wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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? To be fair, that's not a good characterization of why he's into Mars colonization. He's not advocating colonization so we can disregard life on Earth. He seems very much into preserving life on Earth. Mars colonization is a backup plan (or the initial s…

Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.

> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,

Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.

Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

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