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Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

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Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#181

Post by dkersten »

noodle wrote: post #148
dkersten wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely they would just spam submissions and vote-bait comments in the hope of gaining enough karma. I like not having to worry about karma because it means I can speak my mind, instead of simply commenting the popular responses in hope of karma.

thats already happening, more or less. except the culture here is to flag things out of line, and they usually get dealt with. if they're not out of line, then why would it matter?

They get dealt with now, sure, I'm just asking if giving people more incentives to karma whore will have the effect you desire (better submissions/comments; instead of more me-too karma farming comments).

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#182

Post by pixelbath »

resdirector wrote: post #24
pg wrote: post #3

You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less ov…

I think HN has enough upvote/downvote data for all its users such that it could be feeding us articles based on our voting history and the voting history of people similar to us (non-trivial problem, of course). I think it's possible to build a news-site that feeds, say the OP, a news feed that he is 'comfortable with'. In a more general sense, news sites like HN that use up/down are 'dumb' in the sense that they mak…

I wouldn't feel comfortable with this, as it would destroy the amount of discovery I do on HN.

Not all of the articles are within my technical experience, and some I only barely understand, but I find some seriously mind-blowing things out there.

To the OP...yes. I'm constantly impressed with those who have not only the knowledge and skills, but the sheer drive to build and run a successful startup. Even if I had some crazy-awesome idea that had almost no chance of failure (just as an example), the notion of just...picking up and doing my own thing is a very scary thing to do. I've been job with income stability for so long that the idea of going it on my own scares the hell out of me.

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#183

Post by saratogacx »

elblanco wrote: post #120
photon_off wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comment…

"However, there are people way more talented than me" Oh, and one thing that you have to learn to become comfortable with (or at least Zen about)...there is always somebody better at something than me.

What is great about that is that there is always someone to learn from.

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#184

Post by karlzt »

pg wrote: post #3

You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less ov…

>>my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases.

if it worries you so much, why don't you try to make it less popular? eg. by blocking all popular search engines.

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#185

Post by pixelbath »

noodle wrote: post #147
patrickk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them. " I find that I carefully word what I write on HN by default. That is the 'culture' of the site. I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. Of course, there are raging dicks everywhere, and people being people wil…

> I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. perhaps, for now. but if PG's concerns are valid, then it may be the case that this will change. alternatively, consider it a functional way to reinforce the culture.

I doubt the comments here would ever descend to near YouTube levels. For one, trolls on this site are mercilessly modded into the negative, and quickly. The last time I tried to make a snarky comment just for the sake of snark, it got downmodded so fast that I just deleted it. This same comment would probably have hundreds of thumbs up on YouTube by now.

I changed all of my videos to moderated comments on YouTube, and I still receive completely inane ones every day, along with "thumbs up if ____" comments. These, again, would be modded into oblivion here.

Maybe I'm one of the unwelcome newbies that are changing this site for the worse (as I'm not involved in a startup), but I don't think this culture has anything to fear as far as quality dilution goes. Noisy, sure, but still high quality.

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#186

Post by Mz »

I've spent a lot of time on parenting lists for people with very smart kids. Since intelligence is at least partly genetic, the members of those lists tend to be pretty smart. For most of them, those lists were the first time they really encountered substantial numbers of people who disagreed with them for good reasons rather than out of "stupidity" (for lack of a more PC word). Especially in the early days, it lent itself to lots of fighting and identity crises. Sounds to me like that is similar to what you are going through.

I personally like feeling like a drop in the ocean of HN. I've had lots of negative experiences with being a "big fish in a little pond". For me, being "nobody" here is wonderful.

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#187

Post by phaedrus »

mian2zi3 wrote: post #57
phaedrus wrote: post #13

I don't get that feeling from HN, but I get the exact feeling you describe when (trying to) read MathOverflow.com. For some reason the level of math being discussed there has quickly risen to such a rarefied atmosphere that I although go there out of interest and a desire to learn, I come away feeling I can't keep up.

MathOverflow's explicit purpose is to discuss research-level mathematics. First sentence of the FAQ: "MathOverflow's primary goal is for users to ask and answer research level math questions, the sorts of questions you come across when you're writing or reading articles or graduate level books." The discussion is really geared towards people doing research, or trying to. I'm a math grad student, and I find much of it…

There is a need then for a stackoverflow-based site for practical or less research-level math, for questions like, "How do I do this Laplace transform?" or "How do I do this difficult integral?"

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#188

Post by jonny_noog »

malkia wrote: post #149
jonny_noog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please come to the video game industry :) There is always need of someone that knows MySQL, LAMP, etc. That's actually news to me... interesting. So there's still a lot of demand for web sites/apps created in support of games, or are these technologies being used in less obvious and more embedded ways?

We use MySQL for example for logging a lot of stuff coming out of the game - for example texture usage, error messages, where people were shooting mostly, anything. Also MySQL, SQLIte are being used for the caching on the server, and caching locally of the converted data. PHP has been used for getting few internal sites, but I can't tell much. So these technologies are not used in the actual games (at least ours), bu…

Cool. Thanks for the answer!

Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

#189

Post by keefe »

galois wrote: post #36
photon_off wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comment…

What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up? I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on…

I think it was heinlein who wrote that you can break intelligent people into two categories. One sort knows (s)he is better than average but is concerned with levels of intelligence, how smart they are and is susceptible to flattery. Another sort knows they are intelligent enough not to worry about it, knows that other things are the limiting factors in their life and perhaps even feels like a bit of a freak.

also I've seen enough from this username that I think, troll???????????????????????????

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