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Ask HN: What has HN given you?

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Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#191

Post by innocentoldguy »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #180
PaulStatezny wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? If not, can you elaborate why? I’m genuinely curious.

HN is an echo chamber, to some extent. For example, try making valid criticisms against Go or JavaScript and you will be downvoted without explanation. I think HN would be better if it required an explanation in order to downvote something. At least then it would be clear to everyone reading whether the negativity was legitimate or not.

See what I mean? Hehe. You asked. I answered, with a purposeful example to illustrate, and there’s the immediate downvote. Thanks for making my point, to whoever did.

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#192

Post by yters »

opportune wrote: post #164
yters wrote: post #157

I like HN because despite the liberal bias (IMO) responses to my conservative views are often decently thought out. Of course I get the down-votes too, but it helps me maintain my martyr complex. Best of both worlds.

Out of curiosity, have you found anywhere on the internet that is both tech-focused and does not have a liberal bias? I'm sure you could find places that lean libertarian, but I don't know of anywhere that I would consider traditionally conservative To add to your point, I feel that the conservative views on this website are also generally intelligent and thoughtful, even though I mostly disagree with them.

Yes, the uncommondescent blog is heavily conservative, and science and tech focused. But, in general there is a correlation between tech and liberal or libertarian. But this is because that crowd tends to eschew the time consuming obligations that accompany a lived out traditional conservative viewpoint, which would prohibit one from heavy online participation.

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#193

Post by CamperBob2 »

duck wrote: post #128
ne01 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only got ~60 upvotes? Interesting, I always thought the number of upvotes for a Show HN post correlates to its future success.

Dropbox had about 60 if I remember right (109 now) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 .

Wow, those comments are awesome.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

I wonder how many other ten-figure business models can be developed from comments that begin "For any Linux user, this is totally trivial," or "Um, have you looked at the pricing for Amazon S3?" or "LOL, this problem was solved 20 years ago by XXXX at YYYY."

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#194

Post by minimaxir »

Majora320 wrote: post #168
chipperyman573 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't even need to mine it - https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Good luck downloading 16 million records...

You could do that with the Algolia API: https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...

But as noted, BigQuery is more pragmatic.

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#196

Post by ioddly »

xor1 wrote: post #181
ioddly wrote: post #2

Probably the best advice I've gotten on here is from reading 'patio11 and 'tptacek posts on how to bill for consulting work. I don't have a particular comment as they've written it many times over, but it's really changed the game for me.

Do you have links to any of these posts handy?

There are lots with good advice (worth searching site:news.ycombinator.com tptacek/patio11 billing/consulting/etc), but the main thing is to stop billing hourly, here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880096

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#198

Post by zerr »

sytse wrote: post #31

It gave me a job, a company, and a sense of purpose. In 2012 I did a Show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Today we are 1800 contributors and a company of 220 on a mission to ensure that everyone can contribute.

But how is it going with the HN-dream - passive income? :)

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#199

Post by grzm »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #180
PaulStatezny wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? If not, can you elaborate why? I’m genuinely curious.

HN is an echo chamber, to some extent. For example, try making valid criticisms against Go or JavaScript and you will be downvoted without explanation. I think HN would be better if it required an explanation in order to downvote something. At least then it would be clear to everyone reading whether the negativity was legitimate or not.

Many members find language wars boring. Most are already aware of strengths and weaknesses of various languages. People have language preferences (I know I do), and those vary from person to person. What’s more important is what you’re accomplishing. If you bring up criticism when it’s not the topic of conversation (for example, complaining about the use of JS on a Show HN), people may downvote because it’s off-topic.

As for requiring comments for downvoted, search the archives if you’re really interested in more discussion, but those that aren’t interested in leaving comments are just going to leave junk comments if required, and then there would be endless litigation as to what constitutes a valid reason.

As the guidelines request, just don’t comment about downvotes. If you’re really worried about it, take some time to review the guidelines and look at the behavior of other comments that are downvoted. Speculate to yourself why they might have been downvoted. Improve your own comments taking that into account. But in general, I suggest just not worrying too much about it.

Re: Ask HN: What has HN given you?

#200

Post by kbenson »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #98
rdiddly wrote: post #56

A place to hang out (as it were) on the internet that is... ...connected to the tech scene ...ad-free ...not a "social network" in the usual data-harvesting sense ...slim, fast-loading, not riddled with bloat and bullshit ...not plagued quite so badly as the rest of the society "out there" by certain degenerate tendencies in what passes for discourse ...more interested in ideas and substance than in what color car th…

..full of people who's views differ from mine that I can have good arguments with.

> that I can have good arguments with

That's the really special part. There's plenty of places to find people that have a differing opinion, but HN does the best job I've encountered of fostering good, substantive discussion.

It doesn't always work, but it works here more often and on more subjects than anywhere else I've found. That "more subjects" part is important too, since unlike a smaller more focused forum, you might find that someone you totally agreed with on one subject the day before is someone you are in complete disagreement with the next day, and this can go a long ways towards helping people to remember that if they disagree on the current subject, the other person is likely a rational, agreeable person that deserves the benefit of doubt when you've found yourself interpreting what they've said as extremely harsh, disagreeable or wrong.

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