Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#71

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 1:29 AM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #68

danso wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an amazing and amazingly amusing comment thread that I’m going to add to my favorites. It shouldn’t have been flag-killed IMHO. The user attempted to produce a counter-proof — it’s just that he was hilariously wrong.

Since you bring it up, and since I was just looking at your favorited comments, I wonder if you could clarify: Should we attach any significance to the fact that your 3 most recent saved favorites are all [dead]? It makes me think that your opinion of what a good comment is may not agree with the official position, and that you might have suggestions for how the moderation could be improved.

There is no official position!

Something can be dead because it is flagged, in which case a bunch of people didn't like it (for valid reasons or not...) or because the user is new and all their stuff is marked dead until someone comes along and vouches.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#72

Post by barry-cotter » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 5:05 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #33

barry-cotter wrote: post #19

Yudkowsky Ambition Scale https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934 How Do I Start Being a Consultant? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245960 Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739 Edit: Thanks detaro for telling me how to link to individual comments.

The first is an amazing hubris detector. The "going deep" post reminds me of the "programmer-archaeologist" role from the Vernor Vinge novels, where a long-running spacefaring civilisation has built up a very large amount of code on which their magic nanotech runs. This provides opportunities to dig for long-forgotten things .. or exploits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4511950

> That reminds me of Peter Thiel's Venn diagram of 'Sounds like a bad idea' and 'Is a good idea'. It's a pretty slim area in the middle and the 'Sounds like' part means it's hard to know until you do it.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#73

Post by diggernet » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

x0x0 on: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495504

> Humans are very good at holding lots of exceptions in our heads and, in the absence of clear rules, doing reasonable things. Computers are shit at both of the above.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#74

Post by bausshf » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:12 PM UTC

rndgermandude wrote: post #32

mortivore wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, new people frequent here all the time, and opinions can change.

Related: https://xkcd.com/1053/

The end of the comic was great.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#75

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #5

@cperciva in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#76

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:46 AM UTC

bausshf wrote: post #11

fghtr wrote: post #9

This question was already answered several times here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487605 (2010) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652 (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12496558 (2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16846229 (2018) (possibly more)

While correct. New posts happen all the time.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#77

Post by veddox » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:11 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #31

Some of my actually favorited posts: jjoonathan on Oct 6, 2014 on: Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416875 , "For most people it's not, but some people subscribe to the notion that choice implies consent/endorsement/approval ..." scardine 12 months ago on: Ask HN: My company plans an ICO despite my opposit... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16126082 , "L…

Just learnt something new about TCP, thank you :-) (See also this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947)

And discovered that Animats is in fact John Nagle...

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#78

Post by veddox » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

blancheneige wrote: post #58

my favorite by far was the very first thread on the Snowden revelations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830633 comment by comment you could sense the earth shattering awareness slowly setting in, or how the HN crowd suddenly went from unquestionable faith in big government to "oh lord what have we done".

On the whole, this is one of the more edifying political threads I've read around here...

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?

#79

Post by akkartik » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #41

I'd like to ask a parallel meta-question: How can we make better use of HN's existing 'favorite' feature? Currently, we have the option to click on 'favorite' to add submissions or comments to a publicly visible list. Occasionally (a couple times a month?) I do this for comments that I think are excellent: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=nkurz&comments=t Some other users do the same, but I don't really know…

I use this feature a lot. I've also tried to 'hack' discoverability in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12098525