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Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

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171–180 of 247 posts

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#171
post #4

This comment where I first learned about using a bare Git repo for dotfiles management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754

Dammit, now feel like a complete idiot for my mess of a bash script that creates symlinks all over the place. I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#172
post #60

"The contrarian dynamic" by dang, from around a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 > The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are…

A dramatic solution, assuming this phenomena is something to be abated, is to simply remove replies. Why does every internet community by default have a feature that steers us to negativity and confrontation. I often find myself scrolling past the replies on here anyway to find the next comment that may be unique, useful and well-thought - not just an objection or tepid agreement to something that’s already been said…

I found the approach taken by pol.is to be interesting, it is used in various places to develop rough consensus in multi-stakeholder situations. https://pol.is/ https://github.com/pol-is/

Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.

https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min... https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5 https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#173
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you see $100 on the road, leave it there, it's fake or someone would have picked it up first.

This is an excellent comment, it should be noted given the thread.

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.

The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#175
post #114
post #60

"The contrarian dynamic" by dang, from around a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 > The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are…

I'm not sure if I'm surprised that dang didn't touch on to mention downvotes as an even more rapid "contrarian dynamic" mechanism; wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction, effort required for the action - like qualitative text from the downvoter as to why a comment is being downvoted to then allow OP the opportunity to clarify or expand on their comment - "to be more reflective and therefore bette…

What about this: to to downvote, you need to also specify a keyword as to why you are downvoting. It's a text field (not a pull down). Whatever you enter, will not be visible to anyone except to the person who wrote the comment you are downvoting.

Adds just enough friction to reduce downvotes a bit, provides information to the person being downvoted (no more "why all the hate?" comments), and doesn't pollute the experience for everyone else, since those are not visible by most users.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#176
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea. Perhaps asking users why they are downvoting could help. Maybe not necessary to show their reason to others, but add friction and force someone to think twice.

If there's no witnessing or critique/scrutiny by the community possible then I don't think there will be the pressure necessary for quality comments to be made - and leaving a moderator to privately review them would likely have more comments left toward the spectrum of "this guy's an idiot" then toward side of constructive or useful criticism.

Hmm, what about being able to see a list of downvotes and explanations on a user’s profile? With maybe some minimum karma before you can see that on someone else’s profile?

So there is potential scrutiny by the community, but not in a way that disrupts the original discussion?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#177
post #89

The legendary "Putnam" one, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?

I've used it, it works. I trust cperciva to know what he's doing and he's been extremely awesome on customer service.

> Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?

Depends on your goals, eh?

"If all you wanted was money you could just rob a bank."

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#178
post #114
post #60

"The contrarian dynamic" by dang, from around a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 > The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are…

I'm not sure if I'm surprised that dang didn't touch on to mention downvotes as an even more rapid "contrarian dynamic" mechanism; wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction, effort required for the action - like qualitative text from the downvoter as to why a comment is being downvoted to then allow OP the opportunity to clarify or expand on their comment - "to be more reflective and therefore bette…

> wouldn't it be nice if downvotes had a little more friction

Upvotes have much less friction. Downvoted posts are not merely downvoted, they are also not upvoted. Why don't people upvote posts that are unfairly downvoted?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#179
post #160
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually people who design interaction spaces know something about human behavior, spectrum of personality types/needs, social psychology, group dynamics etc and then design the space. But what has happened in the tech world, is obviously the reverse. All kinds of contrived/arbit spaces have been created and then behavior of the lab rats within are studied.

Could you point to a good example of an interaction space designed this way?

Start with Jan Gehl or B.V. Doshi.

EDIT: Also check out and explore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent comment, it should be noted given the thread.

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not. The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has…

FWIW, the quote about money on the ground initially comes from a critique on the efficient market hypothesis, not commentary on the nature of ideas. So it's expected for there to be analogical disconnect here.

For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."

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