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Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

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201–210 of 247 posts

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#201
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's some comments from me here or on reddit (can't recall) where I'm telling the founders of github that their idea is stupid. I underestimated the needs of the open source community, but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business.

>but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business. It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.

I get the idea of SaaS version control I just didn't see how they would be competitive. It wasn't virgin territory. I also thought got would lose to Mercurial.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#202
post #167
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has been discussed many times and it's not a good idea - it adds friction to the discussion , more than anything else. The threads would be full of pointless meta. The fundamental problem is that getting downvoted feels kinda bad - nobody ever asks for explanatory notes on upvotes. It's reasonable to wonder whether getting downvoted feels, say, too bad too soon and if there are UI ways to address that. But it's…

There was an experiment conducted on HN a while back where a AI generated post by GPT-3 was tested on the HN community.

A few people realized that the post was generated by AI and they mentioned this but they were actively voted down.

I think there needs to be friction on the downvote because mob mentality is often wrong. Disliked opinions are still valid opinions that aren't necessarily wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#203
post #16

'graycat on Fedex has to have been the comment that most blew me away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282104 Followed closely by 'tzs on Missile Command: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6228350

I tracked down an explanation for the 810 bug, although it doesn't actually clarify why 80 was a magic number.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Ms9oq...

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#204
post #188
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with Jan Gehl or B.V. Doshi. EDIT: Also check out and explore - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Are you claiming that pubs and barbershops were designed based on an understanding of human behavior? It seems more like they've evolved over centuries, with everyone copying features that worked. Every time some architect tries to reinvent them based on theoretical principles of human interaction, the result sucks.

Here's a good write up of what I meant while responding to the comment about dangs insights - https://points.datasociety.net/how-not-to-know-ourselves-522...

"Third Place" is just one example of understanding what spaces people need and using it to drive design. Studying and understanding where people congregate and why, is what inspires and leads to the design of "Third Places" like the Starbucks store.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#205
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Head injuries are more common in cars than bicycles. Before someone tells me I "must" wear a helmet when cycling, I want to see them strap on a helmet when entering a car.

I’ve been hit by a car three times when cycling (only when cycling on an e-bike, car-drivers seem to have difficulty assessing the different speeds involved). The last time, and the time that persuaded me to give up the e-bike resulted in [this]( https://0x0000ff.uk/imgs/hit-by-car.png ). That top impact is my head, smashing the windscreen. The lower impact is my arm (broken in two places). The side of the car was my…

I understand your situation, but please also understand that per cycled kilometer, the Netherlands is a lot safer than any other country. There exists no country with as big of a modal share with bicycles, and our accident rates involving bicycles are still super low. I'd love to get my hands on statistics on accidents per million kilometers or so, but it doesn't seem to be tracked anywhere for bicycles.

Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do.

I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA

It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'll be in the same ballpark. The estimations are that forcing people to wear a helmet will save about 5-20 lives a year on the Dutch roads. That'd be impressive, but the reduction in people opting for bicycles would yield a much bigger negative for the health of the people. Feel free to read through a Google Translated version of this webpage: https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/wat-vindt-de-fietsersbond...

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#206
post #69
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.

> Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.

IMO a good idea is not only one that can be successful, but also one that can be accomplished.

For example, I had the idea of mobile payments almost 20 years ago, way before smartphones. This is extremely popular today, but even if I had had the technical skill to pull it off (I didn't) this is only the kind of idea a giant company could have considered.

Good ideas are not universally good.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#207
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.

Urgh. Fuck me. I did the same things. How is this not mentioned in any of the dotfile repos I've seen?!

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#208
post #83
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.

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

For those that don't get the reference, it is to this joke about 2 economists:

Two economists walk down a road and they see a twenty dollar bill lying on the side-walk. One of them asks “is that a twenty dollar bill?” Then the other one answers “It can’t be, because someone would have picked it up already,” and they keep walking.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#209
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but honestly I still don't understand why it's such a successful business. It's the same as any SaaS, who wants to set up their own servers? Sure, you may want to, but think at scale, most people wouldn't, so they pay GitHub to do it for them. There are also a lot of quality of life features such as a better interface for both the technical and non-technical side of a team.

I get the idea of SaaS version control I just didn't see how they would be competitive. It wasn't virgin territory. I also thought got would lose to Mercurial.

There are a confluence of factors behind Mercurial's and svn's losses for git to emerge as the dominant SCM tool.

I'm currently writing some articles that will revisit past events in the tech industry, including GitHub's ascendancy. Is this something you'd be interested in reading?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testicles are naturally lumpy. How can you tell the regular lumps apart from a potentially harmful one?

I was once told, “as long as you check regularly you’ll know it when you find it.” I’ve also been told it’s very hard and dense feeing. Sometimes rough feeling. I think this helps a lot but it sure feels like insufficient training. This also gave me an app idea. I have very mole-y skin. Doctor said to keep an eye on new ones of significant size. I have a terrible memory. Maybe I need an app that I can snap photos of…

That mole star map idea is a really nice one.
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