Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

sealedabstract.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 302 posts

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#101

Post by romanoderoma »

Splizard wrote: post #38
kstenerud wrote: post #33

All forums ossify after enough time has passed and the initial population has been crowded out. People come to these places for various reasons: - To debate - To learn - To engage intellectually with other people - To be heard/validated - To gain social standing The problem is (like all human forums) that as the included population rises, you need to make a bigger and bigger splash to be heard, and that means that af…

What does fully evolving to big crowds look like? What kind of adaptations are needed?

> What does fully evolving to big crowds look like?

birds, fishes, insects

basically some kind of hive mind

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#103

Post by foldr »

Ma8ee wrote: post #93
foldr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Semantic arguments are particularly insidious. Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary (unless the actual argument is about language). The worst thing you can do is to have an argument in which you talk past each other because you each have a different idea about what the words mean." It doesn't make sense to dismiss an argument as merely semantic if you are talking about something more than…

But the author's point was that arguments shouldn't be dismissed as merely semantics, but that semantic questions are important and has to be resolved for it to be meaningful discussion. Yes, the different sides have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins, but that is because they mean different things when they say that something is alive. So this discussion is becomming a bit too meta, but now…

The article says the following. "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."

So the author does seem to be saying that the whole abortion debate is purely a debate over arbitrary definitions, not merely that it's important to clear up semantic issues before getting into the meat of the debate.

If the issue were purely semantic, it would be possible to resolve the debate simply by introducing unambigious terminology agreed on by both sides (e.g. using 'alive*' and 'alive†' rather than 'alive'). If this doesn't satisfy both sides, then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself. Informally we can say that they disagree over what it means to be alive. But philosophically it's important to be clear that this isn't just a semantic issue about the meaning of a particular word.

Another way to bring this out is to think cross-linguistically. Do we really have to have the abortion debate over again for every one of the world's ~6500 languages and their corresponding words for 'life'? I think not, because at heart the debate isn't a debate over word meaning.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

CharlesMerriam2 wrote: post #55

Stories need to be good, and that's a problem. Right now, the HN community is voting up more "pop science" to drive people to paywalls. I don't know if its a troll farm or a side revenue, but the number of nytimes.com, businessinsider.com, etc. stories keeps rising.

Here's another explanation: not all bad stories are upvoted, just those that work well to spin up a good discussion.

I know I upvote in this pattern. I read HN for comments first, stories second. The linked story is immaterial, as long as there's something interesting in it that can be discussed on a better level. Take "pop science" articles - the comment thread under those tends to contain links to original research, corrections to the article, opinions of actual scientists in the field, and much better explanations of the described phenomena (as well as the standard set of complaints about paywalls and "journalism these days"; I myself am sometimes guilty of the latter).

Would an arXiv paper be preferable to a "pop science" article? Perhaps. And we get our fair share of papers submitted here too. But I have a feeling that the "articles for the masses" are statistically more likely to create an insightful comment thread, and end up being upvoted more.

Also worth noting is that moderators often update the submission link, when better sources on the same topic are surfaced.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#105

Post by Quarrelsome »

coldtea wrote: post #68
harryf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the initial population has been crowded out I'm going to dare say it but Hackernews is no longer really populated by hackers, or at least it's not bleeding edge when it comes to programming. One example... the number of posts like "Show HN: Here's a thing I made" ... where the first comments is "Here's a link to a product that has been out for 10+ years that does what you just built and 100 times more" My gut feeli…

Hackernews was never about hackers, it was about startup tech founder types (that maybe or maybe not considered themselves as hackers). A second big crowd is devs, mostly web devs. Hackers in the archetypical sense wouldn't upvote posts about Rails, JS, Golang, Rust and stuff, they'd upvote posts about coding things, making stuff, and computing intricasies...

this place was originally called StartupNews after all...

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#106

Post by names_are_hard »

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say.

And I can see how participating too much can be unhealthy. It's easy to start obsessively refreshing, searching for something new. It's easy to get drawn into silly arguments that don't really matter, or lengthy discussions of semantics that don't really help uncover some new truth. But the benefit of the back-catalog cannot exist if there aren't people who share their wisdom, so I hope enough people continue to contribute.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

mola wrote: post #72
cryptica wrote: post #28

I think one of the problems may be that many people on HN have moved from the lower and middle class to the upper class and so their attitude of fighting for innovation has morphed into an attitude of defending the status quo and suppressing innovation while shunning the contrarian 'hacker' ideals which they used to harbor. Unfortunately, for those of us who fell through the cracks of the system and are left behind (…

I grew up middle class, still am (although middle class has almost vanished), and hope to remain middle class. Infact, my moral compass says striving to be rich is bad. I consider what is now considered innovation and entrepreneurism, overrated juvenile, and mostly hurtful. The fact that people don't agree with you, doesn't mean they are against you, or try to protect their power by holding you back. They may just th…

Agreed. And while my moral compass does allow for a very small subset of ways to be rich that I don't consider bad, as I grew up, I've learned this about innovation in tech: 90% of time it's just marketing bullshit, plain and simple.

I've grown a cynical perception of the startup scene not because I hate innovation, or want to preserve status quo - it's because I love innovation, but all I keep seeing is startups arbitraging whatever random potential gradient they can find on the market. For every true innovation like people shipping medical supplies via UAVs in developing countries, there's many more startups that just try to suck on the sweet flow of adtech money, or to make cash arbitraging laws and social trust.

The way I feel about both entrepreneurship and corporations these days: we've refined the ways of making money down to science, but in the process, we've got self-referential. We've lost sight of the big picture: that all that activity is meant to do something useful in the real world. And what's less hackery than self-serving innovation, where the actual thing being done is the free variable, and the only goal is to redirect the flow of dollars?

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#108

Post by elorant »

benjaminjosephw wrote: post #70
elorant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's the diversity of the users that make HN so much interesting. I've happened upon comments made from neurosurgeons, experts in carpeting, electrical engineers, naval architects, aerospace engineers etc. Where else on the Internet can you find such a diversified group of knowledgeable individuals where you can talk in a civilized manner? For me HN is the most significant place on the web and we m…

Absolutely, diversity is incredibly important when we're talking about different kinds of "intellectually curious" people. When diversity means letting in the trolls, the marketers and those less inclined to input constructively, that's when conversations start to degrade and loose value. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to encourage first type of diversity without becoming vulnerable to the second.

That's why we have voting. You start trolling, you're getting the boot.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#109

Post by dash2 »

Treegarden wrote: post #88
etripe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm relatively new to HN but a reddit "senior", and one of the things I really appreciate about this place is the relative lack of toxicity. To me, it seems people really come here for civil discussion and default to asking questions instead of flaming. Well, that and more people source their claims.

Have been reading reddit since 5 or so years now, but pretty much only the frontpage. I like reddit but it has gotten so political and toxic. Many posts boil down to "haha look how stupid this person is". I sometimes skim the controversial comments to see what the hive mind disapproves of. Recently, on the mega threat of Trump being covid positive, the controversial comments were along the lines of "I don't like Trum…

I think you absolutely must avoid the front page. Reddit seems to have a relatively young audience, and the front page just gets the guff that the average teenager likes (at best, puppies; at worst, self-righteous posturing and feeble jokes). If you look into the subforums, they can be very different. Something serious like r/statistics has little in common with a hilarious shitshow like r/wallstreetbets.
Post reply on HN