31–40 of 52 posts
Many people on HN are wrong, but it's the quality of wrong on HN that is vastly superior to the wrong you'll find anywhere else.
If you find yourself writing an informative comment on HN that will likely get buried. Urge yourself to write a blog article instead.
There's a moment towards the end of the Bo Burnham special "what." where he talks about the weight having an audience has in his life, and he says, "if you can go through your life without having an audience, you should do it." I do have thoughts to share and I am working on starting a blog, but I try to keep Burnham's warning in mind.
I love HN technical discussions. I wish to god we could ban all the political/corporate/lifestyle discussions. I say this as someone who lacks the discipline not to get sucked into them, but nevertheless regrets it when he is.
Technically a lot of that is is off topic, but rules are selectively enforced (via community at least)
Cough... https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amichail
You can often spot the impact of "why is the sky blue" type posts in that there are no discussion threads, it's just a long list of one-of "Rayleigh scattering" replies
Many people on HN are wrong, but it's the quality of wrong on HN that is vastly superior to the wrong you'll find anywhere else.
there's something like Knoll's Law for HN where everything seems like intelligent opinions until the topic is in your area of expertise and then...
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
- some blog post https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
ShowHN - “this doesn’t work if JavaScript is disabled” or “you should explain this product better I don’t want it”
Any hardware device: “I’ve noticed declining quality because the space bar is a very specific type of plastic now” or “I can’t even ssh into this. I miss the days when I could ssh into my shoelaces”
But there are also just insane corners of knowledge where there isn’t a lowest common denominator and it’s pretty interesting stuff.
When I do know about a given topic I don’t have to scroll TOO far to find an opinion I agree with, and sometimes an argument I hadn’t come across that changes my view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah.. the upvote counts are probably more useful here than Reddit, but you still end up with a lot of wacky groupthink I think Slashdot had the best voting system ever when it was still popular, but maybe that's just rose-tinted goggles
How did Slashdot's voting system work?
HN has a very interesting “vocal minority” thing going where certain articles will have VERY predictable comments. ShowHN - “this doesn’t work if JavaScript is disabled” or “you should explain this product better I don’t want it” Any hardware device: “I’ve noticed declining quality because the space bar is a very specific type of plastic now” or “I can’t even ssh into this. I miss the days when I could ssh into my sh…
that is absolutely t-shirt worthy
This "zero comments" part doesn't line up with my experience. Maybe what was meant was "on any niche topic that very few people understand that I happen to be an expert in". I consider myself informed about a number of topics, and also constantly learn things from HN within those topics, from people who are much more informed than I am. (But, I'm not really a top 1% kind of expert on anything)