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

Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#61

Post by 3pt14159 »

maayank wrote: post #56
3pt14159 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.

Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?

Sure. Since Ellis Don is a huge company they often end up doing join partnerships with other huge companies because large projects often need companies with multiple deep fields of expertise. This results in needing to use both companies systems to track things like concrete truck tickets, personnel on site, meeting minutes, etc.

Usually the tools that are built for very large construction companies use fairly open file formats, like xml, or CSV files. Instead of having to double enter the data, he'd like to be able to enter in the information once, then have it propagate to the other system. This would free up about 5 hours a week for him on his current project that is expected to take about 3 years. So the total time saved would be about 750 hours, minus the time it took him to program the system.

That would be the most complex case. Others include needing to rename hundreds of thousands of site photos, or to include in an email only photos that matched a certain pattern (for example: duff-site_2011-09-14_4201.jpg would match a pattern looking for all the photos on the duff site taken in September but only between floors 40 and 45).

Other programs he would like would be to import into their in house tracking system any invoices his subtrades email him, again, matching a certain pattern (dig-con_final-invoice_duff-site_req-345.pdf).

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#62

Post by 3pt14159 »

mynegation wrote: post #50
3pt14159 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.

Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none. Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.

He doesn't have an HN account, but I've answered the question here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#63

Post by breckinloggins »

mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

Compromise: how about showing points on comments but only after you yourself have accumulated a significant number of points?

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#64

Post by randallsquared »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions.

This seems like a benefit to me. If I'm skimming through a comments page on a topic I'm not fully familiar with, seeing an opinion I would otherwise disagree with voted up should make me update; it's evidence against my current opinion.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#65

Post by larrys »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #34
mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

"I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too."

I agree with the halo effect. On the other hand knowing that you are building a brand in your handle gives motivation to put in more effort. Not everyone thinks like Job's father ("you will know that the other side wasn't painted" (or whatever that quote was))

I thought an interesting idea would be to run a test of the top karma-ers and have them post replies w/o their actual handle and then compare the karma rating they get.

There are of course a few problems with this.

If the comment is of high quality the fact that it's associated with a brand new handle might paradoxically get it higher votes. "Hmm this new guy knows his stuff.." Add: The other issue is that there may be a little cousing of Hawthorne effect on the part of the commenter. Trying even harder to prove a point that it isn't their handle.

Sometimes the top comment is from someone where you recognize the handle. And the comment is good. But it doesn't seem that good. Same many times PG says anything. He gives brief answers and the way they rank sometimes it's like SCOTUS is talking to someone low on the food chain in the legal profession. (Same with what Fred Wilson says on his blog btw.)

I don't typically upvote anything PG does. To me it's like tipping the owner! And it's not like he needs the karma score. Off the top I don't ever remember seeing a PG comment that is not near the top of the thread or subthread. (I would love if PG were to do the anonymous handle idea and then publish the results.)

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#66

Post by SkyMarshal »

mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

>My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

I completely disagree. The crowd is not always right in upvoting, as PG pointed out in his statement of the problem (dumb or useless comments getting massively upvoted).

Relying on comment votes as a heuristic for rapidly scanning and deciding what to read is a good idea. Read for yourself and decide, and if you lack the knowledge to decide then bookmark it for later research if it's important, or move on to something else if not.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#67

Post by Peaker »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #37
mixmax wrote: post #2

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

The only way I see to satisfy both sides of this argument is to hide the scores until you're done voting on comments for that page. Maybe an "I'm done voting" button at the top and bottom of the page, which removes all voting arrows and replaces them with scores. The score for a comment could also be displayed after you've voted on it. [The problem might lie in the implementation for this solution. You probably don't…

Users would vote on comments randomly just to see their score...

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#68

Post by danwiding »

pg wrote: post #49
NathanKP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the scaling effort gone? In the first post you mentioned that you were just rewriting code to remove bottlenecks. Have you had to make any more exotic and interesting changes to the code base since then to support the growth?

Robert has made a bunch of tweaks that improved performance. To be honest I don't remember what they were. We're still running on one core.

Point of comparison, as of March 2011 Stack Overflow, which got about 2x the traffic for page hits/month, used 12 cores for the web tier and 12-24 cores for their SQL Server 2008 database(s?). Source - http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch...

Does anyone know what db engine serves as backend for HN?

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#69

Post by dennisgorelik »

mixmax wrote: post #47
dclowd9901 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions . Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many…

It's a signal to noise problem. In a perfect world I would research each comment, do basic background checkes against stated facts, think through the implications of the comment, etc. and then form an unbiased opinion. I would do this with every comment thread. After I had done this I would be uniquely qualified to form an opinion on every comment, and I would be wise because I'd read and understood all the comments.…

You are an optimist. In a perfect world it would take you 100++ hours to read and research all HN comments per day.

Re: Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

#70

Post by dfc »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #69
mixmax wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a signal to noise problem. In a perfect world I would research each comment, do basic background checkes against stated facts, think through the implications of the comment, etc. and then form an unbiased opinion. I would do this with every comment thread. After I had done this I would be uniquely qualified to form an opinion on every comment, and I would be wise because I'd read and understood all the comments.…

You are an optimist. In a perfect world it would take you 100++ hours to read and research all HN comments per day.

That is why in a "perfect world" thought experiment, resources are not finite.
Post reply on HN