Hands up if you felt the need to actually reply to some of the comments.
Hacker News Parody Thread
31–40 of 202 posts
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#32Good god this was funny, right down to the usernames. But now its time to be very HN about it. > Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork. I'm not particularly well known here (or anywhere), but either people actually like the words I say, or I simply have yet to make a complete ass out of myself. (I think one of these is more plausible, but…
> Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork.
Darn you ;)
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#33At the risk of a) being wrong and b) breaking the 4th wall by not conforming to said stereotype, looks like both my username and my tendency to ramble just within the limits of OT have been parodied there.... Oh well, if that's actually the case, then I'm honored :)
EDIT: btw, hate my username and emailed PG to get it changed; he said it's not currently possible in the code. Wouldn't want him poking around the DB for me! Made my username back when HN first started as an anonymous account, but kept using it thereafter... CamelCase usernames suck!
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#34I disagree with the author. This isn't exactly a parody thread. A parody is "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work" [1]. For one thing, I would hardly call Hacker News comments "original work", and a simple creation like this hardly captures the full scope and breadth of comments on here. Furthermore, I'm not really sure why this belongs on HN, because it's not very technical, a…
This article made me switch to Gentoo Linux.
I'm only replying to you comment because it's the top voted one.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#35I think a parody of something is one of the best ways to draw insight, and in my opinion I'm kinda happy that this is what the parody of HN is: links to wikipedia/cited sources, debates about whether or not an article was correct, nitpicks and views from different positions/experiences, and the off hand XKCD comic.
Probably much more civil than a parody of a slashdot/reddit/4chan post would be.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#36"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..." actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content. i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have…
I'm curious what you came up with. I used to work on Google Moderator, which was a project created to solve this problem for non-threaded discussion (which is even worse), and we had some neat solutions. We displayed comments to users to be voted on, and ended up using a variant of wilson confidence intervals not just to rank, but to figure out which comments we should display to users to be voted on.
where i ended up was, it cannot be solved within a single view. there needs to be some form of split side-by-side view for the discussion, each prioritizing replies differently - by freshness, votes, weight or other metrics. another idea was to create a heat-map based on reply velocity to give a third dimension to the whole thing.
replies need "simmer" time at the top to aggregate enough votes. if there is one huge reply thread that dominates, few will scroll through pages looking for new content.
just the ability to fold comments on HN would help a lot already.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#37I have a related question: what is HN's stance on parody?
I've seen many parodies posted to HN that have been flagged to hell because some don't notice that it's a parody. (excellent example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126318) I also have my own parodies that I've stopped posting because they've met the same fate.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#38I love what happens when you search. Lol.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#39I also like how the user "redditor" is highlighted in subtle green.
Re: Hacker News Parody Thread
#40Good god this was funny, right down to the usernames. But now its time to be very HN about it. > Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork. I'm not particularly well known here (or anywhere), but either people actually like the words I say, or I simply have yet to make a complete ass out of myself. (I think one of these is more plausible, but…
> Alas I don't know for certain, but my guess is that if you have a high average karma then your posts are automatically weighted higher, so you can inject your opinion into almost any topic at any time. This affords me the luxury of being a contradictory whine even if I come late to the party!
One thing I dislike about the 'average karma' is that it discourages engaging in an extended discussion. For example, if you reply to this post, you may get a number of upvotes, but probably not as many as your original post. This creates an incentive just to ignore replies (when possible) so as not to bring down your average comment score.