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Hacker News is depressing

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Re: Hacker News is depressing

#381

Post by Garoof »

zeteo wrote: post #84
simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

>the meanness of programming communities is a the biggest problem we have Or maybe it's our biggest asset. In a world filled with bullshit (how many people you think really empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?), it's refreshing to have a little corner where they honestly tell you why your ideas suck and your background is deficient. It kind of comes with the profession, yes. Only a relentlessly cr…

"(how many people you think really empathize with you - vs. just going through the motions?)"

I don't know that I prefer people going through the motions of hating on each other. It's not necessarily honest and genuine just because it's unpleasant.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#382

Post by lotsofcows »

FreeBird wrote: post #70
simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

That's nothing. Check these comments, anywhere else you would get summarily fired for emails like this. http://www.muktware.com/5276/linus-torvalds-secure-boot-supp... "Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue..." What if that email was to a female kernel dev? What if a whizkid reads the kernel dev mailing…

"anywhere else you would get summarily fired" Speak for yourself. I've never worked anywhere where someone got fired for speaking English.

"What if that email was to a female kernel dev?" What if it was man? A martian? A lickle putty tat? I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here saying here.

"What if a whizkid reads ... deepthroating means?" Whizkid? Doesn't know what deepthroating means? Were you home-schooled?

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#383

Post by angersock »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #374
medecau wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't block the people you disagree with. You block the jerks, the obvious trolls, the negative shit aka noise.

I never use such features unless it is really trolling, in which case I expect the flagging system to solve the problem or anti-spam techniques. I don't really like I need protection from people's thoughts, not saying people who want such features do but it's not my thing.

Exactly--the flagging feature is there to deal with real trolls.

Let's be honest--usually, blocking (in a community which has other ways of dealing with abusive users) is just a way of helping people be intellectually lazy and filtery.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#384

Post by gaius »

bjhoops1 wrote: post #101
simonsarris wrote: post #25

This is curious, maybe a little too reactionary[1], but I think we could use the introspection. On the one hand, being argued about is a problem a lot of people would like to have. I spent two years making a large canvas diagramming library and I would have loved for it to have frontpage'd on HN, even if everyone just told me it was terrible. On the other hand, I do think the meanness of programming communities is a…

I could not agree more. One factor that I think contributes to the Asshole Ethos common among programmers is this idea that great men of genius cannot be held to the same moral standards as mere mortals. This idea, combined with an inflated sense of self-worth, makes for a host of Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds wannabes, convinced that their special nature absolves them from social norms and responsibility. The Raskol…

It has been my privilege in my career to work with some truly talented people, and my misfortunute to work with some whose talents were only in bullshit. I am thinking now of the smartest, by a considerable margin, guy I know, a former cow-orker and a cryptographer. He is the nicest, humblest guy you could hope to meet, he always had time to deal with my stupid questions (I was the only non-PhD in that team). And this is a general pattern: truly smart guys are beyond ego, they exist on another plane. They have time for mortals because they effortlessly see the big picture.

Now let me be brutally honest about Torvalds: Tanenbaum was correct. He is not a great coder or a great thinker, Linux as he wrote it was indeed as Tanenbaum said, a giant step backwards. Torvalds just happened to be at the right place at the right time to be at the nucleus of a nascent social movement (what we now call Open Source). What has he done lately - Transmeta? And he is well aware of this himself I suspect: the abrasive personality is his insecurity showing.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#385

Post by roguecoder »

larrys wrote: post #323
bjhoops1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not agree more. One factor that I think contributes to the Asshole Ethos common among programmers is this idea that great men of genius cannot be held to the same moral standards as mere mortals. This idea, combined with an inflated sense of self-worth, makes for a host of Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds wannabes, convinced that their special nature absolves them from social norms and responsibility. The Raskol…

"convinced that their special nature absolves them from social norms and responsibility." Is it that they feel this way inherently (maybe) or that there are a large percentage of people that surround them, and/or stand to gain from them, that tolerate and allow that behavior? My feeling is that people act the way they do because they can get away with it with little repercussions. If you've ever dealt with a person w…

From a very early age, probably. We all remember the kid who could get away with calling out in class because he was always right, or goofing off and harassing the other students because he already knew the material being taught, or demanding the college professor address his long, convoluted and only tangentially-related comment no one cared about.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#386

Post by roguecoder »

sirclueless wrote: post #359
pfortuny wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being impolite does not come with the profession, this is an easy excuse which sidesteps the problem. The difference between: "You cannot use a pointer without previous initialization becuase it may lead to corrupt memory, or some other error". and "Nobody with a f king idea of C would dereference a pointer as you have done" is politeness. And the first one helps, the second one just offends. Both are right, but…

There's plenty of legitimate reasons to give brusque, dismissive answers. It's tough to distinguish between someone dismissing an idea because he sees the inevitable problems that make it unworkable, and someone dismissing an idea that falls outside his comfort zone. It's tough to distinguish between someone giving an abrupt answer because her time is too valuable to spend on a detailed one, and someone giving an abr…

It's not actually that hard:

A) They politely provide reasons, citations or rational for their opinion and may ask you to address those concerns.

B) If their time is too valuable and mine isn't there had better be a significant actual differential in our importance in the world. I'd take it from my CEO, but I expect explanations from anyone under him. Otherwise the "brusque" answer is like someone who doesn't bother capitalizing and using proper punctuation: a mark of disrespect for my time.

C) The nice guy having a shitty day feels bad when you call him on acting like an asshole.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#387

Post by roguecoder »

bch wrote: post #305
itsybitsycoder wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard drives are a physical medium. http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of...

But is memcached on RAM?

The recent Blizzard case found that making a copy of something into RAM created a fixed copy of it, I believe.

Remember, intellectual property rights are all thought-crime laws. They don't have to make sense.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#388

Post by shadowfiend »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #349
abraxasz wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that this might be specific to me, but I'd actually rather have someone tell me: "You're useless. For god's sake stop contributing until you get your sh t together" rather than: “your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to expl…

Hmm, the first one would basically stop me contributing at all. You go in feeling all good and like you're going to lend a hand, presumably to people you respect if you want to work with them in the first place, and then they turn around and basically tell you they think you're a retard. It'd hurt pretty bad. I'd be interested, would you find something like this to be as patronising: "Thanks for your submission. Coul…

Definitely less patronizing, yes. I like it very much, but that works better in a situation where you can see that they already understand X/Y/Z reasonably well. I guess I was trying to present the worst possible situation, where it seems like they are stumbling around with concepts that seem to be over their heads, and then I think the risk of being patronizing is worth the value of being as honest as possible.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#389

Post by roguecoder »

ionforce wrote: post #115
smacktoward wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's important to acknowledge that most commenters on HN do not behave that way, but some do and they are very loud." I think part of this is just the dynamics of community-moderated comments. In my experience, the way to get upvotes in any such forum (not just HN) is to express an opinion in the strongest terms you possibly can. "X is dead" gets upvotes. "X has some challenges to overcome, and it might" doesn't. Pe…

You fix it with heavy-handed moderation that actively punishes curtly written content.

There's an interesting observation in the field of mechanism design that says when any ordering of preferences if possible (that is, it is possible for something like agent X thinks A>B>C and agent Y thinks A>C>B and agent Z thinks C>B>A to happen) the only "truthful" mechanism is dictatorial. Otherwise it is always possible to game the system by voting for outcomes you don't really like as much but you think more other people will like.

Re: Hacker News is depressing

#390

Post by roguecoder »

patrickmay wrote: post #79
meritt wrote: post #49

Want to get rid of the majority of trolls, abuse and unnecessarily negative behavior? Remove anonymity. These fake points don't do much at all.

I think I've posted this here before, but there is some evidence that eliminating anonymity does not improve civility: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-... Anonymity or pseudonymity do, however, have benefits that should be considered before eliminating them. Whistleblowers and employees of companies being discussed are the two that come to mind immediately.

I have noticed that in Anonymous and pseudonymous environments people seem more willing to speak from personal experience and in the first person, which enhances and personalizes discourse. Actually, my favorite environment of all time was enforced anonymity with hiding comments that got downvoted. Without the ego payoff of persistent identity, ignoring the trolls was actually effective and people who's comments weren't engaged with just left. The discussion that was left was insightful and frequently constructive.
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