Comments that focus on a single ambiguous phrasing or definition, then begins a giant chain of people pedantically arguing about technicalities.
Can we please discuss ideas and concepts?
Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
41–50 of 229 posts
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#42[citation needed] - This isn't Wikipedia, so skip the passive-aggressive comments. If you think something's wrong, explain why. The reason to post this is not so much thinking the comment is necessarily wrong as that it makes an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence, which if accepted as fact is going to change the shape of the whole discussion...perhaps appropriately, but the onus is on the person ma…
What bothers me is the link. If you say it's ad hominem and I don't know what that is, I can google it. Adding a link just feels pretentious.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#43Cliches like this are OK. What really annoys me is that the top rated comment is invariably a straight-forward contradiction of the original article's thesis. Like this comment here.
That's not annoying, that's my favorite part of HN: automatic counterpoint. I don't always see them otherwise.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#44HN sometimes looks like an Asperger's meetup. I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism, but sometimes it's more uptight than getting interviewed at a border control. I visit and get value from it, but this article is spot on. Well, I still think [citation needed] is relevant sometimes, in the case of a legitimate/interesting (or maybe questionable) citation that would produce more va…
Yes, sometimes you want to see a source, but why would you use that phrasing? The passive form doesn't feel like a conversation. Like the original poster wrote, it comes across as passive-aggressive.
Imagine someone walking into a coffee shop and ordering coffee by saying: "Coffee required" -- while drawing imaginary square brackets around his head with his fingers.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#45The biggest problem with Hacker News comments -- actually, make that all comments -- is fundamental: the sort of people that leave comments are (more often than not) people that want something, ANYTHING, to say, not people that have something to say.
a) the internet (and HN) can't get full
b) there are downvote arrows
To me it's OK if people just leave anything as a comment here because it will be modded down if it's irrelevant to the discussion.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#46[citation needed] - This isn't Wikipedia, so skip the passive-aggressive comments. If you think something's wrong, explain why. The reason to post this is not so much thinking the comment is necessarily wrong as that it makes an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence, which if accepted as fact is going to change the shape of the whole discussion...perhaps appropriately, but the onus is on the person ma…
What bothers me is the link. If you say it's ad hominem and I don't know what that is, I can google it. Adding a link just feels pretentious.
I consider linking helpful; that's just being a good citizen. Ad hominem is recognizable, but e.g. "Begging the question" is more often misunderstood and linking helps clarify.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#47The comment that gets my anal beads in a knot the most: "Citation please" or "Can you link to a study that.." etc. Sometimes people (myself included) just like to comment. Fart out a completely subjective opinion without worrying about the little army of pedantic party poopers coming along to spoil the fun. It's just a discussion board after all. Must everything be quite so serious. all. the. time. ?
It's fine to post subjective opinions ("I think yellow flying monkeys are awesome, and should be venerated as gods"), but those kinds of comments are usually targeted at statements of facts that get thrown around ("Yellow flying monkey's poop cures cancer and diarrhea").
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#48The HN comment that really bores me is the one that totally denigrates the project described in the link because it's "been done before", "won't work because X" where X is a woolly hypothetical, "doesn't solve Y" where it's blindingly obvious that Y is either incredibly hard or tangential to the point, or "could simply be done with just A, B and C" where A, B and C are some permutation of a raspberry pi, arduino, a kinect, some random combination of open source libraries, emacs and a blender.
There is benefit in new approaches to old problems. Incomplete attempts are still useful. Actually getting a project into a state that more than one person can use it, even if that use is just "Here, read the code. It doesn't work, but you might find it enlightening," is an effort worth respecting.
It's extremely rare that these comments have any worthwhile content in them. They seem to serve to point at the commenter's username and say "Aren't I clever for spotting the problems with your project?" What effect is that supposed to have past your own ego? You can't rewind the universe to a state where the project didn't happen, so why not take 3 minutes instead of 2 and find something positive to highlight rather than a negative to pick on?
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#49100% agree and I'd add other things I hate about HN:
* First comment debunks the article.
* Comments that start with "No." It's worse if the "No." is in its own paragraph.
* Mentioning Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
* General passive-agressivness.
* Lack of humour and light-heartedness.
* People upvote some really shitty stuff. The newest submissions page is sometimes more interesting than the homepage.
* People love to upvote blogposts of some people, e.g daringfireball.net or paulgraham.com, no matter the quality.
Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
#50The first 8 points are all totally valid comments and I don't think they can be rejected out-of-hand. The author seems annoyed by a perception that they're thrown into the mix in snarky, passive aggressive or ad hominem ways but that doesn't invalidate their use when they are accurately applied. Facile, poorly reasoned content is abundant on the internet. Hacker News is a firehose of content – both good and bad – and…
The inevitable comments about Bettridge's law of headlines every time a title ends in a question mark are not helpful. They don't make an argument, as the article is hardly ever arguing for the question. It is just indicating "look at me, I know of this exotic jargon term, and it happens to apply to this article title". Like, this article could have been "would hacker news improve if we stopped posting certain kinds of comments?"; the answer might be "no", but saying "no, due to Bettridge's law of headlines" provides no value or understanding to the reader.