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Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

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Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#61

Post by pekk »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #29

The 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. ?

Is it necessary to make groundless claims all the time? The reaction you are seeing has a context of serious subject matter. If you want silly disposable comments, try Reddit

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#62

Post by saurik »

anigbrowl wrote: post #18

[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…

The "citation needed" thing is pulled out any time people disagree, however, even when the comment is something where a source could be found rapidly using Google. It is not the onus of someone in a friendly discussion to have to anally cite every comment they make that involves some random fact: instead, it should be the onus of every person involved in the discussion to keep an open mind and do some due diligence. If you disagree with the other person's fact, then you bring up your own fact and cite the hell out of it to make it clear how wrong the other person is, you don't just demand citations. The real reason people do this is just because they want to undermine trust in the other person's position without having to do any actual work, and it is a great strategy as no matter how well cited something is, there will always be something, potentially in the citation itself (going one or even two levels out), you can take issue with and scream "citation needed" about.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#63

Post by bane »

I was expecting this to contain the inevitable "why didn't you do this in Haskell?" that seems to come and go in waves. I've come to think that there's a non-trivial percentage of HN users that are simply bots (written in Haskell) that insert this into a random percentage of threads. If they're responded to it then brings in a human to continue the conversation.

More seriously, these aren't just gripes, most of these have some kind of remediation step too. Most of the comments here seem to be missing that.

That being said, most of these are still very valid things to be said here, the problem is not that they're being said, but that they have to be said. People in general are lazy and carry around terribly poor models of the world in the heads. 8 of these are really constant, low pressure attempts to correct this problem with the last one just being a cultural issue that this isn't reddit.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#64

Post by jmadsen »

I'll go with people who read your full paragraph, find the not quite 100% perfect analogy in the 5th most important point, and worry it like a terrier with a chew toy

These people should be shot in the face with a double barrel shotgun.

(You may now commence to argue over whether or not both barrels are really necessary )

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#65

Post by ronilan »

sker wrote: post #23
k__ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there already a law for this? I would love this to be called "Moomin's Law"

I personally call it Pwnage Culture. Karma-based sites love it when a user debunks an article or another user's comment. You get extra points if you start your reply with a cold remark such as "No." "Wrong." "False." And then you put some random citations to Pubmed or Wikipedia at the bottom of your comment.

No. This is wrong. Extra point conversion is never a sure thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(gridiron_football)

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#66

Post by jasonkester »

My personal favorite is "The plural of anecdote is not data".

Correct. The plural of anecdote is conversation, which is exactly the reason we're here.

I think this one comes down to people misunderstanding the reason we're here in the first place. If you start to notice that the discussion here resembles the sort of conversation you'd have around the watercooler, that's probably has to do with the fact that Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler.

Complaining that that seems to be the case and asking people to stop having lively conversation is not really helping anybody. As much as some folks want this to be the Royal Society for Correctly And Properly Dismissing The Ideas Of Other People, it's not.

Good thing, too. That place wouldn't be any fun.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#67

Post by nekopa »

This.

Just because these comments appear quite frequently it doesn't necessarily mean that they are responsible for making your eyes tired, after all, correlation is not causation. Maybe try to adjust the font on your browser or use one of the popular HN chrome extension. Remember that HN is a free site and if you're not paying for it, you're the product, so try to see how you can improve your comments, thereby improving the product.

Even though Pg has a legal duty to maximize shareholder value for YC [citation needed] changing how people comment would be premature optimization - why don't we see how the site shakes out after a couple of years. Saying that this is a place for discussion is at best a leaky abstraction, like Playboy magazine, I come here predominately to read the articles. I feel that I understand most of the technical articles posted here, even though some people say I suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect I feel that is just a needless ad hominem.

You can read more about this in a blog post I wrote:

Is the quality of HN discussion falling?

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#69

Post by pekk »

saurik wrote: post #50
gilgoomesh wrote: post #33

The 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…

Sensationalized, misleading titles are not helpful.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#70

Post by Dewie »

What grates me is people that use "order of magnitude" for everything. It's fine if you're talking about different kinds of memory access or the acidity of some lake due to acid rain. But writing phrases like "Ever since I started biking to work, I feel an order of magnitude better" just makes you look pretentious, to me.

Of course this is more of an aesthetic gripe rather than a gripe with some rhetorical device.

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