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

Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

righto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 229 posts

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#111

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

nekopa wrote: post #67

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 impro…

Why didn't you write this reply in Haskell/Node.js/Go/Rust? I did a naive implementation (since I am still kinda new to this) of your post in all those languages and here are my benchmark results:

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#112

Post by hrktb »

This would be the kind of comment the author hates...but isn't "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" a fallacy as well ? Paying for something is orthogonal to being a part of what's sold to to someone else. For instance newspapers/magazines cost a price but still "sell" their audience to advertisers.

And yes, I love communities nitpicking news items, because it's not as if the internet is in lack of discussion boards, and seeing different approaches on the same items is so interesting.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#113

Post by mbesto »

pekk wrote: post #69
saurik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, now we're getting to the real issue - the titles/content of the articles that get upvoted is extremely poor, not the comments.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#114

Post by [deleted] »

jmadsen wrote: post #64

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 )

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#116

Post by chris_wot »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #36
raverbashing wrote: post #31

HN 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…

> I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism Is it? [citation please]

WARNING!!!! MISUSE OF CITATION NEEDED!

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#118

Post by jaredsohn »

hrktb wrote: post #112

This would be the kind of comment the author hates...but isn't "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" a fallacy as well ? Paying for something is orthogonal to being a part of what's sold to to someone else. For instance newspapers/magazines cost a price but still "sell" their audience to advertisers. And yes, I love communities nitpicking news items, because it's not as if the internet is in lack of discu…

That statement is not a fallacy. Assuming a product is made by a business that hopes to become profitable, if the users aren't paying for it then what other business reason can there be to having users at all?

Your example doesn't support the argument since it just states that if users pay for something it doesn't mean that they aren't also the product.

So it is possible to pay for something and be part of the product, to pay for something and not be a part of the product, and to not pay something and be a part of the product but not possible to not pay for something and not be a part of the product.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#119

Post by mbesto »

DanBC wrote: post #102
jasonkester wrote: post #66

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 N…

It's immensely frustrating when someone is discussing a well conducted study showing an interesting result to have another person say "This feels wrong. I had $ANECDOTE, so maybe they researchers are missing $CONCLUSION_FROM_ANECDOTE?", which has been covered in the study and in the HN comments and is just a weird point anyway.

Most of the conclusions I find in comments on HN, are rarely conclusive. I've always struggled with comments that provide one data point (or better yet, a generalization of data points) that the user declares a conclusion from. I can't tell if I'm just being pessimistic when I detract these poorly thought out conclusions or if they are genuinely good for the discussion.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#120

Post by olalonde »

cstross wrote: post #82
moomin wrote: post #4

Cliches 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.

Cliches get to be cliches because they're a good idea that everyone wants to reuse . And recycle. Until they're familiar and then over-familiar. The top-rating issue is simply symptomatic of the lack of insight of many of the folks clicking the little arrows over their first morning cup of coffee. News delivers a brief stimulus; commentary even briefer: the spasmodic twitch of the mousing fingertip merely signals the…

> The top-rating issue is simply symptomatic of the lack of insight of many of the folks clicking the little arrows over their first morning cup of coffee.

Totally agree and it's hard to blame them. The real problem might be that people who are over-familiar with the cliche don't bother to down vote.

Reminder to all: take the time to down vote over used cliches that bother you.

Post reply on HN