121–130 of 229 posts
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"You get extra points if you start your reply with a cold remark such as "No." "Wrong." "False." Exactly, I automatically downvote comments like that.
That'll teach them! It's fortunate that nerds are psychic. It's ok, you can downvote this, I know it'll make you feel better about yourself.
One thing that really annoys me about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. Responses typically take the most absolute narrow and unforgiving interpretation of any point you are trying to make and subsequently use that to spin a counterpoint. Drives me batty.
While in certain "communities" this maybe is driven by the profession it self (oh, CS and all its true/false 0/1 domains ;), very seldom "cooperative discussion" is presented as something beneficial... just check most newspaper and tv reports... we get controversy presented as the way to go while the world is clearly much more complex as to be grasped in simple black/white true/false terms.
For single humans tending to such patterns in thinking certain medical conditions are associated with... in our societies looks like we embrace it much more thoughtlessly. All has to be a controversy (Parties, Companies, People)
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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.
One thing that really annoys me about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. Responses typically take the most absolute narrow and unforgiving interpretation of any point you are trying to make and subsequently use that to spin a counterpoint. Drives me batty.
I find that productive discussions do grow out of conversations with people who can note both what they agree with and what they don't. I've actually learned quite a bit from this.
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…
Given that this comment is also about Haskell, can we assume that one of the bots became sentient?
Have you considered the importance of the lambda calculus in your daily life?
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.
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…
In fairness, the HN guidelines are pretty clear about this one:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
A useful comment is one which moves the conversation forward. A non-useful comment is one which serves NO useful purpose.
Correlation is not causation. This is useful where a naive correlation is shown without causal mechanism. It's not useful when a correlation is shown and there's a strong causal link known. http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=552:_Correla...
If you're not paying for it, you're the product. I disagree that that this is useless, though it's not necessary to point it out without some justification.
"the legal duty to maximize shareholder value" Agree. Companies have numerous stakeholders. The "shareholder value" proposition was birthed by Milton Friedman and given a solid kick into the public eye by Jack Welch, who later called it "the world's dumbest idea": http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-orig...
[citation needed] Appropriate when someone makes an extraordinary, unsubstantiated, and difficult-to-source claim. No, this isn't Wikipedia, but it is a high quality, high s/n discussion site. Not appropriate where source is trivially confirmed or when intent is strictly snarky.
Premature optimization Depends on technical context. If substantiated, it's a fair gripe.
Dunning-Kruger effect Sadly, far too often appropriate, IMO.
Betteridge's law of headlines This is most often a meta-commentary: the story posted is vague and poorly conceived, it really shouldn't have made the front page. Increasingly I'm flagging such items (but not the Betteridge comments on them).
Logical fallacies As with "citation needed": the quality of discourse is served when people don't take cheap shots or rhetorical evasions. If you're trying to make a point and you're committing obvious logical fallacies, you deserve to be called on it.
Cue ... FTFY ... Cue: http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/406/282/2b8...
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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.
It isn't a request for a source. It is like saying 'if you want others to believe this thing you are claiming publicly, you need to back it up better than asking us to take you on your word.'
