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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

#12

Post by TelmoMenezes »

lutusp wrote: post #2

Unfortunately there are too many useful rhetorical devices in the list, devices that serve a purpose. Ironically, the list starts off with "correlation is not causation," an expression that in most cases is raised for very good reasons -- for example, any popular science story that includes the word "linked" but without adequate qualifiers. If more people were science-literate, these platitudes wouldn't be necessary.…

I agree. The author says "If there's some specific reason you think a a study is wrong, describe it". Unfortunately, this is very often precisely the problem: many times not in the study itself but in the way it's reported.

"Correlation is not causation" mistakes are not always obvious. Especially when there's ideological bias. E.g: the claim that owning a gun increases the chances that you will be violently killed by X%.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#15

Post by michaelwww »

Telling us how ridiculously little time it took you to build something cool. Most of the time I enjoy what you built, but telling me that you did it "over the weekend" cheapens it for me. Are you bragging, trying to excuse it's shortcomings, or lying? All three most likely. Unless you're a team of people in a weekend competition [1], I'd skip the part about only caring to put a couple days into it before showing it off.

[1] http://garage48.org/blogger/list-of-projects-built-over-week...

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#16

Post by zalew »

> > What comments bother you the most?

"just use bootstrap/heroku/nodejs/techoftheday"

"hn is turning into reddit"

"http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

complaints about: negativity, wrong tone and cursing.

looking for reasons to get offended.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#17

Post by erikb »

This is not criticism, but just an idea I had while ago while writing similar articles: Maybe only people read this who only consider the gain you get from reading their comment. Probably people who don't care about the other users at all will not read it.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#18

Post by anigbrowl »

[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 making the claim to support it.

A link to a logical fallacy, such as ad hominem or more pretentiously tu quoque - this isn't a debate team and you don't score points for this.

Considering the requests that if one thinks something is wrong, one should explain why, I'd say that identifying errors in reasoning is quite appropriate; though some of them are so frequent that I just downvote rather than pointing them out yet again. Fallacies of composition are astonishingly frequent, for example.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#19

Post by gedrap »

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.

There is nothing wrong with a top comment being a contradiction. I believe that in this way, it might bring even more useful comments and thoughts since it takes a different angle.

The real problem is that those contradicting comments usually are plain simple negative (not to be confused with criticism, which is alright, I am referring to the grumpy negative ones), demotivating.

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