Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing • Hacker News Board

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#161

Post by GalacticDomin8r » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:27 PM UTC

antimagic wrote: post #152

statictype wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. Sure, when you leave a comment asserting something, you don't need to provide a full bibliography of references, but if someone asks for it (ie, someone follows up with [citation needed]) then the onus is on you to show that your facts have a basis in reality. I don't see anything wrong with that. You can't really disprove something which doesn't have any factual basis.

Surely if someone asks for a citation then they need to provide at a minimum some countering anecdotes. Otherwise their "[citation needed]" is even weaker than my anecdote-supported assertion... And if they're going to present countering evidence, why not just do so without the superfluous "[citation needed]"?

> Surely if someone asks for a citation then they need to provide at a minimum some countering anecdotes.

The burden of proof lies with the initial claim AKA Russell's teapot. In a strict academic forum, the person making the claim should provide evidence at the time of making the claim or at least be prepared to defend it with facts.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#162

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:54 PM UTC

zainny wrote: post #100

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 do this, even though I find it annoying in others. It might be that I'm an assertive, details-oriented professional. Or a prick. I'm not sure.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#163

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:56 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #158

Too wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the karma system can also be a contributor to this. Any comment you make has the chance to get a few upvotes, regardless of how little it contributes to the conversation. So people just spam comments to get a few points here and there. This phenomena can be seen in forums without karma also but i think in places with karma it is usually worse, worst offenders being digg and reddit where everybody tries to mak…

>A better algotithm calculating the karma as an average over all your comments maybe could help The metric I would most like to know is how many votes my comments got divided by the total number of words in my comments.

Wouldn't this favour the short smartarsery that's one of the not-done things hereabouts?

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#164

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:58 PM UTC

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #111

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:

Please make sure to follow up with a blog post about how you coped with being on the front page of HN.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#165

Post by chilldream » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:59 PM UTC

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.…

"Correlation is not causation" started useful but has become less useful the more cliched it became. And OP is right that it's particularly useless among people who've already heard it.

The whole reason people felt the need to mention "correlation is not causation" is that correlation is evidence of causation. Some people seem to think this catchphrase means the two are unrelated which is also false.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#166

Post by raphman » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 12:59 PM UTC

Too wrote: post #89

citricsquid wrote: post #13

The 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.

I think the karma system can also be a contributor to this. Any comment you make has the chance to get a few upvotes, regardless of how little it contributes to the conversation. So people just spam comments to get a few points here and there. This phenomena can be seen in forums without karma also but i think in places with karma it is usually worse, worst offenders being digg and reddit where everybody tries to mak…

It might also be interesting to rate-limit commenters (perhaps based on their previous upvotes per comment). If you are new to HN, you may only post one comment per week. The "better" (as measured by karma) your comments are, the more comments per week you may post. This might make commenters consider whether their comment is really so important that they sacrifice another opportunity to comment in the future.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#167

Post by jacques_chester » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 1:01 PM UTC

ilyanep wrote: post #93

Oh no. Is Hacker News going to start down the ever-descending death spiral of angst that made parts of reddit so unbearable to me (until the angst became a self-fulfilling prophecy)? Many of these classes of comments are fairly reasonable in many cases (as discussed in the rest of the comments here), and I really hope that we're not about to begin the cycle of "I hate this place, it used to be so much better" that se…

Yes.

Before HN, Reddit.

Before Reddit, K5.

Before K5, Slashdot.

Before Slashdot, Usenet and Listserv.

Before Usenet and Listserv, every community ever.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#168

Post by csmatt » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 1:05 PM UTC

mmcnickle wrote: post #150

zainny wrote: post #100

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.

It's flattering to oneself to be contrarian; Not only have you already considered what has been presented, you've also thought about it and have a counter-argument. You're cleverer than the author of the article; she still entertains that idea while you have long ago dismissed it. Thought that's rarely the case. What usually happens is someone will read a clever article, get upset that they didn't come up with it and…

This is very well articulated and at least partly rings true for me. However, after typing out a response of the nature you described, I hit the back button rather than submit.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#169

Post by polymatter » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 1:07 PM UTC

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.

If I agree with a point, there is very little I can add to the conversation.

But if I disagree, I can say how I disagree. And this can move the conversation forward. Like this comment here.

Re: Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing

#170

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 1:09 PM UTC

Meh. Not so much.

The problem here is the difference between a conversation and a mob of emotional ranters (And I plead guilty to being in the latter category many times). Most of these comments are meant to provide context.

The author seems to forget that it's much better to have a reasonable conversation in context than it is to simply wander far afield on whatever the outrage of the day is. Correlation does not equal context. Companies are there to provide shareholder value. Google doesn't owe you anything. And so on. Yes, these can be throwaway catchphrases (bumper stickers), but hell, I'd rather have the usual half-dozen bumper stickers and then talk reasonably about something that try to un-fuck a conversation built of some bullshit fallacy with somebody talking very emotionally about things about which they aren't fully informed.

We make the mistake over and over again of rewarding emotional content, not useful content. I'd argue this post is a prime example of that. The reason the same phrases come back again and again is that we continue to make the same cognitive mistakes again and again. Ignoring that won't make it go away.