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HN: The Good Parts (2016)

danluu.com

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Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#21

Post by treebog »

creata wrote: post #14
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.

I should have worded this a little differently. I don’t know how accessible it is to someone who is actually blind or uses a screen reader. For all I know it’s great for them.

I do know the tiny text and low contrast make it hard to use for someone like me with older eyes. This is especially true on mobile, where the text refuses to resize in accordance to my phone’s large font settings.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#22

Post by lewispollard »

HN comments, by and large, are extremely polite, and people are open to discussion, criticism, etc without resorting to insults, in my experience. I don't really see the sort of complaints brought up in the post here, well, ever, outside of the rare ghostly, semi-transparent comments that have already been flagged or filtered.

You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how nice and non-combative it is here. Maybe it is just the relative difference from those sites' comment sections that blind me to how many assholes are regularly posting on HN, but I really don't see them.

Admittedly, as another comment pointed out, the further it gets away from tech, the less informed the comments tend to be (the recent thread about mystical experiences and psychedelics had the level of rhetoric and nuance I'd expect from a teenage Reddit capital-A Atheist on the subject, for example). But that's fine, it's not where I come here for.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#23

Post by CyberRabbi »

It’s a sign of elitism to have this much contempt for internet comments. The internet is not academia or your fancy hierarchical tech job, it’s a place where anybody of any ilk can have a say. Yes there will be wrong comments or mean comments but that’s just because you’re amongst the people and the people are imperfect. Yet it’s the masses of people who form the audience of this site that make this site so valuable.

If one cannot get over their contempt of bad internet comments then it might be better for their stress levels to stick to reading academic journals or other elite publications. Much higher ratios of nice/correct opinions there.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#24

Post by PaulHoule »

Ranking 'quality' is tough because it has multiple dimensions and aggregating multiple kinds of utility is problematic, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

developing a good ranking function for bag-of-words full text search is about carefully balancing the attraction of larger vs smaller documents in the collection. If you try to aggregate several bad search engines you get a bad search engine, if you try to add more factors you get a bad search engine, instead you have to walk the path of BM25 or one of the more modern 'information theoretic' ranking functions. (e.g. precious knowledge I got from years of reading conference proceedings and still having no idea how to make a good ranking function then finally reading the right review paper that pointed out the two discoveries the conference made in the first 10 years!)

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#25

Post by ryandrake »

> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars.

If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: https://news.ycombinator.com/active

This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussion topics to stay at the top, and not get insta-buried because they're controversial. I use it as my default now. In my opinion, it's much better than the main sorting algorithm.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#26

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sokoloff wrote: post #5

I don’t think the informed technical opinions are nearly as rare as danluu characterizes them to be, to wit: “it’s rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed”. I do agree that the farther you get from computer tech, the more frequently you’ll see patently wrong comments (aviation is my eye-roll inducing topic here), but on computer tech topics, I’d say more than 50% of substantive comment…

I do wonder if the definition of well-informed includes agrees with my viewpoint somewhere in it.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#27

Post by suprfsat »

creata wrote: post #14
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.

Color ratio of a typical comment on this web site:

https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23dddddd-on-%23f6f6ef

1.25, which is well below the minimum of 4.5

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#28

Post by nickthemagicman »

ryandrake wrote: post #25

> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars. If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: https://news.ycombinator.com/active This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussio…

Thanks for this! Awesome tip!
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