One valid reason I have seen of people just saying "Hello" is to see if they get ghosted after putting their request. There are some people who can't bring themselves to say "no" and want an escape saying "Oh, I have not seen your messages" or something like that. For those people, hitting them up with "hello" and then putting the request helps narrow it down for you that your specific request made them ghost you and not them being busy.
No Hello
211–220 of 256 posts
Re: No Hello
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have several responses depending on how ornery I'm feeling 1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or 2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the day
Lately I've been going with 3. No response, people that have something important eventually follow up their lonely hello with their actual question/issue, the rest just forget about it I guess so the conversation never starts.
Yep. This is the way I’ve ended up handling it. I believe it has been established now that these interruptions in flow (context switching) have a cost in terms of time taken to refocus on a task. Minutes vs the few seconds it took to have that focus broken and clicking away into a single word DM.
Re: No Hello
#213I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times. The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second gro…
There’s more than two groups. Some people are just being friendly, behavior which is hard to exhibit when you primarily (or only) interact with someone over chat. Yes, some people are just being nervous around potentially breaching etiquette in an ironic way that happens to be a different breach of etiquette (for some, at least) but I just respond with “hi” strictly because I am interested in getting on with the conv…
> It would be rude to simply link this site (not blaming you) in response to a “hello”
That's why I set it as my status message.
Re: No Hello
#214Let people be people for god sake. If people saying hello on a chat pisses you off, take it as a sign that you need a vacation. I bet when you're back from 2 weeks in the Bahamas, when someone pings you with an empty "hello", you'll reply with a nice "oh hey buddy, what's up?", rather than spending one week building a fancy website to post to HN people who already agree with you.
Hi
Re: No Hello
#215Arthur Clarke made this point in a story about high latency communication half a century or more ago. He made the point that one should simply keep talking rather than wait for questions and answers to ping pong back and forth. While one is providing an answer you can be asking the next question. I can't remember the name of the story though. The solution was expressed in slightly sexist terms: speak like to women ha…
I could have sworn it was Asimov, but now I’m not so sure. As I remember it, the problem was communication with astronauts in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Re: No Hello
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because we're communicating synchronously in person. If you say something when I'm not listening to you, I will probably start listening midway through your statement, and miss potentially vital info. In a slack message, I can just read it again.
IDK about you but I get chats from 30+ different people and I usually miss at least one person's message a day as it falls off the "front page" so to speak
I don't see how "hello?" helps with that. If anything, it makes things worse if everybody does that, because now half of those chats from 30+ different people are that, drowning out the useful messages.
Re: No Hello
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people give me a hello back I raise them a “how are you?”
It took me a depressingly long time to figure out that when people (offline) ask me how I am, they don’t expect, or want, an answer.
The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.
Re: No Hello
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird subthread. > The selfish point (there are other points too) of "hi" is to confirm you have their attention No one is unsure of the selfish/self-serving motivation behind the lone "hello". The singleminded self-centeredness at the expense of others is the _entire_ basis of the criticism. This response is like encountering in a thread about lunch theft in the workplace, "Some people take food that isn't theirs be…
It's the confirmation of attention (the response to "hello") that removes the deniability of "I missed your message." In case that wasn't clear.
> The power of this response to be able to explain something not already understood is nil
Re: No Hello
#219It's 2025, we should be able to use LLMs to adapt between communication styles. If someone I don't know "hello"s me, my LLM should detect that, suppress the notification, and reply automatically - and then resume notifications and defer to me once non-greeting conversation has started.
That kind of agent driven communication is surely not far away. And I predict it will make things much much worse.
Re: No Hello
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what I do. There’s been plenty of times where the conversation never actually begins
And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people, cause that's pretty rude. What they are doing is only rude if they are aware that it annoys people. You response is rude nonetheless since it's a version of "that'll teach them" which is a pretty immature way of handling disagreements or conflicts. A more mature way would be for "first offenders" to politely reply hi and help them with whatever they ne…
I’m actually very good with people. But this is chat. Would you email someone and just say hi?