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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#221

Post by acabal »

These criticisms, when phrased in the manner of the post ("HN is full of mean and rude people"), suggest by omission that there's some kind of internet forum Nirvana out there where everyone's nice all the time and nobody every says mean things or is rude. ("HN is full of mean and rude people [... unlike place X, which is always great all the time]")

But the thing is, once a community reaches a mid-to-large size, certain kinds of people will always going to think it's full of jerks and trolls, and that its golden age has long passed--regardless of the community's age or actual composition.

I run one of the largest online writing communities online, Scribophile. We've been around going on 9 years and I personally pride myself on the reputation we've earned as being a friendly and supportive community. By and large people seem to agree. And yet every now and then we still get people complaining that Scrib members are out to get them, that everyone is mean, that Scrib's golden age has passed. (I started hearing that same golden age comment about 6 months in, by the way).

I think the truth is more like the faceless, voiceless, anonymous internet makes it really easy for people to both a) be jerks, and b) misinterpret harmless posts as people being jerks. I think this phenomenon happens in every mid-to-large sized community, ever. And I don't think it's really helpful to criticize any community of that size as having nothing but mean people, or trending towards meanness.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#222

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #205
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. When my comments or articles hit the frontpage/top of the thread, I don't really care. What excites me is when I get a ton of responses from more experienced people. Because that gives me an opportunity to learn something.

I second this. I watched the votes for a while to gauge what style, topics, or counterpoints had impact. Then, I mostly just ignored them. The real value is learning from people that know better than me on numerous topics. On top of helping out others with whatever I've learned. I've learned a ton, though, from other commenters with some things might have lasting significance in business or software developments I pa…

I mean, yeah. I learned about security, how deoptimization works, why CPU cache misses matter, how to program better, and a bunch of other stuff.

So thanks to the lot of you, in no small part for putting up with me being an idiot. And yes, thank you Nick P, (author of parent, if you couldn't tell), as you taught me a good bit of it.

And I just looked at my account info page: I'm ~30 days off from 1 year on HN. Funny how that worked out...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#223

Post by grzm »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #201
hiou wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and place their own concerns way above those of the team. I wonder if there is a language barrier but cynical and sarcastic is very very different from putting people down.

"The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and place their own concerns way above those of the team." Please give evidence supporting that claim. What I've seen is a lot of people are just non-confrontational by nature. They'll do a lot to…

Lots of good discussion in this whole thread. Another thing to keep in mind is that good, effective communication involves both/all parties.

That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as well.

There very well can be mismatches and miscommunication, but if the goal is effective communication, I think in a lot of cases these can be tolerated and worked around. Takes both sides.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#224

Post by lorenzhs »

qb45 wrote: post #220
lorenzhs wrote: post #120

The comments on that "Lenovo is blocking Linux on some new laptops" story a while back were truly abysmal. I think that's the only time where I was really disappointed by HN comments. Now obviously (and as many of the more thoughtful commenters pointed out) this was just a case of missing support in the Linux kernel. There was no "secret deal" between Lenovo and Microsoft that the customer service rep on that forum r…

There was more to it than missing support in Linux. These SSDs have two modes of operation: AHCI (supported by any OS) and proprietary (requiring special drivers). Lenovo chose to hide the corresponding menu in UEFI setup and hacked the firmware to revert changes made through UEFI variables so that the SSD was permanently stuck in proprietary RAID mode, at that time supported only by Lenovo's modified Windows 10. Ult…

I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy. No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and missing driver support in Linux.

But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#225

Post by whopa »

toxican wrote: post #122
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement…

While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always st…

> Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Honest question: What are some actual techniques to effectively find these gem subreddits?

I see this sentiment expressed regularly, but nobody explains how actual effective discovery works. If the answer is spending hours wading through a bunch of noise only to find one or two gems, it's a completely rational response to just give up on Reddit itself, because the reward/time spent tradeoff is too low.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#226

Post by nickpsecurity »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #24

You post a list of the best comments on HN without putting The Wisdom of Bane on the list? Seriously, how did The Wisdom of Bane not make it one here? That is one of the best comments on all of HN. For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

Thanks for the link. That was an amazing comment that should be required reading for all these people thinking about throwing datacenters at their problem of choice. It's actually about the same as the advice and methods used in the Beowulf clusters back when all this crap was starting. They did come up with creative ways to scale out while NUMA vendors (esp SGI) kept scaling further up. However, they also identified bottlenecks in their algorithms from transport all the way up to application layers. Active Messages vs TCP/IP, BLAS libraries, hand-tuned MPI, careful choice of interconnects, offloading I/O onto dedicated workstations w/ clustered filesystes... always improving efficiency of each component in the stack to get max ROI out of those expensive clusters.

As bane notes, it seems that third part of doing HPC right was lost in translation to modern crowd. Not entirely sure why. Prior conversations indicated strong separation between HPC and business/cloud crowds in terms of knowledge sharing. Plus, there's marketing hype and VC money involved riding the waves of whatever is massively popular. Bigger IT budgets, too, if your proposal doesn't involve using one, mid-range Dell. I'm sure such things have more impact than the technical arguments in many places. ;)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#227

Post by nickpsecurity »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #90
blt wrote: post #47

I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.

Maybe have a [jokular] tag and let readers flag a comment as such, then allow [jokular] comments to be hidden for the people who find them noisy. Edit: this comment deservers the [overengineering] tag...

That's a decent idea. The HN client could also have settings to turn them off entirely or just disable them for a specific thread with too much noise.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#228

Post by nickpsecurity »

amelius wrote: post #58

I wish there was more research in moderation systems. I think it is a fascinating topic, because it can make or break an online forum. And perhaps it even has applications in political decision making.

I agree. I don't know of any such research but this article posted on HN was one of best summaries on the subject I've seen:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#229

Post by zzzcpan »

parasubvert wrote: post #218
zzzcpan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need positive, supportive environments Google's research doesn't conclude that at all. Safe place to speak up is not necessarily a positive, supportive environment.

I'm having a severe case of cognitive dissonance here. A positive, supportive environment is one that allows people to speak up, supports people to be critical and allows both success and failures but doesn't perpetuate failures - meaning the initiative or product is separate from the person. A negative, unsupportive environment generally makes people feel like shit until they quit or are fired, perpetuates failed in…

Obviously, positive and supportive mean different things to different people. I, for example, don't see how you can be positive, supportive, but criticize other people's ideas and work they are doing at the same time. So, at best it's a neutral place, leaning towards negativity, since expressing criticism substantially is a lot of effort, it's easier to simply call bad ideas as bad and move on.

The research is actually about two things, safe place to speak up and empathy.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#230

Post by nickpsecurity »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #222
nickpsecurity wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. I watched the votes for a while to gauge what style, topics, or counterpoints had impact. Then, I mostly just ignored them. The real value is learning from people that know better than me on numerous topics. On top of helping out others with whatever I've learned. I've learned a ton, though, from other commenters with some things might have lasting significance in business or software developments I pa…

I mean, yeah. I learned about security, how deoptimization works, why CPU cache misses matter, how to program better, and a bunch of other stuff. So thanks to the lot of you, in no small part for putting up with me being an idiot. And yes, thank you Nick P, (author of parent, if you couldn't tell), as you taught me a good bit of it. And I just looked at my account info page: I'm ~30 days off from 1 year on HN. Funny…

Yeah, it's been quite the experience. I appreciated you comments as well as I learned from many I agreed and disagreed with. Still have the Scheme ones bookmarked for when I have time to start on it. :)
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