Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 383 posts

Re: HN comments are underrated

#241

Post by zodiac »

lstamour wrote: post #237
zodiac wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, did you read his second paragraph? > And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary.

I don't think they're mutually exclusive opinions. HN could be seen as mean or rude just as it can be technically correct -- and sometimes at the same time. The original post also acknowledges that there's been an effort to reduce negative comments in the past few years.

I read danluu's first two paragraphs as making the argument that "comments on HN are bad, but better than comments on any other online community", instead of as trying to distinguish between meanness and technical correctness.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#243

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #226
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…

There's a reason it's a classic. The best summation I heard of it was, "If you can't get the solution to a problem to fit on one machine, you probably don't understand the problem well enough."

This is probably one of my favorite quotes in software. I'm probably slightly misquoting it here, but I don't care.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#244

Post by foxfired »

acabal wrote: post #221

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, cer…

I was looking for a writing community for so long. Thank you for pointing me to Scribophile :)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#245

Post by grzm »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #235
grzm wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 miscommu…

"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." That's a good point. In my classes on it, they called it active listening. Anyone interested in following up on your point should type that phrase into Google to find all kinds of inter…

Thanks for the Principle of Charity link! It calls to mind Anotol's Rapoport's rules, summarized by Daniel Dennett as:

> How to compose a successful critical commentary:

> * You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

> * You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

> * You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

> * Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...

Might be too much for every comment response, but good to keep in mind.

I think I've been particularly fascinated by this whole area recently in part because I know it's something I need to improve on. Your point I even learn ... suck it up. :) is spot on.

Thanks again for your thoughtful remarks and contributions. Much appreciated. Off to dig into the Principle of Charity and its references.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#246

Post by topkekz »

eternauta3k wrote: post #89
Jimmy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go…

> only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits Any recommendations?

https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/

Re: HN comments are underrated

#247

Post by mooreds »

veddox wrote: post #149
mooreds wrote: post #96

I have often thought it's be great to do a "best comments of the week" email list the same way "Kernel Traffic" did for a number of years with Linux kernel development: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/archives.html Condensing comments down to the 5-10 gems would be very interesting. And, perhaps with the voting system, not that difficult.

I like that idea! The only problem I see is that great comments are often embedded within an extensive discussion - how do you give readers of such a digest the necessary context without too much bloat?

I can think of two options:

* Embed enough to give the reader context (maybe a link to the original article or quoting the parent or grandparent is enough)

* Only include those comments that are stand-alone.

It'd be quite a lot of work, but even if you highlighted 10% of the great comments, you'd provide a great service.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#248

Post by [deleted] »

veddox wrote: post #149
mooreds wrote: post #96

I have often thought it's be great to do a "best comments of the week" email list the same way "Kernel Traffic" did for a number of years with Linux kernel development: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/archives.html Condensing comments down to the 5-10 gems would be very interesting. And, perhaps with the voting system, not that difficult.

I like that idea! The only problem I see is that great comments are often embedded within an extensive discussion - how do you give readers of such a digest the necessary context without too much bloat?

[deleted]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#249

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #230
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

It's always good to know you've helped someone out.

Who knows, by the time you get started on Scheme, I may have finished one of may many side projects. Did I mention I tend to get distracted a lot?

Speaking of which, DFHack is unbelievably impressive. I mean, jeez. This has nothing to do with scheme, I've just been trying to work with it the past few days.

And with that, I think I've made my point.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#250

Post by tedmiston »

I really think the author is onto something here.

Recently I've been thinking about doing a couple blog posts that summarize the HN thread for a given article* in perhaps ~1500 words. I think of it like the approach that r/tabled uses for AMAs on Reddit (example: [1]).

Would others find this interesting, or would you rather just read the comments yourself?

A second idea is — a daily / weekly update of comments from all of the people you're interested in "following" on HN. You can do this very manually right now. I think it could be an interesting proof of concept.

*When I say one article, I really mean the aggregate of recent links around that topic as discussions are often merged or commenters bring information from other sources into the commentary for whichever link takes off on that topic. Often that is the most original source, but not always.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/4lh4t1/table_iama_i...

Post reply on HN