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

301–310 of 383 posts

Re: HN comments are underrated

#301

Post by hiou »

elbear wrote: post #298
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.

You can be critical without sounding cynical and sarcastic. When you say something sarcastically, you're implying that you consider yourself better than that person. Do you think it's healthy to speak to a child in a cynical way? It shouldn't be any different when relating to an adult.

"Do you think it's healthy to speak to a child in a cynical way?"

Absolutely not. I don't think I would look to fill my team with people who wish to be spoken to as children.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#302

Post by [deleted] »

me34llama wrote: post #240
hiou wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Seen both many times. The positive enforcement causes no one to share any negative thoughts after a while and the company smiles it's way out of business. Unfortunately people who will not speak up out of fear are toxic to company culture. The creative process is immediately destroyed when people need to second guess everything they say or do since it is impossible to know if you are about to say the wrong thin…

You are conflating respect with a lack of conflict. This mistake allows you to pretend that "respect" consists solely of being nice, never putting anything down, and generally being ineffective. > If someone can not tolerate cynical and sarcastic comments they need to be removed quickly. This is very different from mean spirited put downs and intentionally hurtful comments. If somebody belives that cynical comments a…

[deleted]

Re: HN comments are underrated

#303

Post by nickpsecurity »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #275
nickpsecurity wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been formalized past that into the COST methodology of assessing distribution solutions: Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread. If that configuration doesn't exist, just ditch the solution in favor of a single thread. :) http://www.frankmcsherry.org/assets/COST.pdf http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... It just gets more hilarious the more you read the measurements of all these…

A single thread frequently has less code: less code means less code being executed. This is a contributing factor to speed. The less instructions you have to execute, the faster it runs, give or take. Not that instructions executed do not necessarily correlate to code size (a loop is only written once, but executed many times). By the way, bane responded to my original post: it's worth reading.

His response just loaded on my end for some reason. Yeah, that's the points I was getting from his longer write-up. If you see him redo it & I'm not there, definitely ping me so I can see the future copy.

We were actually both in the best example I've seen of this effect on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12472905

It's the kind of title that, if proven in resulting article, should make many people pause to think about how effectively they're solving business problems.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#304

Post by gist »

atmosx wrote: post #282
pavlov wrote: post #255

I second Dan's advice of blogging more. I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case stud…

> I'm a very average HN commenter. An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator. I think that you just used the best tool for the job . That doesn't really mean anything about comments. You read what I consider low level comments and high level comments on technical and social subjects from the SAME nickname all the time at HN.

> An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I don't know if that is true. I had an equally high comment number and I reset it. My feeling is that there are others that do that as well.

You can get upvotes any number of ways [1] putting out correct and admirable info is only one of them.

Likewise you can loose karma by simply mentioning a third rail issue or not fawning when the community (on a particular post) [2] is fawning.

[1] For example I tend to upvote the parent threads of my comments. That way my comment has a better chance of being seen is my theory. (Doesn't matter if I am correct since I am pointing out what I do and it's reasonable to think that others might do the same.)

[2] And this is important. You can say the same type of thing on one comment thread and be downvoted but be upvoted on another.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#305

Post by veddox »

tedmiston wrote: post #264
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.

YC has something like this in the Monday Morning Macro newsletter [1] called "Top Posts on Hacker News". I think it's a combination of highly voted comments and ones referred by other users that found them insightful. Interestingly the links to comments don't seem to be published anywhere on the website, unlike everything else in the email. [1]: http://www.themacro.com/

Thanks for the link, unfortunately, I was unable to find the section you mention...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#306

Post by ghaff »

mratzloff wrote: post #280
ghaff wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical and sarcastic seem to be two rather different things to me. Constructive criticism is certainly important in all sorts of contexts. You don't want to be all "Oh that's perfect" when in fact it's fundamentally flawed in some way. Sarcastic is more a matter of style than substance. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." Which doesn't seem necessary or necessarily positive.

That's not sarcasm.

Sarcasm does not need to be ironic. From Wikipedia: Sarcasm is "a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although sarcasm is not necessarily ironic.

In any case, saying instead: "Oh yeah, that's a fucking brilliant idea" doesn't seem clearly better in my book.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#307

Post by dang »

wfeui3 wrote: post #71

I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology for fraction of price. And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees. But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every year.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773066 and marked it off-topic.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#308

Post by pavlov »

atmosx wrote: post #282
pavlov wrote: post #255

I second Dan's advice of blogging more. I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case stud…

> I'm a very average HN commenter. An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator. I think that you just used the best tool for the job . That doesn't really mean anything about comments. You read what I consider low level comments and high level comments on technical and social subjects from the SAME nickname all the time at HN.

I've been on the site since 2008 IIRC, so I've had plenty of time to accumulate karma.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#309

Post by veddox »

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 just dug a little into the HN API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API). Unfortunately, they don't publish comment ratings... :-( Unless that is changed, implementing an automatic "best comment finder" would become rather more tedious... (And perhaps even turn out to be AI complete ;-) )

Re: HN comments are underrated

#310

Post by dang »

internaut wrote: post #56

It's not complicated, just hard to digest. Anti-white racism. It's identical to the antisemitism of the far right in the 30s and 40s, except it is with whites.

You've been posting reams of comments on classic flamewar topics. That's emphatically not what HN is for, and it degrades the quality of discussion here, so please stop.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773182 and marked it off-topic.

Post reply on HN