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HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#311

Post by tedmiston »

veddox wrote: post #305
tedmiston wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's not actually listed on the website anywhere, but it is in the email newsletter every Monday.

For example, this is what they chose for last week's:

> Top Posts on Hacker News

• How I built a keyboard by hand

• The Hard Raise

• Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?

• Statistical Machine Learning, Spring 2016

• Yarn – A new package manager for JavaScript

• Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

• Windows 93 (2014)

• Say Cheese: a snapshot of the massive DDoS attacks coming from IoT cameras

• Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

• So You Want to Learn Physics

• Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions

• Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

• It’s Been Real, Android: Why I’m Retiring from Android

• Taking PHP Seriously

• Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

• Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?

• Be Kind

• A Man Who Stood Up To Facebook

• Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?

• Becoming a CTO

• Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)

• Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?

• Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 10: New boards, running programs, mouse problems

• Walmart Paid Its People More to Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales

• What has happened down here is the winds have changed

• Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013)

• Programming books you might want to consider reading

Re: HN comments are underrated

#312

Post by sideproject »

I absolutely love comments on HN and they are probably the main reason I read this site a lot. Some times, the posts themselves are quite self-explanatory from the title and I just go straight to the discussions.

I created a little site called HackerNews Club

http://hackernews.club

Where you can easily search for user's submissions and comments. FYI, here's Dan's comments :)

http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01f172df6d183c59633c...

And HN users ordered by the number of comments they have made.

http://hackernews.club/#search/39a2159841122c713bf4324d6f9de...

Re: HN comments are underrated

#313

Post by jeff_petersen »

50CNT wrote: post #80
berntb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. And sad. But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is. (One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( ) EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won…

My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made. His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem. Eh, who knows.

> His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors"

...and if it is a major article, there are definitely errors, some likely introduced on purpose[1] (since major articles are the juiciest targets)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ravpapa/Tilt

Re: HN comments are underrated

#314

Post by type0 »

david-given wrote: post #273
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 completely agree. In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven years later it's still one of the most popular pages on my website, although luckily it's been eclipsed by better content. If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015 ) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Whi…

> If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I think everyone feels like that sometimes when writing long comment, the problem is all the mental burden that comes with trying to structure a blog post. Another thing is that a blog needs to have a theme or be subject specific otherwise it drowns in the oceans of interwebs.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#315

Post by NeutronBoy »

tedmiston wrote: post #269
veddox wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point. That is such a good idea it has actually been integral to HN for, oh, I don't know, a pretty long time... From the FAQ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ): ''' How is a user's karma calculated? Roughly, the number of upvotes on their stories and comments minus the number of downvotes. The numbers don't match up exactly…

This is what Stack Overflow does. Since it "hurts" their own karma, people downvote less. One implication of that is that when threads stay at zero, it can be hard to differentiate the reason why. Sometimes it's just that the question is well written but obscure.

> Since it "hurts" their own karma, people downvote less.

Yes, so they just vote to close the question instead.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#316

Post by Mz »

pavlov wrote: post #297

On second read, I'm not sure I agree with the first paragraphs of Dan's post at all. He seems to be saying that HN is terrible, but a handful of comments from star posters rise above the muck. I just don't think that's fair. Yes, the cliché is that HN is a place full of mean, entitled semi-autists who will criticize your site's CSS whitespace formatting when you ask for business feedback... And of course there's a gr…

Comment moved, per request.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#317

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #303
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Ah, I remember that. To paraphrase myself at the time, "never send a 747 to do a racecar's job."

Yeah, as it turns out, it's not a good idea to use a piece of software optimized for workloads to large to even be handled by a single machine on large quantities of data, and maybe you should use tools designed for small workloads (Gigabytes, or even Terabytes, is pretty small, nowadays) for small workloads. This should be obvious.

Besides, things like Manta exist, so you can scale up your small workload scripts to larger workloads in the future. Mind, I don't know if I trust Manta yet (I don't know the perf, and I haven't tried it personally), so maybe exercise a little bit of caution about going that route.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#318

Post by lucb1e »

Mz wrote: post #316
pavlov wrote: post #297

On second read, I'm not sure I agree with the first paragraphs of Dan's post at all. He seems to be saying that HN is terrible, but a handful of comments from star posters rise above the muck. I just don't think that's fair. Yes, the cliché is that HN is a place full of mean, entitled semi-autists who will criticize your site's CSS whitespace formatting when you ask for business feedback... And of course there's a gr…

Comment moved, per request.

Is there any reason why you replied to a comment instead of responding to the article? Because as a sub it has little added value to the parent, but as a top level comment I would have liked to see it as the #1 comment.

Edit: for the record, it moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775905

Re: HN comments are underrated

#319

Post by phs318u »

sideproject wrote: post #312

I absolutely love comments on HN and they are probably the main reason I read this site a lot. Some times, the posts themselves are quite self-explanatory from the title and I just go straight to the discussions. I created a little site called HackerNews Club http://hackernews.club Where you can easily search for user's submissions and comments. FYI, here's Dan's comments :) http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01…

Seconded. I too love HN comments. Overall, my perception is that HN has reasonably non-clickbaity articles with a good blend of tech and non-tech. The comments I find largely pertinent, overwhelmingly constructively critical, with FAR fewer trolls, flames and biased voting than any other public forum on the internet I've ever come across since the original Usenet days. In fact, it reminds me very much of good ol' Compuserve (there's nothing like having to pay REAL money for a subscription to curb bad behaviour).

Re: HN comments are underrated

#320

Post by [deleted] »

rhizome wrote: post #286
me34llama wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't this essentially a tone argument?

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