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HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#351

Post by qb45 »

lorenzhs wrote: post #349
lisivka wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If deal is secret, how you know?

Because you can now boot Linux on these machines. If there had been a deal, it would have failed its purpose. Occam's Razor leads me to conclude that almost certainly, there was no conspiracy. Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

> Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

Nobody said it was secret, besides you. I think it was parent's point that you are strawmanning here.

This was also the sole reason I responded to your initial post. You misrepresent people's position and then complain that what you presented is "abysmal" and "disappointing".

Re: HN comments are underrated

#352

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

LukeShu wrote: post #231
3pt14159 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that had a major drawback: it discouraged helpful replies deep in the thread. I'm glad they removed it.

It was also buggy. On several occasions, I'd post a comment that got voted several points higher than my average, but the average went down; or vice-versa.

It may have been a moving average of the last N items.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#353

Post by Tomte »

e12e wrote: post #343
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…

I always find it strange when people do that. I mean, it's a wiki - if there's an obvious, glaring error - just fix it? Then that particular article will be more correct? Wikipedia is absolutely useless as a dead book - the level of (professional) work that goes into vetting "real" encyclopedia articles is much higher - and the errors that slip through much more permanent. The great thing about Wikipedia is the poten…

No, your fix will often be reverted by those one or two authors who consider the article "theirs".

If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#354

Post by pjc50 »

jaredsohn wrote: post #326
pjc50 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep meaning to scrape my comments over the years, collate the most upvoted ones, then publish in a blog/ebook somewhere with a bit of commentary on what it appears that HN "likes". The API doesn't quite facilitate this, unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes. On HN politics, while the comments often have a substantial presence of doctrinaire libertarians, I feel that the voters skew…

> unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes. If you just want to see your comments sorted by net upvotes, use this link: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:pjc50&sort=byPopularity&pre... You can get all of your comments as JSON via this URL using a site I built: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/pjc50/json/ You can then run that data through a sort and filter to get what you want.

Thanks, that looks extremely useful.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#355

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

One day, I intend to scrape all my HN comments, and turn the best ones into blog posts (if still relevant) :-)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#356

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

Another note: A valid criticism mean the author actually took the time to read, understand and respond to your work.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#357

Post by lorenzhs »

qb45 wrote: post #351
lorenzhs wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can now boot Linux on these machines. If there had been a deal, it would have failed its purpose. Occam's Razor leads me to conclude that almost certainly, there was no conspiracy. Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

> Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a secret deal. Nobody said it was secret, besides you. I think it was parent's point that you are strawmanning here. This was also the sole reason I responded to your initial post. You misrepresent people's position and then complain that what you presented is "abysmal" and "disappointing".

That wasn't my impression reading the original submission or the comment thread. Lots of things that would adequately be explained by lack of Linux drivers and stupidity on Lenovo's side were attributed to malice and purported as fact.

Also, the source of the entire story seems to have a background of baseless accusations about vendors maliciously preventing Linux: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/778680150812536833

Re: HN comments are underrated

#358

Post by angry_octet »

DrScump wrote: post #345
angry_octet wrote: post #140

I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images. Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin ) really helped. The…

"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise..." Me, too. My presence there began in 1987. Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and a sense of community. There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the exception, not the rul…

And now top posting is the norm in email! It's so anti-electronic to do it that way, as if we were exchanging _letters_.

> Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming text unrelated to the context you were discussing

I get confusion these days if I use [snip], people think I am mutilating their email through spite or something.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#359

Post by Jaruzel »

Zero criticism here - I love danluu.com posts[1], but ...

Who is he? And why does all of his posts get massively up-voted?

Thanks in advance, from an ignorant chimp. :)

--

[1] However, a little bit of CSS sprinkled on them wouldn't go amiss - even just 'max-width' would help a lot.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#360

Post by wruza »

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…

To be honest, I practically never read posts beyond titles. If there is no tldr in comments, post was not worth it anyway.

It may seem funny, but it is a great mechanism to selectively widen knowledge without going into details everywhere.

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