361–370 of 383 posts
Yet another human bemoaning the fact that when myriad humans randomly get together on the internet, some folks are clueless, some folks are not nice, some folks write poorly, etc. There are things that can be done to improve online discussion. But expecting everyone to be equally knowledgeable, savvy, etc is simply not a reasonable expectation.
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.
Dan Luu has an about page and a LinkedIn page, but he's not a mega-celebrity or Chief Architect of Google or some such - he's mostly a guy with an uncommon-but-useful mix of backgrounds who writes well.
I agree that there was a major change in moderation 1-2 years ago. But I think it's worse rather than better. The moderation is more arbitrary and capricious now (in particular it's a lot more active during the hours when the US is awake), and there are a lot of positive-but-contentless fluff comments and even humour, both of which are inimical to what made HN great.
HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too. It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, 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, and sometimes talk with the guy who…
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…
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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.
One speaks to a child with kindness, politeness, and respect. If you're looking to fill your team with people who don't want to be treated in those ways, that sounds to me like a pretty broken team.
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My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise. This is because the very act of writing a comment, be it laden with misconceptions, causes its author to think , at least a little. Also reading different points of view helps people to identify common misconceptions and to make up their min…
"My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise." What little, empirical evidence we have on these things shows the opposite: misinformation spreads more rapidly with less likelihood of being countered than accurate information. Facebook and others have done studies to show that. It would…
The increasing majority of us don't expect any but a fraction of comments to be good. (This applies to research articles too. Sturgeon's Law.) They are like unrefined ore. Which is why we need as many as possible. Misconceptions are dangerous but they are less dangerous when brought into the light where they can be identified and corrected.
It's true that misinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly but, crucially, so does the correction of error, especially older and more parochial errors, which may even need to spread a bit before this can happen.
Look at places where people don't have access to the internet and you won't find an abundance of true information. Rather you'll find much less information together with cruder and more parochial misinformation such as ideas about witches and evil spirits.
So I don't think we need to worry too much about the quality of information in the comment section or any frontier of knowledge. It's mostly wrong. What is of more concern is how to guard and improve the conditions under which knowledge grows, beyond what we've already learnt (such as expelling trolls, discouraging politics, fluff).
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"My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise." What little, empirical evidence we have on these things shows the opposite: misinformation spreads more rapidly with less likelihood of being countered than accurate information. Facebook and others have done studies to show that. It would…
I don't think 'doing solid research' is what comments are about or should be about: that's what the articles are for. Comments are more like what goes on with coffee after the research presentation. They're about saying what you think, asking questions, correcting other comments, correcting the article, pointing to other articles. The mere act of writing causes ideas to be clarified. The increasing majority of us don…
I would like that to be the default approach to how comments are handled. It's pretty much what we're doing here. On a lot of social media especially, it's done differently where they're spreading what they believe is the truth to get others to believe it. It's often reposted by many of those others. Further, I've seen polls showing most people on left and right are getting their news from social media and websites these days. These comments and shares reinforce the echo chambers they're in where they hit them before the corporate media does.
"It's true that misinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly but, crucially, so does the correction of error, especially older and more parochial errors, which may even need to spread a bit before this can happen."
Facebook's studies found the opposite: misinformation spreads far and wide while retractions happened for under half of it. I think it was in 30-40% range. Misinformation outperforms corrections on the Internet. That wasn't as much a problem in the early days but not people are trusting misinformation more because it often looks legit and comes from friends. Instead of lies, it's often just selective presentation of the truth where other information is filtered out. That's why it's more effective.
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I'm around a quarter through that thread which I missed previously cuz this dude bought an Ubuntu Dell that lasted 8 years. So, the situation seems to be they intentionally changed BIOS setting to not allow alternatives to their proprietary image or something like that. A lock-in technique in an industry that's had one after another exposed going back over a decade. So, what is going on the thread posits. Let me go t…
I'm not arguing about the voting scheme, and it's impossible to reconstruct what that thread looked like while it was active. It's also not about Microsoft's shady business deals, as the whole thing was about crazy (and dumb) firmware things that Lenovo did. The claim was that the whole thing was due to a secret deal with Microsoft, and the only evidence (apart from historical crap that MS pulled) was a community sup…
Most of those suck but two are OK since they indicate a history of sneaky behavior. This could help readers wondering if this is merely a hiccup or part of a recurring problem that justifies switching vendors. This particular company puts quite a bit of effort into things that negatively impact some of its users to boost profits. Some companies do less of that. For those users, at least two of these comments like a few I found before would justify switching away from Lenovo regardless of what their motivations were.
"The claim was that the whole thing was due to a secret deal with Microsoft, and the only evidence (apart from historical crap that MS pulled) was a community support guy's post."
What I saw was a claim that the problem effectively blocked an install of anything but the OEM version of Windows. Microsoft negotiated secret deals to do that in the past. They also publicly pulled it with Vista and a recent one. So, that's how you partly test the Microsoft hypothesis. Was the only working image available only the latest version of Windows that Microsoft was pushing? Did it lock you in?
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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 th…
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 want to start blogging, but I'm concerned about giving control of my content to a third party. At the same time, I can't be bothered to register my own domain (mainly due to the herculean task of finding a decent name).