Programming Is Like Sex • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#41

Post by edw519 » Fri, Feb 22, 2008, 2:03 PM UTC

boucher wrote: post #39

gscott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any article title with "sex" in it should be harder to get to the first page, also any article title with curse words. Both are instant indicators of low quality.

Curse words aren't necessarily an indicator of low quality. Plenty of cogent arguments (and plenty of great literature) have been written that included cursing.

"Plenty of great literature" Agreed

"Plenty of great arguments" Disagree. AFAIC, credibility is lost as soon as you resort to this. Many don't think like I do, but many do. Is cursing really worth losing those of us who do?

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#42

Post by dpapathanasiou » Fri, Feb 22, 2008, 2:50 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #16

ghiotion wrote: post #15

Wow. Add a few puns and one C-C-C-C-Combo Breaker, this could be a comment thread on reddit. That ain't a good thing.

Yeah, this is worrying. A crap link and a crap thread, and it's number 2. The fundamental problem on any site like this is that it's so easy to upvote lightweight stuff. When a link sounds like it's going to take a while to read, people say "maybe I'll read it later," and never do. And since they haven't read it, they don't upvote it. Whereas e.g. a cartoon people know will only take a few seconds, so they click on i…

Or I could add a downarrow on stories for users over a certain karma threshold.

Yes.

I would have certainly used it on that burger thing yesterday.

Re: Programming Is Like Sex

#43

Post by carpal » Sat, Feb 23, 2008, 1:26 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #22

ghiotion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the po…

Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting. Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

What if you did a word count of the linked article, and used that for the weight? It might be good to strip out links from the count, but other than that it seems a pretty sold way of judging complexity.