71–80 of 383 posts
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.
I follow many people on twitter who dislike HN. Reason for this is opinions here are alsmost entirely from white males with money.
If this were true, it would merit study. How can a forum that is open to all and used in mostly anonymous fashion, so effectively police the race of users? And how could other less open less anonymous activities hope to succeed in diversity?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster". And you see a lot of xkcd 927 and "I can't help thinking effort would have been better spent on an existing project" when someone writes any program of any type where other examples exist.
I only post a 927 when there are >6 different standards in the field, and there's no way a new one will catch on. As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those. Instead post about how great emacs is compared to vim: you're more likely to spawn useful discussion.
> Most of the negative things you hear about HN comments are true.
I think it is interesting how the relatively anonymised nature of the internet has a similar effect on people of all stripes. HN readers, I believe, are among the more intelligent, or at least curious, in our species. The same is true of another popular internet forum, Stackoverflow. Yet there exists an air of negativity that is of much higher ubiquity than in "real" life where people are not anonymous. And this is true of most other internet forums as well where more of the general popular participates. I think it shows in a strange way that people just have a lot of negativity to vent, and the internet has made that really easy and without consequence to the rest of one's life, and that this remains true regardless of one's interests and general intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only post a 927 when there are >6 different standards in the field, and there's no way a new one will catch on. As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those. Instead post about how great emacs is compared to vim: you're more likely to spawn useful discussion.
I think that it's interesting that there is an etiquette developing on when which XKCD is appropriate.
When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those projects had more upvotes. The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users reduced the quality of judgement. So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN. I also suspect that early com…
I've been on this website for quite some time and I don't honestly care about "Show HN" links. I mean, I wish the submitters all the best in the world, it's just that I'm not visiting HN in order to see who is gonna get funding or not in a year or two, I visit HN for interesting links and some interesting comments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go…
You also find a whole lot of echo chambers, fanboys and wannabe-intellectualism. This because anyone can set up a sub-reddit, and thus also moderate them.
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'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 If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go…
Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics.
It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the incentive here lately has been to discredit or silence (bury) comments from anybody whose opinion points out something like: yeah -- Airbnb's "business model" might be creating way more more problems than it's claiming to solve. Or that collusion in and among YC-funded companies might (or maybe should) yield some Antitrust issues. The tech commentary can be pretty good, and there are plenty of active HNers whose opinions I respect. However, it is leaning heavy on becoming selection-biased and just plain mean to anybody with an original idea.
When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those projects had more upvotes. The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users reduced the quality of judgement. So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the user's tenure on HN. I also suspect that early com…
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…
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.