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HN: The Good Parts (2016)

danluu.com

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Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#71

Post by dang »

ryandrake wrote: post #25

> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars. If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: https://news.ycombinator.com/active This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussio…

That is a bad sign. Someone who's only interested in the most overheated discussions and doesn't want to look at the front page is not using HN in the intended spirit of curiosity.

The intended use of HN is to run across things that one isn't already familiar with, not to argue about the same small number of hot topics over and over. People who want to do that should find a site that wants them to do that.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#72

Post by dang »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #59
dkarras wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I come here to read opinions of intelligent / informed people who disagree with me. I even subtly and respectfully try to rile them up sometimes to see what they have to offer.

I have found that the best way to get correct information is to confidently state incorrect information.

That's Cunningham's Law. But please don't do it on purpose. That would make for worse discussion overall.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#73

Post by dang »

PaulHoule wrote: post #24

Ranking 'quality' is tough because it has multiple dimensions and aggregating multiple kinds of utility is problematic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... developing a good ranking function for bag-of-words full text search is about carefully balancing the attraction of larger vs smaller documents in the collection. If you try to aggregate several bad search engines you get a bad sear…

What was the review paper?

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#74

Post by krapp »

ryandrake wrote: post #25

> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars. If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: https://news.ycombinator.com/active This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussio…

Conversely, if you like stories that could generate good discussion but never got traction, the second chance pool is now open to the public. [0,1]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#75

Post by ryandrake »

dang wrote: post #71
ryandrake wrote: post #25

> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars. If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: https://news.ycombinator.com/active This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussio…

That is a bad sign. Someone who's only interested in the most overheated discussions and doesn't want to look at the front page is not using HN in the intended spirit of curiosity. The intended use of HN is to run across things that one isn't already familiar with, not to argue about the same small number of hot topics over and over. People who want to do that should find a site that wants them to do that.

Different strokes for different folks. I'm glad HN offers both views! I personally think the flamewar-detector, while useful for keeping a good signal-to-noise ratio, is too sensitive and browsing /active lets you find things you would have only seen if you are one of those readers who refresh / every 5 minutes. Plus, there are only so many "Obscure Tool Rewritten In Rust" articles I can take :)

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#76

Post by the_af »

lewispollard wrote: post #22

HN comments, by and large, are extremely polite, and people are open to discussion, criticism, etc without resorting to insults, in my experience. I don't really see the sort of complaints brought up in the post here, well, ever, outside of the rare ghostly, semi-transparent comments that have already been flagged or filtered. You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how n…

> You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how nice and non-combative it is here

Let me offer a counterpoint (I'm glad you didn't mention Twitter, because I'd have to really agree that Twitter is a Hate Machine. And I'll grant you YouTube as well, to a lesser degree): I use facebook mostly for its closed, special interest groups. For each of these groups, which are relatively civil -- until there's the occasional namecalling flamewar and some people get expelled -- the most common assertion is by far something of this kind: "why, this is the best group about $SUBJECT, people here are so nice and civil and I haven't found a group like this one anywhere on the net!". If you belong to a couple of groups on facebook, you'll see this repeated in every one of them, each of these groups oblivious to the existence of other, similar or possibly nicer groups, each selectively forgetting the most recent fight.

I think some degree of this phenomenon is at play here on HN, too.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#77

Post by dang »

ryandrake wrote: post #75
dang wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a bad sign. Someone who's only interested in the most overheated discussions and doesn't want to look at the front page is not using HN in the intended spirit of curiosity. The intended use of HN is to run across things that one isn't already familiar with, not to argue about the same small number of hot topics over and over. People who want to do that should find a site that wants them to do that.

Different strokes for different folks. I'm glad HN offers both views! I personally think the flamewar-detector, while useful for keeping a good signal-to-noise ratio, is too sensitive and browsing /active lets you find things you would have only seen if you are one of those readers who refresh / every 5 minutes. Plus, there are only so many "Obscure Tool Rewritten In Rust" articles I can take :)

> there are only so many "Obscure Tool Rewritten In Rust" articles I can take

Yup, that's an issue for sure.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#78

Post by lifeisstillgood »

PaulHoule wrote: post #42
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #30

I like the idea of preserving the best comments as some form of blog. TheBestOfHN.com might be worth starting up by just compiling all comments with > 200 karma?

Those scores are not so interesting by themselves in that they were calculated based on votes at the time and aren't meant for comparing comments on different articles. (The top comment on a high-scoring article will automatically beat the top comment on a low-scoring article) I would rather like to see what Dan did scaled up 1000x or so: that is, have experts pick out a few of the best comments over the very long te…

is this actually feasible - if we push it beyond HN then it becomes trying to crowd source wisdom or deep expertise across human experience. The Anti-Social-Media-Algorithm?

This sounds ... tempting...

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#79

Post by PaulHoule »

dang wrote: post #73
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

Ranking 'quality' is tough because it has multiple dimensions and aggregating multiple kinds of utility is problematic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... developing a good ranking function for bag-of-words full text search is about carefully balancing the attraction of larger vs smaller documents in the collection. If you try to aggregate several bad search engines you get a bad sear…

What was the review paper?

actually it is this book

http://istl.org/06-summer/review1.html

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#80

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

dang wrote: post #72
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that the best way to get correct information is to confidently state incorrect information.

That's Cunningham's Law. But please don't do it on purpose. That would make for worse discussion overall.

:)

Not to worry. I do it fine, by accident...

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