9 ms·

You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem over

by pg 16y ago

You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top.

neilk 16y ago
> If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top This should be a preference. Ego-boosting sort.
- abp 16y ago
  Sort of anti-learning, pro-ego comment reading? :D
  - shadowfox 16y ago
    On some days you want to be the wind shield. on other days the bug ;)
- DanielRibeiro 16y ago
  I'd also suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer (http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer, written by @pragdave) and the The Passionate Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer). People who are passionate about what they do have a tendency to stand out (pg makes a similar argument on Amateur section of http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html). If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then.
  - abp 16y ago
    If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then. I sometimes feel like I'm dragged into too many directions at the same time. Damn interest. But that's it. I love to spin, reading about 3 or 4 frameworks in 2 or 3 languages serially until I feel something like information satisfaction or I'm getting tired. I think I actually need the diversity of information. Sort of brain stimulation through information overflow. ;) But it works. Diversity is very good for the brain, i think it's irrelevant in wich form. And when you're talking about pragprog: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear... My favourite pragprog book so far.
Locke1689 16y ago
Also remember that in the comments you'll get a heavy selection bias. I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on ;)
- statictype 16y ago
  I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on See, its comments like this that make the OP and others feel bad :)
Terry_B 16y ago
My wife has the occasional habit of cherry picking the best bits of all of our friends/acquaintances lives, combining them into one and using that as the yardstick as to how we are doing. She'd be the first to admit this btw:)
- betterlabs 16y ago
  Like wives tend to want the best qualities of all their friends' husbands all rolled into theirs :)
  - hrabago 16y ago
    To be fair, we want the same thing in return, while trying to get by with the minimum effort exerted by the other husbands.
- donw 16y ago
  Has she purchased any Old Spice for you recently, by chance...?
  - gruseom 16y ago
    Ha. Here we have the rarest of local species: a Reddit-style one-liner that merits an upvote here.
photon_off 16y ago
While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comments are awesome. I suppose I can accept the fact that the majority of people don't represent anything to get flustered about. However, there are people way more talented than me, doing much more important-seeming (that is to say, things that are getting more attention) things, and in general just being more successful than I. I truly mean it when I say "good for them," but it eats away at me. Quarter-life crisis I suppose. I was on this site as a different name over a year ago and have recently returned. I can tell you that I noticed a pretty significant difference in the quality of users now on this site. There are more low/medium quality comments, and the quips aren't as clever. What's more concerning is the upvote counts on those comments... That being said, there's no other place I'd rather be.
- galois 16y ago
  What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up? I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on and on. Most people I know with real talent feel similarly about HN. Heck, I even know YC guys who feel this way about it.
  - chitabox 16y ago
    Ignore post's questioning your talent, If you've been on HN long enough, you'll know where you stand in terms of talent in the LAMP world. Talking of talent, ping me on duxy786 at google's mail and maybe we can work together!
  - photon_off 16y ago
    I cannot know whether or not you would qualify my abilities as "talent". The way you've constructed your response leads me to believe that if I told you I won the Nobel Prize in Javascript, you'd list stupid things that Nobel Prize winners have done. Even if this site is mostly "talentless wantrepreneurial pundits," which has some truth to it, you're not the slightest bit overwhelmed at the amount of high quality information here?
resdirector 16y ago
I think HN has enough upvote/downvote data for all its users such that it could be feeding us articles based on our voting history and the voting history of people similar to us (non-trivial problem, of course). I think it's possible to build a news-site that feeds, say the OP, a news feed that he is 'comfortable with'. In a more general sense, news sites like HN that use up/down are 'dumb' in the sense that they make a crude (but reasonable) approximation to what each individual wants via a simple[1] summation of what the group wants. [1] unless I'm mistaken
- Zak 16y ago
  I think reddit tried to do exactly that a while ago and didn't have much luck. It may have been smaller than HN at the time, but I think they kept trying for quite a while.
  - resdirector 16y ago
    Interesting, do you, or anyone else know why they didn't succeed? Maybe user-created groups (i.e., subreddits) was simpler and effective.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- pixelbath 16y ago
  I wouldn't feel comfortable with this, as it would destroy the amount of discovery I do on HN. Not all of the articles are within my technical experience, and some I only barely understand, but I find some seriously mind-blowing things out there. To the OP...yes. I'm constantly impressed with those who have not only the knowledge and skills, but the sheer drive to build and run a successful startup. Even if I had some crazy-awesome idea that had almost no chance of failure (just as an example), the notion of just...picking up and doing my own thing is a very scary thing to do. I've been job with income stability for so long that the idea of going it on my own scares the hell out of me.
sushrutbidwai 16y ago
Also to add to what pg said - http://sushrutbidwai.com/?p=232 http://sushrutbidwai.com/?p=232 Remember the tools that you had at your disposal and some one else. Dont get overwhelmed by what others have achieved or seems to have achieved.
rkalla 16y ago
I just typed up a reply and realized pg's suggestion of reading bottom-to-top is an excellent idea. It's like only reading Nobel-prize-winning publications and then complaining you feel dumb...
Alex3917 16y ago
"If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases." I'd rather trade ten smart people for one person who ships.
- spudlyo 16y ago
  Amen. I know a guy who is an extremely talented programmer, but for a number of reasons currently has a very poor work ethic. While he is able to be considerably more productive than a number of his lesser clued co-workers, he isn't.
  - znull 16y ago
    And why do you think that is? I've seen too many situations where the reward for being more productive than lesser-clued co-workers was a greater share of grief and stress.
    - spudlyo 16y ago
      Well in his case it's because he's obsessed with finding the shortest possible solutions to the more difficult levels in the puzzle game Fish Fillets. He's recently rewritten the game's undo/redo system to help him in this. Sometimes people, even smart people, are unproductive for the usual reasons -- they're lazy/unmotivated or simply just goofing off.
- da5e 16y ago
  Those smart people can also give you more ideas for things to ship.
noodle 16y ago
how about hacker news gold, with a special restricted-access area only? ;) a bit more seriously, are there any plans to increase the number of karma-locked features? if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them.
- patrickk 16y ago
  "if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them." I find that I carefully word what I write on HN by default. That is the 'culture' of the site. I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. Of course, there are raging dicks everywhere, and people being people will sometimes go off on a tangent. If there was a 'quality of comments' scale, YouTube would probably be near the bottom (just go onto some sorry excuse for a music video and read some spam and inspired fan comments), and HN near the top.
  - noodle 16y ago
    > I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. perhaps, for now. but if PG's concerns are valid, then it may be the case that this will change. alternatively, consider it a functional way to reinforce the culture.
    - pixelbath 16y ago
      I doubt the comments here would ever descend to near YouTube levels. For one, trolls on this site are mercilessly modded into the negative, and quickly. The last time I tried to make a snarky comment just for the sake of snark, it got downmodded so fast that I just deleted it. This same comment would probably have hundreds of thumbs up on YouTube by now. I changed all of my videos to moderated comments on YouTube, and I still receive completely inane ones every day, along with "thumbs up if ____" comments. These, again, would be modded into oblivion here. Maybe I'm one of the unwelcome newbies that are changing this site for the worse (as I'm not involved in a startup), but I don't think this culture has anything to fear as far as quality dilution goes. Noisy, sure, but still high quality.
pinneycolton 16y ago
You should also remember that a lot of the time, you're reading about efforts that take teams of extremely bright individuals to make successful. Sure, there's the occasional lone gunman out there, but two brains are almost always better than one. In fact, in my own experience, I have found it is very difficult for one person (me) to be amazing at all the different things needed to make an idea successful. I'm pretty amazing, but not superman! ;)
karlzt 16y ago
>>my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. if it worries you so much, why don't you try to make it less popular? eg. by blocking all popular search engines.

by pg 16y ago

neilk 16y ago

> If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top This should be a preference. Ego-boosting sort.

abp 16y ago
Sort of anti-learning, pro-ego comment reading? :D
- shadowfox 16y ago
  On some days you want to be the wind shield. on other days the bug ;)
DanielRibeiro 16y ago
I'd also suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer (http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer, written by @pragdave) and the The Passionate Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer). People who are passionate about what they do have a tendency to stand out (pg makes a similar argument on Amateur section of http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html). If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then.
- abp 16y ago
  If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then. I sometimes feel like I'm dragged into too many directions at the same time. Damn interest. But that's it. I love to spin, reading about 3 or 4 frameworks in 2 or 3 languages serially until I feel something like information satisfaction or I'm getting tired. I think I actually need the diversity of information. Sort of brain stimulation through information overflow. ;) But it works. Diversity is very good for the brain, i think it's irrelevant in wich form. And when you're talking about pragprog: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear... My favourite pragprog book so far.

Locke1689 16y ago

Also remember that in the comments you'll get a heavy selection bias. I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on ;)

statictype 16y ago
I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on See, its comments like this that make the OP and others feel bad :)

Terry_B 16y ago

My wife has the occasional habit of cherry picking the best bits of all of our friends/acquaintances lives, combining them into one and using that as the yardstick as to how we are doing. She'd be the first to admit this btw:)

betterlabs 16y ago
Like wives tend to want the best qualities of all their friends' husbands all rolled into theirs :)
- hrabago 16y ago
  To be fair, we want the same thing in return, while trying to get by with the minimum effort exerted by the other husbands.
donw 16y ago
Has she purchased any Old Spice for you recently, by chance...?
- gruseom 16y ago
  Ha. Here we have the rarest of local species: a Reddit-style one-liner that merits an upvote here.

photon_off 16y ago

While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comments are awesome. I suppose I can accept the fact that the majority of people don't represent anything to get flustered about. However, there are people way more talented than me, doing much more important-seeming (that is to say, things that are getting more attention) things, and in general just being more successful than I. I truly mean it when I say "good for them," but it eats away at me. Quarter-life crisis I suppose. I was on this site as a different name over a year ago and have recently returned. I can tell you that I noticed a pretty significant difference in the quality of users now on this site. There are more low/medium quality comments, and the quips aren't as clever. What's more concerning is the upvote counts on those comments... That being said, there's no other place I'd rather be.

galois 16y ago
What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up? I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on and on. Most people I know with real talent feel similarly about HN. Heck, I even know YC guys who feel this way about it.
- chitabox 16y ago
  Ignore post's questioning your talent, If you've been on HN long enough, you'll know where you stand in terms of talent in the LAMP world. Talking of talent, ping me on duxy786 at google's mail and maybe we can work together!
- photon_off 16y ago
  I cannot know whether or not you would qualify my abilities as "talent". The way you've constructed your response leads me to believe that if I told you I won the Nobel Prize in Javascript, you'd list stupid things that Nobel Prize winners have done. Even if this site is mostly "talentless wantrepreneurial pundits," which has some truth to it, you're not the slightest bit overwhelmed at the amount of high quality information here?

resdirector 16y ago

I think HN has enough upvote/downvote data for all its users such that it could be feeding us articles based on our voting history and the voting history of people similar to us (non-trivial problem, of course). I think it's possible to build a news-site that feeds, say the OP, a news feed that he is 'comfortable with'. In a more general sense, news sites like HN that use up/down are 'dumb' in the sense that they make a crude (but reasonable) approximation to what each individual wants via a simple[1] summation of what the group wants. [1] unless I'm mistaken

Zak 16y ago
I think reddit tried to do exactly that a while ago and didn't have much luck. It may have been smaller than HN at the time, but I think they kept trying for quite a while.
- resdirector 16y ago
  Interesting, do you, or anyone else know why they didn't succeed? Maybe user-created groups (i.e., subreddits) was simpler and effective.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pixelbath 16y ago
I wouldn't feel comfortable with this, as it would destroy the amount of discovery I do on HN. Not all of the articles are within my technical experience, and some I only barely understand, but I find some seriously mind-blowing things out there. To the OP...yes. I'm constantly impressed with those who have not only the knowledge and skills, but the sheer drive to build and run a successful startup. Even if I had some crazy-awesome idea that had almost no chance of failure (just as an example), the notion of just...picking up and doing my own thing is a very scary thing to do. I've been job with income stability for so long that the idea of going it on my own scares the hell out of me.

sushrutbidwai 16y ago

Also to add to what pg said - http://sushrutbidwai.com/?p=232 http://sushrutbidwai.com/?p=232 Remember the tools that you had at your disposal and some one else. Dont get overwhelmed by what others have achieved or seems to have achieved.

rkalla 16y ago

I just typed up a reply and realized pg's suggestion of reading bottom-to-top is an excellent idea. It's like only reading Nobel-prize-winning publications and then complaining you feel dumb...

Alex3917 16y ago

"If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases." I'd rather trade ten smart people for one person who ships.

spudlyo 16y ago
Amen. I know a guy who is an extremely talented programmer, but for a number of reasons currently has a very poor work ethic. While he is able to be considerably more productive than a number of his lesser clued co-workers, he isn't.
- znull 16y ago
  And why do you think that is? I've seen too many situations where the reward for being more productive than lesser-clued co-workers was a greater share of grief and stress.
  - spudlyo 16y ago
    Well in his case it's because he's obsessed with finding the shortest possible solutions to the more difficult levels in the puzzle game Fish Fillets. He's recently rewritten the game's undo/redo system to help him in this. Sometimes people, even smart people, are unproductive for the usual reasons -- they're lazy/unmotivated or simply just goofing off.
da5e 16y ago
Those smart people can also give you more ideas for things to ship.

noodle 16y ago

how about hacker news gold, with a special restricted-access area only? ;) a bit more seriously, are there any plans to increase the number of karma-locked features? if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them.

patrickk 16y ago
"if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them." I find that I carefully word what I write on HN by default. That is the 'culture' of the site. I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. Of course, there are raging dicks everywhere, and people being people will sometimes go off on a tangent. If there was a 'quality of comments' scale, YouTube would probably be near the bottom (just go onto some sorry excuse for a music video and read some spam and inspired fan comments), and HN near the top.
- noodle 16y ago
  > I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. perhaps, for now. but if PG's concerns are valid, then it may be the case that this will change. alternatively, consider it a functional way to reinforce the culture.
  - pixelbath 16y ago
    I doubt the comments here would ever descend to near YouTube levels. For one, trolls on this site are mercilessly modded into the negative, and quickly. The last time I tried to make a snarky comment just for the sake of snark, it got downmodded so fast that I just deleted it. This same comment would probably have hundreds of thumbs up on YouTube by now. I changed all of my videos to moderated comments on YouTube, and I still receive completely inane ones every day, along with "thumbs up if ____" comments. These, again, would be modded into oblivion here. Maybe I'm one of the unwelcome newbies that are changing this site for the worse (as I'm not involved in a startup), but I don't think this culture has anything to fear as far as quality dilution goes. Noisy, sure, but still high quality.

pinneycolton 16y ago

You should also remember that a lot of the time, you're reading about efforts that take teams of extremely bright individuals to make successful. Sure, there's the occasional lone gunman out there, but two brains are almost always better than one. In fact, in my own experience, I have found it is very difficult for one person (me) to be amazing at all the different things needed to make an idea successful. I'm pretty amazing, but not superman! ;)

karlzt 16y ago

>>my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. if it worries you so much, why don't you try to make it less popular? eg. by blocking all popular search engines.