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I have to agree, if I wanted to write Wikipedia I would write for Wikipedia. This is a comment thread.

by tomc1985 9y ago

skybrian 9y ago
Hacker News isn't like other places though. There doesn't seem to be an official rule about jokes [1] but they generally get voted down. In a world filled with fake news, a tradition of posting at least one link might be a good thing? (Unless it's personal experience, which is useful in itself.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Yes it is. Don't kid yourself thinking that we are a class above Reddit or something. This burden of research that some impose upon others is bullshit. If one is intellectually omnivorous they do not keep links of all their findings handy, it is simply not possible. This incessant wailing for citations is an activity fit for gutter-snipes, not productive software engineers.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    Why shouldn't we try to do better than most parts of Reddit? I don't mean Ask Historians [1] level discussion, but posting a relevant link is not hard. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
    - saurik 9y ago
      Nor is doing a quick search on Google to see if you can find citations yourself. The fact that this took me about two minutes to find should frankly make you feel ashamed at your insistence that everyone provide citations for everything you don't know anything about: this is you being intellectually lazy :/. > But rather than admit this truth and risk being accused of failure or, worse still, denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, local party bosses fiddled the figures they sent to the central authorities. > They curried favour by vying with each other to increase their targets of food production to ludicrous and entirely fictional levels. Then they lied that they had not only met but exceeded them. > On paper, China was bursting with food of every type. The people’s bellies were full. Poverty and want had been eradicated. > In reality, as the notional, non-existent surpluses were commandeered to feed the industrial workers in the cities, vast areas of China were left with a fraction of the sustenance needed to survive. > In one province, the grain harvest shrank from 82,000 tonnes in 1957 to 18,000 tonnes three years later. Yet the local party boss still reported a bumper harvest of 130,000 tonnes. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-starved-60-million-death-Devastating-book-reveals-Maos-megalomania-turned-China-madhouse.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-starv... "Madman who starved 60million to death: Devastating book reveals how Mao's megalomania turned China into a madhouse" Clearly it would be better to cite the book (which I can't easily, as not all knowledge can be hyperlinked), or a higher-quality secondary source, but this is definitely sufficient enough to put the onus firmly on you to cite why you are so resistant to this thought process. Some tips, if the issue is that you don't know how to do research: You might try searching for the title of the book, which might find you some more reviews, and you might find some which disagree and essentially write a "rebuttal". You might also can try to search for those specific numbers in the final paragraph I quoted from this article.
      - skybrian 9y ago
        Thanks for the link! However, your accusations that I don't know how to do research are unfounded. I'm also not at all ashamed to keep doing something I usually do and recommend it to others. As you say, it usually takes only a couple minutes to do, so why not? If it's a subject I know (and I'm therefore commenting about) then I generally find it pretty easy to find a reliable link.

I have to agree, if I wanted to write Wikipedia I would write for Wikipedia. This is a comment thread.

Hacker News isn't like other places though. There doesn't seem to be an official rule about jokes [1] but they generally get voted down. In a world filled with fake news, a tradition of posting at least one link might be a good thing? (Unless it's personal experience, which is useful in itself.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tomc1985 9y ago
Yes it is. Don't kid yourself thinking that we are a class above Reddit or something. This burden of research that some impose upon others is bullshit. If one is intellectually omnivorous they do not keep links of all their findings handy, it is simply not possible. This incessant wailing for citations is an activity fit for gutter-snipes, not productive software engineers.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Why shouldn't we try to do better than most parts of Reddit? I don't mean Ask Historians [1] level discussion, but posting a relevant link is not hard. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
  - saurik 9y ago
    Nor is doing a quick search on Google to see if you can find citations yourself. The fact that this took me about two minutes to find should frankly make you feel ashamed at your insistence that everyone provide citations for everything you don't know anything about: this is you being intellectually lazy :/. > But rather than admit this truth and risk being accused of failure or, worse still, denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, local party bosses fiddled the figures they sent to the central authorities. > They curried favour by vying with each other to increase their targets of food production to ludicrous and entirely fictional levels. Then they lied that they had not only met but exceeded them. > On paper, China was bursting with food of every type. The people’s bellies were full. Poverty and want had been eradicated. > In reality, as the notional, non-existent surpluses were commandeered to feed the industrial workers in the cities, vast areas of China were left with a fraction of the sustenance needed to survive. > In one province, the grain harvest shrank from 82,000 tonnes in 1957 to 18,000 tonnes three years later. Yet the local party boss still reported a bumper harvest of 130,000 tonnes. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-starved-60-million-death-Devastating-book-reveals-Maos-megalomania-turned-China-madhouse.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017839/Madman-starv... "Madman who starved 60million to death: Devastating book reveals how Mao's megalomania turned China into a madhouse" Clearly it would be better to cite the book (which I can't easily, as not all knowledge can be hyperlinked), or a higher-quality secondary source, but this is definitely sufficient enough to put the onus firmly on you to cite why you are so resistant to this thought process. Some tips, if the issue is that you don't know how to do research: You might try searching for the title of the book, which might find you some more reviews, and you might find some which disagree and essentially write a "rebuttal". You might also can try to search for those specific numbers in the final paragraph I quoted from this article.
    - skybrian 9y ago
      Thanks for the link! However, your accusations that I don't know how to do research are unfounded. I'm also not at all ashamed to keep doing something I usually do and recommend it to others. As you say, it usually takes only a couple minutes to do, so why not? If it's a subject I know (and I'm therefore commenting about) then I generally find it pretty easy to find a reliable link.