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Personally, i've always had the opposite thought to all this. Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, dis

Personally, i've always had the opposite thought to all this. Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, discuss things with them and be treated the same as them in conversation just based on the things I say? HN's always seemed like a fairly equalizing place to me. As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits. There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person.

RikNieu 6y ago
Excellent point. We get to hear from and learn from people we never have been able to here.
marktangotango 6y ago
I was disappointed by the content of the article as well, I was hoping for something about the incredible amount of insight and wisdom offered freely, as well as the give an take you allude to.
xur17 6y ago
> HN's always seemed like a fairly equalizing place to me. As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits. I wonder what causes this - perhaps it's the lack of emphasis on the poster's name (small text, light grey vs profile picture, bold name, etc)?
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I'm willing to bet it's a combination of that, the anonymity of most users, the userbase in general, and somewhat opinionated moderation. Whatever it is, I'm glad it exists.
rcconf 6y ago
I've had the same experience. I always see side projects at the top of the front page and many of these projects are not making $1k MRR, or even $100 MRR, but they're on the front page because everyone knows how difficult it is to make and launch a side project here. I love this community. Yes we have big expectations, yes we all want to do great-things and you see the extremes of that when you see the comments that $1k MRR is not that good. You also see comments that 1000 Inserts Per Second is not that good. It gives you perspective on the amazing people here; who have big dreams and big expectations and I would not want it any other way.
HeyHoJoe 6y ago
> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me A bit of an inferiority complex here, you can’t possibly be that unpleasant in real life.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I don't think their point was about being personally inadequate in any way, just that such conversations are unlikely to actually happen in person.
sandworm101 6y ago
HN is one of the very few places left where one can be openly anonymous without sounding like a 4Chan kook. We don't need to know people's professions/job or titles. The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  > The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities. This reminds me of the bar scene in Goodwill Hunting (sans the power/class dynamics): > CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital— > WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization. > CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of — > WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? etc.
- ninjanomnom 6y ago
  How do you know you're recognizing other players though if in the vast majority of interactions you can't verify such a thing due to the anonymity? It's true that it's often easy to tell when another individual here knows less than yourself or has a less matured knowledge on a topic, but recognizing another player just means that they can speak at the same level as yourself. You make the distinction based on the contents of their words and not their identity which gets back to benefits of being anonymous: The only thing that matters is the contents of the discussion. An interesting way to see this in action is to take a look at any conversation here debating different viewpoints. You'll often have conversations that could coherently be read as between two individuals but every post could have a different author that contributes to the conversation in a way that it doesn't matter who they are. What is said matters much more than who says it.
toby 6y ago
> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person. In San Francisco there are tech millionaires everywhere. Just like almost every other group, some are nice, gregarious, excited to talk to anyone; others are rude, snobbish and judgmental. You're likely underestimating yourself and others.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Haven't been to San Francisco myself, but Vancouverites tend to be cold in general, moreso when there's an obvious class divide between two people. I've noticed the difference between the kinds of people who will respond to me or the tone of their responses in public just based on what clothes I happen to be wearing that day. I'm not saying everyone out there is shallow and judging of people, just that people tend to prefer to interact with people they feel is on the same level as them in a public situation. HN removes all that and leaves just a username and words.
- khalilravanna 6y ago
  This. The side effect is OP is likely humble which is a great side effect. But I’d say it should stop there and not extend into thinking others are better than yourself. A lot of $$$ is people making different decisions and those decisions end up on a bell curve of chance. Some end up making peanuts, a lot make something ok, and some others make millions. I’d say there’s a big fallacy with equating “I got a good dice roll on joining the right startup” with “I am a higher class of individual”.
- hobofan 6y ago
  > In San Francisco I'd wager most people on here are not in San Francisco.
  - dang 6y ago
    Fewer than 10% in the Bay Area, and far fewer than that in SF.
  - toby 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, discuss things with them and be treated the same as them in conversation just based on the things I say? It's not quite the same thing, but, StackOverflow. I won't name-drop, but I've conversed with some pretty high-powered people on there, and I've conversed with some other high-powered people here on HN. I think a lot of the credit goes to the HN moderation team.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slfnflctd 6y ago
As someone who never 'made it' and whose CV is a complete joke, feeling like I've contributed to the occasional discussion here has been good for my mental health, and moderation seems to be quite sufficient. Apologies for the grandiosity, but the oft-denigrated "words on the internet" may be the most significant trace left of the existence of myself and many others long after everyone here is dead. If technology and civilization survive, future data anthropologists have their work cut out for them. The thought of historians combing through ancient threads and trying to piece together a narrative - only, maybe, for a moment perhaps with something I wrote - gives me a glimmer of warmth, like a fireplace on a cold day.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  That's funny, because I'd just-as-soon historians never spent so much as a CPU cycle analyzing my posts. I've said some intelligent things, some popular things, some uncomfortable-but-I-suspect-true things, some well-reasoned things, etc.. I've certainly had an impact on the people in my real-life sphere and maybe something I've said online has helped a stranger, too. (Comments here on HN have certainly helped me.) But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. Edit: Clarity.
  - bartread 6y ago
    > But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. I suspect you're probably doing yourself a disservice but I can certainly think of numerous instances of my own idiocy. I should particularly have learned by now not to browse and contribute to internet forums whilst drunk, for example, because this tends to magnify my idiocy[0]. [0] To be clear, I'm not drunk now.
  - qchris 6y ago
    > But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. Every now and then, I come across something phrased in such a way that it makes something in my brain click. This is one of them, and I'm really leaving this comment so I can find it easily again in the future and maybe get it put on my coffee mug or something.
bananaface 6y ago
I'm not sure I like this. In practice it means people who don't know what they're talking about (but can bullshit) get promoted more than people who earn $500k/year understanding the subject, who can't be bothered to dress their point up or engage in arguments because their time is valuable. Case in point: I'll give you good odds the person saying $3.7 million "isn't a lot" is not on the ludicrous salary they're citing. It's a dumb sentiment. More broadly when someone earning half a million says you're wrong about their area of expertise, you should probably just listen. Deep understanding isn't easy to explain, and most people with deep understanding won't explain things laboriously.
- grawprog 6y ago
  To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field. Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections? Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections. Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career. The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something. Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around. But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding. So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).
bartread 6y ago
I think both you and the author have entirely valid perspectives. Yes, you can hear from and read comments by all kinds of wildly successful people here, and that can be really cool. You can also hear from people who think $3.7M (I assume this relates to the Basemetrics post) isn't a lot of money even though, for most people and - let's be honest - for most of us, it's a huge and utterly life-changing sum that we'd be happy to walk away with for 7 years work. From my own perspective, my side-project makes just about enough money that it looks like from August/September most months I can now expect a payment from Google Adsense. Net hosting expenses I'm still not making any money (at all!)[0] but it feels pretty good that the project substantially pays for itself: hosting is getting close to covered, CDN and domain expenses not yet. I also don't have any time to work on it at the moment because I'm working on my house, but I do have plenty of ideas about how I can grow that revenue into something that perhaps ends up being more substantial. Not mega money, but maybe enough to cover the mortgage after hosting expenses and taxes. That's nice because it will make me a bit less dependent on earning a regular paycheck every month. [0] I don't really want to get into this but, to pre-empt possible questions about why this is so expensive (greater than the £60/mo threshold for an Adsense payout), I host it on a physical machine that's way more powerful than strictly necessary at the moment. This is primarily because I want to also use that machine for other things, but also because even a few months ago the site was getting hit infrequently enough that on (e.g.) Azure there'd be this horrible startup delay for most users if I went ultra-cheap, and I didn't want that. I went dedicated with Azure a couple of years or so back, which worked out more expensive than the machine I rent from OVH, so I switched to a much beefier physical box. I also use Cloudflare because I serve up a reasonable number of media assets, and using a CDN really reduces the bandwidth hit on my own box. Yes, I could do this more cheaply, but I don't want to because it would yield a worse experience for a non-trivial proportion of my userbase.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits. I agree that HN is pretty much the best place on the web for this kind of thing, but I think we can still do better to reduce the number and degree of 'hostile disagreements'. I would like to see us debate charged topics a bit more objectively and constructively and with the genuine desire to understand other points of view. On the other hand, posting here has taught me a lot about how to structure comments to head-off the obnoxious / predictable / low-value responses while still being able to find a fair number of good-faith participants (which isn't to say 'people who agree with me', but rather 'people who can constructively disagree or even challenge my logic when they agree with my conclusion').
LoSboccacc 6y ago
> equally based on its own merits unless you have a slightly non mainstream opinion on some of the HN dearest, then you get drowned in flags irregardless of merit.
csomar 6y ago
> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person. Imo, you are wrong. Some of these people (even for wealth > $1bn) are just regular folks. The difference is that there are lots of people around them and lots of rinsers, so they are cautious and it is harder to find them in real life. But beyond that, you can have an average, regular discussion with them. A key point is to not think about their wealth much or at all.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires To me, what's really great about HN is not the "talking with millionaires and billionaires" thing. It's talking with people who know how to get shit done and some of those people happen to be millionaires and billionaires because they know how to get shit done. Others are lowly PhDs (okay, sometimes someone is both a Phd and a zillionaire). And they will, in a surprising number of cases, answer your questions in layman's terms even though you are a big fat nobody. Assuming you are not blatantly an over the top asshole about it. (Whoops. Forgot the not. That's a bad thing.)
Shugarl 6y ago
Even putting aside the money thing, I'm always impressed when I see people considered important in the CS-field come and discuss topics casually.
THEDONKEYOFDOOM 6y ago
Agreed I'm a mech eng with little to no software knowledge. I only understand concepts from a high level Even though HN can have a distinct "pro-privacy, pro-free market, SV centered" bent and people getting pedantic about technical detail, I find it has one of the most egalitarian, informative, collaborative and non toxic comment sections on the internet I have found. Expecially considering its size With the upvote system and user base, I find it filters out the comments to bring the relevant, informative and humble responses to the top I frequent the site to read the articles relevant to my interests and almost always lurk the discussion in the comments

RikNieu 6y ago

Excellent point. We get to hear from and learn from people we never have been able to here.

marktangotango 6y ago

I was disappointed by the content of the article as well, I was hoping for something about the incredible amount of insight and wisdom offered freely, as well as the give an take you allude to.

xur17 6y ago

> HN's always seemed like a fairly equalizing place to me. As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits. I wonder what causes this - perhaps it's the lack of emphasis on the poster's name (small text, light grey vs profile picture, bold name, etc)?

ravi-delia 6y ago
I'm willing to bet it's a combination of that, the anonymity of most users, the userbase in general, and somewhat opinionated moderation. Whatever it is, I'm glad it exists.

rcconf 6y ago

I've had the same experience. I always see side projects at the top of the front page and many of these projects are not making $1k MRR, or even $100 MRR, but they're on the front page because everyone knows how difficult it is to make and launch a side project here. I love this community. Yes we have big expectations, yes we all want to do great-things and you see the extremes of that when you see the comments that $1k MRR is not that good. You also see comments that 1000 Inserts Per Second is not that good. It gives you perspective on the amazing people here; who have big dreams and big expectations and I would not want it any other way.

HeyHoJoe 6y ago

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me A bit of an inferiority complex here, you can’t possibly be that unpleasant in real life.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I don't think their point was about being personally inadequate in any way, just that such conversations are unlikely to actually happen in person.

sandworm101 6y ago

HN is one of the very few places left where one can be openly anonymous without sounding like a 4Chan kook. We don't need to know people's professions/job or titles. The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities.

cgriswald 6y ago
> The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities. This reminds me of the bar scene in Goodwill Hunting (sans the power/class dynamics): > CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital— > WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization. > CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of — > WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? etc.
ninjanomnom 6y ago
How do you know you're recognizing other players though if in the vast majority of interactions you can't verify such a thing due to the anonymity? It's true that it's often easy to tell when another individual here knows less than yourself or has a less matured knowledge on a topic, but recognizing another player just means that they can speak at the same level as yourself. You make the distinction based on the contents of their words and not their identity which gets back to benefits of being anonymous: The only thing that matters is the contents of the discussion. An interesting way to see this in action is to take a look at any conversation here debating different viewpoints. You'll often have conversations that could coherently be read as between two individuals but every post could have a different author that contributes to the conversation in a way that it doesn't matter who they are. What is said matters much more than who says it.

toby 6y ago

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person. In San Francisco there are tech millionaires everywhere. Just like almost every other group, some are nice, gregarious, excited to talk to anyone; others are rude, snobbish and judgmental. You're likely underestimating yourself and others.

grawprog 6y ago
Haven't been to San Francisco myself, but Vancouverites tend to be cold in general, moreso when there's an obvious class divide between two people. I've noticed the difference between the kinds of people who will respond to me or the tone of their responses in public just based on what clothes I happen to be wearing that day. I'm not saying everyone out there is shallow and judging of people, just that people tend to prefer to interact with people they feel is on the same level as them in a public situation. HN removes all that and leaves just a username and words.
khalilravanna 6y ago
This. The side effect is OP is likely humble which is a great side effect. But I’d say it should stop there and not extend into thinking others are better than yourself. A lot of $$$ is people making different decisions and those decisions end up on a bell curve of chance. Some end up making peanuts, a lot make something ok, and some others make millions. I’d say there’s a big fallacy with equating “I got a good dice roll on joining the right startup” with “I am a higher class of individual”.
hobofan 6y ago
> In San Francisco I'd wager most people on here are not in San Francisco.
- dang 6y ago
  Fewer than 10% in the Bay Area, and far fewer than that in SF.
- toby 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires, discuss things with them and be treated the same as them in conversation just based on the things I say? It's not quite the same thing, but, StackOverflow. I won't name-drop, but I've conversed with some pretty high-powered people on there, and I've conversed with some other high-powered people here on HN. I think a lot of the credit goes to the HN moderation team.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

slfnflctd 6y ago

As someone who never 'made it' and whose CV is a complete joke, feeling like I've contributed to the occasional discussion here has been good for my mental health, and moderation seems to be quite sufficient. Apologies for the grandiosity, but the oft-denigrated "words on the internet" may be the most significant trace left of the existence of myself and many others long after everyone here is dead. If technology and civilization survive, future data anthropologists have their work cut out for them. The thought of historians combing through ancient threads and trying to piece together a narrative - only, maybe, for a moment perhaps with something I wrote - gives me a glimmer of warmth, like a fireplace on a cold day.

cgriswald 6y ago
That's funny, because I'd just-as-soon historians never spent so much as a CPU cycle analyzing my posts. I've said some intelligent things, some popular things, some uncomfortable-but-I-suspect-true things, some well-reasoned things, etc.. I've certainly had an impact on the people in my real-life sphere and maybe something I've said online has helped a stranger, too. (Comments here on HN have certainly helped me.) But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. Edit: Clarity.
- bartread 6y ago
  > But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. I suspect you're probably doing yourself a disservice but I can certainly think of numerous instances of my own idiocy. I should particularly have learned by now not to browse and contribute to internet forums whilst drunk, for example, because this tends to magnify my idiocy[0]. [0] To be clear, I'm not drunk now.
- qchris 6y ago
  > But by-and-large, past-me is an idiot and I have no reason to believe future-me won't feel that way about me, too. Every now and then, I come across something phrased in such a way that it makes something in my brain click. This is one of them, and I'm really leaving this comment so I can find it easily again in the future and maybe get it put on my coffee mug or something.

bananaface 6y ago

I'm not sure I like this. In practice it means people who don't know what they're talking about (but can bullshit) get promoted more than people who earn $500k/year understanding the subject, who can't be bothered to dress their point up or engage in arguments because their time is valuable. Case in point: I'll give you good odds the person saying $3.7 million "isn't a lot" is not on the ludicrous salary they're citing. It's a dumb sentiment. More broadly when someone earning half a million says you're wrong about their area of expertise, you should probably just listen. Deep understanding isn't easy to explain, and most people with deep understanding won't explain things laboriously.

grawprog 6y ago
To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field. Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections? Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections. Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career. The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something. Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around. But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.
- bananaface 6y ago
  What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding. So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).

bartread 6y ago

I think both you and the author have entirely valid perspectives. Yes, you can hear from and read comments by all kinds of wildly successful people here, and that can be really cool. You can also hear from people who think $3.7M (I assume this relates to the Basemetrics post) isn't a lot of money even though, for most people and - let's be honest - for most of us, it's a huge and utterly life-changing sum that we'd be happy to walk away with for 7 years work. From my own perspective, my side-project makes just about enough money that it looks like from August/September most months I can now expect a payment from Google Adsense. Net hosting expenses I'm still not making any money (at all!)[0] but it feels pretty good that the project substantially pays for itself: hosting is getting close to covered, CDN and domain expenses not yet. I also don't have any time to work on it at the moment because I'm working on my house, but I do have plenty of ideas about how I can grow that revenue into something that perhaps ends up being more substantial. Not mega money, but maybe enough to cover the mortgage after hosting expenses and taxes. That's nice because it will make me a bit less dependent on earning a regular paycheck every month. [0] I don't really want to get into this but, to pre-empt possible questions about why this is so expensive (greater than the £60/mo threshold for an Adsense payout), I host it on a physical machine that's way more powerful than strictly necessary at the moment. This is primarily because I want to also use that machine for other things, but also because even a few months ago the site was getting hit infrequently enough that on (e.g.) Azure there'd be this horrible startup delay for most users if I went ultra-cheap, and I didn't want that. I went dedicated with Azure a couple of years or so back, which worked out more expensive than the machine I rent from OVH, so I switched to a much beefier physical box. I also use Cloudflare because I serve up a reasonable number of media assets, and using a CDN really reduces the bandwidth hit on my own box. Yes, I could do this more cheaply, but I don't want to because it would yield a worse experience for a non-trivial proportion of my userbase.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> As long as you can form a constructive, useful comment, your post will sit right next to people who make insane amounts of money, and be regarded equally based on its own merits. I agree that HN is pretty much the best place on the web for this kind of thing, but I think we can still do better to reduce the number and degree of 'hostile disagreements'. I would like to see us debate charged topics a bit more objectively and constructively and with the genuine desire to understand other points of view. On the other hand, posting here has taught me a lot about how to structure comments to head-off the obnoxious / predictable / low-value responses while still being able to find a fair number of good-faith participants (which isn't to say 'people who agree with me', but rather 'people who can constructively disagree or even challenge my logic when they agree with my conclusion').

LoSboccacc 6y ago

> equally based on its own merits unless you have a slightly non mainstream opinion on some of the HN dearest, then you get drowned in flags irregardless of merit.

csomar 6y ago

> There's no way in hell many of the people I've talked to on here about a bunch of different things would ever have those conversations with me, or any conversation probably, in person. Imo, you are wrong. Some of these people (even for wealth > $1bn) are just regular folks. The difference is that there are lots of people around them and lots of rinsers, so they are cautious and it is harder to find them in real life. But beyond that, you can have an average, regular discussion with them. A key point is to not think about their wealth much or at all.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Where else can I as one of the non-gods of HN, go to argue with millionaires and billionaires To me, what's really great about HN is not the "talking with millionaires and billionaires" thing. It's talking with people who know how to get shit done and some of those people happen to be millionaires and billionaires because they know how to get shit done. Others are lowly PhDs (okay, sometimes someone is both a Phd and a zillionaire). And they will, in a surprising number of cases, answer your questions in layman's terms even though you are a big fat nobody. Assuming you are not blatantly an over the top asshole about it. (Whoops. Forgot the not. That's a bad thing.)

Shugarl 6y ago

Even putting aside the money thing, I'm always impressed when I see people considered important in the CS-field come and discuss topics casually.

THEDONKEYOFDOOM 6y ago

Agreed I'm a mech eng with little to no software knowledge. I only understand concepts from a high level Even though HN can have a distinct "pro-privacy, pro-free market, SV centered" bent and people getting pedantic about technical detail, I find it has one of the most egalitarian, informative, collaborative and non toxic comment sections on the internet I have found. Expecially considering its size With the upvote system and user base, I find it filters out the comments to bring the relevant, informative and humble responses to the top I frequent the site to read the articles relevant to my interests and almost always lurk the discussion in the comments