13 ms·

This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human, and

by reason 15y ago

This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human, and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human, and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been guilty of it in the past too. But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It's sad to see. So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask yourself if you're being human and remind yourself that whatever you're about to say is directed at another human. Stop being robots, and just act human.

peter_l_downs 15y ago
Elaborate on this; write a blog post. I'll gladly give you another up vote. > But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. Honestly, I have had the opposite experience. Everyone here seems focused on getting work done and making great things, yes, but the little criticism that I do see is always well thought-out and explained. Instead of it 'grating' on me, I value it highly, because it's almost all of excellent quality. > I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you?
- reason 15y ago
  That is of course an assumption I'm making, but one that's come from years of using HN. More recently there was the article about the girl from Pakistan who received technical certification and sadly passed away. There was a good amount of comments that took a fully rational approach to assessing her credentials concluding that what she'd done was not worthy of praise. That seemed terribly inhuman, and I feel people of this community are more prone to act that way.
  - ScottBurson 15y ago
    I seem to recall there was also a substantial reaction against those comments.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    I remember that. The nice thing about those comments is that most of them seemed to be focused entirely on correcting journalistic exaggeration, and not on maliciously bashing someone, even if that was the way they were perceived. I know, that doesn't really sound like a nice thing, but I've seen enough actual malicious behavior to much prefer the "inhumanity" of only acting like an asshole as a purely accidental side-effect of being persnickety about technical correctness. There are a lot of aspects of the Human Condition that I'm not too fond of, so feel free to act inhuman with good intentions around me any time!
- dvdhsu 15y ago
  > > I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you? I, and I suspect many others, have subscribed to this belief. When working on purely technical problems, I find that there's no need to bring emotions in. There's just the problem, the problem, and nothing but the problem. When I bring emotions in, I lose focus on the technical aspects of the problem, which are all that I need to solve it.
  - pepve 15y ago
    A problem never made you mad or excited? Did you never get motivated or deterred by a problem? I think keeping emotions out is an illusion.
  - nik61 15y ago
    Hi there, Sheldon Cooper.
- joshkaufman 15y ago
  Here's my personal experience with these sorts of issues: http://joshkaufman.net/working-in-public-is-weird/ http://joshkaufman.net/working-in-public-is-weird/
  - peter_l_downs 15y ago
    Well written, thanks for sharing. Here's my viewpoint, from the situation of the people asking things of you: http://peterdowns.com/posts/ask-for-help.html http://peterdowns.com/posts/ask-for-help.html
nick_urban 15y ago
Thank you. Well said. When I was a student of software engineering, I felt strongly that there was not enough emphasis given to what effect the use of computers has on humans, and what sort of software we ought to make to benefit humans. This is related to Tim O'Reilly's call to "Work on Stuff that Matters" (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...). It's not about the machine or the money -- we must add value to people's lives. This is a different issue than that of being kind to each other on Hacker News, but I happen to think it is deeply related. In some circumstances, I am spontaneous, playful, and extremely open to my environment and aware of other people. When I spend a lot of time programming, however, I tend to become more cautious, analytical, and insensitive. Partly this is because any time spent programming is, generally speaking, spent away from people and in ignorance of our bodies (and hence, our environments). This is one reason why I think it is so important for engineers to have diverse interests. It's not just so that we will be kinder to each other on Hacker News. We are, in a very significant way, the people building the future. We need to make sure that we are in the right frame of mind to build a future we want to live in, and not one that is anti-social and inhumane. Perhaps the reason dystopian sci-fi has so much resonance is because we are already experiencing, unconsciously, the dehumanizing effects of technology.
kevinf 15y ago
So true! Your comment really struck a chord with me. Amazing, how we stop treating each other as human beings in so many contexts: work, school, online, etc. The #1 value of the company I am starting (Cojourneo) is: "Treat people as human beings first." http://cojourneo.com/about/values http://cojourneo.com/about/values Here is a great post the reminds people of how human we really are underneath our entrepreneur facade: http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com/2011/11/13/connect-think-lead/ http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com/2011/11/13/connect-think... So, thank you for this reminder. I'm so happy to know there are people like you out there. :-)
jiggy2011 15y ago
You think it's worse here than on other boards? Most internet boards are worse than this one, I see lots of comments elsewhere of people saying "you must be a retard" , "kill yourself" etc
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Rather, it means things are worse on this board than they could be. And that is enough reason to advocate for more civility here.
- freditup 15y ago
  I normally come here for the articles, not the discussion, but it doesn't seem too bad here. However, tech forums can often become a place of arrogance, pride, and incivility, and it never hurts to look at yourself in the mirror now and then.
- EricDeb 15y ago
  Comments like "Kill yourself" would never be tolerated around here, but that does not mean people are encouraging and positive. Instead of being encouraging, you see a lot of pedantic nitpicking and subtle criticism
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    I quite like this side as a way to feed my pedantic side since nobody else will let me. There's more criticism and less encouragement here partly because people here are just harder to impress on the whole. The anti-humor thing can get annoying sometimes, although I'm glad it's not full of people posting "witty" variations on internet memes every other post. Sometimes you see a post that has an original and relevant joke or something that is meant tongue in cheek to just get downvoted to oblivion.
  - itmag 15y ago
    Instead of being encouraging, you see a lot of pedantic nitpicking and subtle criticism Tip: if those nitpickers are getting you down, imagine that it's Sheldon Cooper doing it :)
jseliger 15y ago
See also Derek Sivers' "A real person, a lot like you": http://sivers.org/real http://sivers.org/real .
blhack 15y ago
Nerds, we need to have a talk: http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/ http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/
- stevear 15y ago
  Has this been to the front-page yet? I have noticed this a lot...especially about frameworks and platforms.
  - blhack 15y ago
    It was around a year ago...
tlrobinson 15y ago
I agree, the pseudo-anonymity of the internet allows us to more freely criticize each other, but is that necessarily a bad thing? We can't improve without feedback, and negative feedback is useful too. So yes, be more mindful that there's a person behind whatever you're responding to, and try to be polite, but at the same time don't hold back your opinions because you're afraid you might hurt someone's feelings.
- docgnome 15y ago
  It's really the politeness that is key. It's the difference between "You suck" and "Your X could be improved by Y" Sadly the tubes are clogged with the former and the latter is much less common. I wonder how many of us really remember learning to program and all the "stupid" questions we asked. Or installing that "Linux thing" the first time, or whatever. As we get farther away from that point it can be harder to remember just what it was like.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Well reasoned :-) I am reminded of the pithy epithet "Haters are gonna hate." sometimes when I read comments on HN and elsewhere. The pendulum of 'responsibility' in our society has been swinging toward 'group' responsibility and away from 'personal' responsibility for a while now. The number of people who feel disenfranchised or held back or discriminated against, can reach further now with the Internet than at any time in the past. The combination of these two situations has as one of its outcomes and out pouring of emotion (generally hate) against the 'others.' I realize that when the pendulum is heavily into the 'personal' side of responsibility those people are more likely to commit suicide rather than to spew vitriol. Clearly that is a bad place to be as well. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, where people take personal responsibility for their own challenges and the group takes responsibility for those things which are (or should be) beyond the responsibility of any one person. The canonical example is education, where the group should be responsible for making sure educational opportunities are available and the individuals should make sure they take advantage of all of the opportunities afforded them. It is a new thing in the world that the meanest and foulest 10% of society have the ability to reach just as many people as the nicest and wisest 10%, I cannot predict the eventual impact of that fundamental change.
itmag 15y ago
The most common personality types on HN are INTJ and INTP. Might have something to do with it Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
- Luyt 15y ago
  I got curious what you meant by 'INTJ and INTP'. I founds this in the WikiPedia: "INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types." Ah, Myers-Briggs, a pyschometric system. I've read some criticism about it: (two excerpts) An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it. She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who had a degree in political science. The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics. Together they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own. Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets. Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches. Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the sixteen possible ways for those switches to be set. Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number. [...] the MBTI's practical use is overwhelmingly unscientific, and it's often criticized for this. Criticism ranges from the pragmatic fact that neither Jung nor Myers and Briggs ever employed scientific studies to develop or test these concepts, relying instead on their own observations, anecdotes, and intuitions; all the way to charges that your MBTI score is hardly more meaningful than your zodiac sign. Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221
zschallz 15y ago
Agreed. I think something along these lines every time someone says things like "I hope that xxx company goes under," etc. I guess it's all too easy to forget that there really are people with families and lives behind everything.
- iwwr 15y ago
  It's very easy to dwell on that too. Companies rise and fall, some are well lead, others not. A frequent jump is to raise the "family card" in order to prop up a failing business. The error in the latter case is ignoring people on the other side of the equation.
potatolicious 15y ago
I ran into this problem myself in the 90s when I first got into the whole internet forum thing. This is something that has worked for me, though YMMV: I re-read every post I write in my head, and pretend I'm saying it to the other person IRL who is sitting across the table from me. Would I use the same words? The same tone? The internet is, in its current form, dehumanizing, you have to take care to maintain your own humanity and the humanity of the semi-anonymous non-faces you're interact with. The negativity on HN doesn't bother me so much as the tone and language. Instead of criticizing, many posters here outright bash. Remember OMGPOP's sale to Zynga? The word "coward" got tossed around as if the company was staffed by an army of unfeeling Mecha-Hitlers.
- davidw 15y ago
  Yeah, this 'say it to their face' rule is a great one. One specific addendum: if your words come out sounding like something the comic book guy from the Simpsons would say, rewrite.
- aptwebapps 15y ago
  I first really learned to program on an LP-Mud that was in the early to middle stages of development. We had lots of live interactions that went just fine, but our message board conversations were often teetering on the brink of flame wars. The exact same handful of people, usually around five or so, talking about the same subjects, but with really different results. So there's something about the forum or message board format that is dangerous, I think. With live chat, of course, misunderstandings surface faster so you can correct or elaborate as needed, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think that somehow people read tone into the messages that isn't there. I'm not sure exactly why. Over-aggressive pattern matching maybe. You get an idea in your head around the first or second sentence and then fit the rest to that idea.
- sausagefeet 15y ago
  If a post gets me emotionally fired up, I often type up my response. Read it. Then delete it. Then type it up again. I find just getting the emotional response out helps.
- 15y ago
andywood 15y ago
I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I'm talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn't appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There's an aggressive form ("Citation Needed") and a passive-aggressive form ("Say, friend, that's a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you have a source where I might read more about it?") Sometimes, this is completely appropriate, as when someone is using an anecdote as their only support in a vigorous debate, or when information is clearly being presented as factual, when it probably isn't. But as "Citation Needed" has become a rampant meme in its own right, I think it is increasingly applied in knee-jerk, cargo-cultish, and inappropriate ways. Sharing anecdotes and experiences is one of the fundamental ways that humans share information about the myriad little nooks of the world that we move through. I know it isn't science. I'm quite well read on cognitive biases, statistics, and the scientific method; and I do not need to be reminded about these by HN commenters continually, every time somebody shares a story, or an opinion based on their experience. I'm concerned about a chilling effect on the sharing of anecdotal information. There is information - information that I can use - in the many experiences related by others. I don't need or desire to get fully 100% of my information from peer-reviewed scientific studies. I know the difference between science and personal experience, and I would much rather bear the burden of telling the difference for myself, as the reader, than to have fewer people talking about their personal experiences.
- aiscott 15y ago
  Now I'm afraid of asking for a reference for anything. God forbid I'd like evidence so if I share a claim with others I have as solid foundation. You are providing your own chilling effect by demanding others adhere to your personal standards.
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    Let's not go to extremes, please. The parent has not called for a ban on requests for more information. Part of being human, as the GP requests we act, is using our discrimination. Context and balance are indispensable.
etherael 15y ago
I am not so sure human is something one ought to aspire to be. There is a certain comfort in dealing with people who, when they criticise your ideas, you can be confident that they are doing so purely from a rational position. I believe it is worthwhile to pursue and encourage this mindset, if I am wrong about something, I want to know about it, not be encouraged to pursue a path of questionable value purely because it might be perceived as mean to educate me. I want to be treated this way and I want to treat others this way. It is not at all innately vicious or an excess of negative emotion, if anything its precisely the opposite, the complete absence of emotion.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

by reason 15y ago

peter_l_downs 15y ago

Elaborate on this; write a blog post. I'll gladly give you another up vote. > But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. Honestly, I have had the opposite experience. Everyone here seems focused on getting work done and making great things, yes, but the little criticism that I do see is always well thought-out and explained. Instead of it 'grating' on me, I value it highly, because it's almost all of excellent quality. > I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you?

reason 15y ago
That is of course an assumption I'm making, but one that's come from years of using HN. More recently there was the article about the girl from Pakistan who received technical certification and sadly passed away. There was a good amount of comments that took a fully rational approach to assessing her credentials concluding that what she'd done was not worthy of praise. That seemed terribly inhuman, and I feel people of this community are more prone to act that way.
- ScottBurson 15y ago
  I seem to recall there was also a substantial reaction against those comments.
- pjscott 15y ago
  I remember that. The nice thing about those comments is that most of them seemed to be focused entirely on correcting journalistic exaggeration, and not on maliciously bashing someone, even if that was the way they were perceived. I know, that doesn't really sound like a nice thing, but I've seen enough actual malicious behavior to much prefer the "inhumanity" of only acting like an asshole as a purely accidental side-effect of being persnickety about technical correctness. There are a lot of aspects of the Human Condition that I'm not too fond of, so feel free to act inhuman with good intentions around me any time!
dvdhsu 15y ago
> > I think people here tend to assume that [...] to be an empathetic and emotional person puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. Who? That's a foolish viewpoint that I cannot believe anyone here would hold. I haven't run across anyone who seems like they subscribe to this belief — have you? I, and I suspect many others, have subscribed to this belief. When working on purely technical problems, I find that there's no need to bring emotions in. There's just the problem, the problem, and nothing but the problem. When I bring emotions in, I lose focus on the technical aspects of the problem, which are all that I need to solve it.
- pepve 15y ago
  A problem never made you mad or excited? Did you never get motivated or deterred by a problem? I think keeping emotions out is an illusion.
- nik61 15y ago
  Hi there, Sheldon Cooper.
joshkaufman 15y ago
Here's my personal experience with these sorts of issues: http://joshkaufman.net/working-in-public-is-weird/ http://joshkaufman.net/working-in-public-is-weird/
- peter_l_downs 15y ago
  Well written, thanks for sharing. Here's my viewpoint, from the situation of the people asking things of you: http://peterdowns.com/posts/ask-for-help.html http://peterdowns.com/posts/ask-for-help.html

nick_urban 15y ago

Thank you. Well said. When I was a student of software engineering, I felt strongly that there was not enough emphasis given to what effect the use of computers has on humans, and what sort of software we ought to make to benefit humans. This is related to Tim O'Reilly's call to "Work on Stuff that Matters" (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...). It's not about the machine or the money -- we must add value to people's lives. This is a different issue than that of being kind to each other on Hacker News, but I happen to think it is deeply related. In some circumstances, I am spontaneous, playful, and extremely open to my environment and aware of other people. When I spend a lot of time programming, however, I tend to become more cautious, analytical, and insensitive. Partly this is because any time spent programming is, generally speaking, spent away from people and in ignorance of our bodies (and hence, our environments). This is one reason why I think it is so important for engineers to have diverse interests. It's not just so that we will be kinder to each other on Hacker News. We are, in a very significant way, the people building the future. We need to make sure that we are in the right frame of mind to build a future we want to live in, and not one that is anti-social and inhumane. Perhaps the reason dystopian sci-fi has so much resonance is because we are already experiencing, unconsciously, the dehumanizing effects of technology.

kevinf 15y ago

So true! Your comment really struck a chord with me. Amazing, how we stop treating each other as human beings in so many contexts: work, school, online, etc. The #1 value of the company I am starting (Cojourneo) is: "Treat people as human beings first." http://cojourneo.com/about/values http://cojourneo.com/about/values Here is a great post the reminds people of how human we really are underneath our entrepreneur facade: http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com/2011/11/13/connect-think-lead/ http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com/2011/11/13/connect-think... So, thank you for this reminder. I'm so happy to know there are people like you out there. :-)

jiggy2011 15y ago

You think it's worse here than on other boards? Most internet boards are worse than this one, I see lots of comments elsewhere of people saying "you must be a retard" , "kill yourself" etc

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Rather, it means things are worse on this board than they could be. And that is enough reason to advocate for more civility here.
freditup 15y ago
I normally come here for the articles, not the discussion, but it doesn't seem too bad here. However, tech forums can often become a place of arrogance, pride, and incivility, and it never hurts to look at yourself in the mirror now and then.
EricDeb 15y ago
Comments like "Kill yourself" would never be tolerated around here, but that does not mean people are encouraging and positive. Instead of being encouraging, you see a lot of pedantic nitpicking and subtle criticism
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I quite like this side as a way to feed my pedantic side since nobody else will let me. There's more criticism and less encouragement here partly because people here are just harder to impress on the whole. The anti-humor thing can get annoying sometimes, although I'm glad it's not full of people posting "witty" variations on internet memes every other post. Sometimes you see a post that has an original and relevant joke or something that is meant tongue in cheek to just get downvoted to oblivion.
- itmag 15y ago
  Instead of being encouraging, you see a lot of pedantic nitpicking and subtle criticism Tip: if those nitpickers are getting you down, imagine that it's Sheldon Cooper doing it :)

jseliger 15y ago

See also Derek Sivers' "A real person, a lot like you": http://sivers.org/real http://sivers.org/real .

blhack 15y ago

Nerds, we need to have a talk: http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/ http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/

stevear 15y ago
Has this been to the front-page yet? I have noticed this a lot...especially about frameworks and platforms.
- blhack 15y ago
  It was around a year ago...

tlrobinson 15y ago

I agree, the pseudo-anonymity of the internet allows us to more freely criticize each other, but is that necessarily a bad thing? We can't improve without feedback, and negative feedback is useful too. So yes, be more mindful that there's a person behind whatever you're responding to, and try to be polite, but at the same time don't hold back your opinions because you're afraid you might hurt someone's feelings.

docgnome 15y ago
It's really the politeness that is key. It's the difference between "You suck" and "Your X could be improved by Y" Sadly the tubes are clogged with the former and the latter is much less common. I wonder how many of us really remember learning to program and all the "stupid" questions we asked. Or installing that "Linux thing" the first time, or whatever. As we get farther away from that point it can be harder to remember just what it was like.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Well reasoned :-) I am reminded of the pithy epithet "Haters are gonna hate." sometimes when I read comments on HN and elsewhere. The pendulum of 'responsibility' in our society has been swinging toward 'group' responsibility and away from 'personal' responsibility for a while now. The number of people who feel disenfranchised or held back or discriminated against, can reach further now with the Internet than at any time in the past. The combination of these two situations has as one of its outcomes and out pouring of emotion (generally hate) against the 'others.' I realize that when the pendulum is heavily into the 'personal' side of responsibility those people are more likely to commit suicide rather than to spew vitriol. Clearly that is a bad place to be as well. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, where people take personal responsibility for their own challenges and the group takes responsibility for those things which are (or should be) beyond the responsibility of any one person. The canonical example is education, where the group should be responsible for making sure educational opportunities are available and the individuals should make sure they take advantage of all of the opportunities afforded them. It is a new thing in the world that the meanest and foulest 10% of society have the ability to reach just as many people as the nicest and wisest 10%, I cannot predict the eventual impact of that fundamental change.

itmag 15y ago

The most common personality types on HN are INTJ and INTP. Might have something to do with it Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

Luyt 15y ago
I got curious what you meant by 'INTJ and INTP'. I founds this in the WikiPedia: "INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types." Ah, Myers-Briggs, a pyschometric system. I've read some criticism about it: (two excerpts) An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it. She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who had a degree in political science. The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics. Together they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own. Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets. Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches. Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the sixteen possible ways for those switches to be set. Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number. [...] the MBTI's practical use is overwhelmingly unscientific, and it's often criticized for this. Criticism ranges from the pragmatic fact that neither Jung nor Myers and Briggs ever employed scientific studies to develop or test these concepts, relying instead on their own observations, anecdotes, and intuitions; all the way to charges that your MBTI score is hardly more meaningful than your zodiac sign. Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221

zschallz 15y ago

Agreed. I think something along these lines every time someone says things like "I hope that xxx company goes under," etc. I guess it's all too easy to forget that there really are people with families and lives behind everything.

iwwr 15y ago
It's very easy to dwell on that too. Companies rise and fall, some are well lead, others not. A frequent jump is to raise the "family card" in order to prop up a failing business. The error in the latter case is ignoring people on the other side of the equation.

potatolicious 15y ago

I ran into this problem myself in the 90s when I first got into the whole internet forum thing. This is something that has worked for me, though YMMV: I re-read every post I write in my head, and pretend I'm saying it to the other person IRL who is sitting across the table from me. Would I use the same words? The same tone? The internet is, in its current form, dehumanizing, you have to take care to maintain your own humanity and the humanity of the semi-anonymous non-faces you're interact with. The negativity on HN doesn't bother me so much as the tone and language. Instead of criticizing, many posters here outright bash. Remember OMGPOP's sale to Zynga? The word "coward" got tossed around as if the company was staffed by an army of unfeeling Mecha-Hitlers.

davidw 15y ago
Yeah, this 'say it to their face' rule is a great one. One specific addendum: if your words come out sounding like something the comic book guy from the Simpsons would say, rewrite.
aptwebapps 15y ago
I first really learned to program on an LP-Mud that was in the early to middle stages of development. We had lots of live interactions that went just fine, but our message board conversations were often teetering on the brink of flame wars. The exact same handful of people, usually around five or so, talking about the same subjects, but with really different results. So there's something about the forum or message board format that is dangerous, I think. With live chat, of course, misunderstandings surface faster so you can correct or elaborate as needed, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think that somehow people read tone into the messages that isn't there. I'm not sure exactly why. Over-aggressive pattern matching maybe. You get an idea in your head around the first or second sentence and then fit the rest to that idea.
sausagefeet 15y ago
If a post gets me emotionally fired up, I often type up my response. Read it. Then delete it. Then type it up again. I find just getting the emotional response out helps.
15y ago

andywood 15y ago

I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I'm talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn't appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There's an aggressive form ("Citation Needed") and a passive-aggressive form ("Say, friend, that's a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you have a source where I might read more about it?") Sometimes, this is completely appropriate, as when someone is using an anecdote as their only support in a vigorous debate, or when information is clearly being presented as factual, when it probably isn't. But as "Citation Needed" has become a rampant meme in its own right, I think it is increasingly applied in knee-jerk, cargo-cultish, and inappropriate ways. Sharing anecdotes and experiences is one of the fundamental ways that humans share information about the myriad little nooks of the world that we move through. I know it isn't science. I'm quite well read on cognitive biases, statistics, and the scientific method; and I do not need to be reminded about these by HN commenters continually, every time somebody shares a story, or an opinion based on their experience. I'm concerned about a chilling effect on the sharing of anecdotal information. There is information - information that I can use - in the many experiences related by others. I don't need or desire to get fully 100% of my information from peer-reviewed scientific studies. I know the difference between science and personal experience, and I would much rather bear the burden of telling the difference for myself, as the reader, than to have fewer people talking about their personal experiences.

aiscott 15y ago
Now I'm afraid of asking for a reference for anything. God forbid I'd like evidence so if I share a claim with others I have as solid foundation. You are providing your own chilling effect by demanding others adhere to your personal standards.
- aptwebapps 15y ago
  Let's not go to extremes, please. The parent has not called for a ban on requests for more information. Part of being human, as the GP requests we act, is using our discrimination. Context and balance are indispensable.

etherael 15y ago

I am not so sure human is something one ought to aspire to be. There is a certain comfort in dealing with people who, when they criticise your ideas, you can be confident that they are doing so purely from a rational position. I believe it is worthwhile to pursue and encourage this mindset, if I am wrong about something, I want to know about it, not be encouraged to pursue a path of questionable value purely because it might be perceived as mean to educate me. I want to be treated this way and I want to treat others this way. It is not at all innately vicious or an excess of negative emotion, if anything its precisely the opposite, the complete absence of emotion.

deleted 15y ago

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deleted 15y ago

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