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Hacker News – The Good Parts
- pedalpete 1y agoI've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.
- dingnuts 1y agocareful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the natives
- fishmicrowaver 1y agoit's basically what digg should've been
- ayaros 1y agoGood post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoOh! didn't know that bear blog could set up custom CSS but I was wondering about that actually as well! Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol. I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :) [1]: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/
- validatori 1y agoOne thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
- tptacek 1y agoThat's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page here.
- veqq 1y agohttps://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's minimalism.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had: * The ability to save comments, as well as posts * Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category * Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever. * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
- n4r9 1y agoTo favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click "favourite" just after "flag". You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoWow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern. Good to know though, thank you!
- vavooom 1y agoI appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
- krapp 1y agoIn a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.
- 1718627440 1y agoIt helps when you view it like a graph of people making commitments of their opinion. You can checkout a commit by clicking on the time and then run the commands by clicking on their label. There are also the plumbing commands like 'latest', that you only find, if you know them.
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top. The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment". So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
- bilekas 1y agoIf the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
- nadermx 1y agoYeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
- kylecazar 1y agoI personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program. There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoAgree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
- tptacek 1y agoOnly a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)
- xg15 1y agoNot involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.
- deadbabe 1y agoThings to add to hackernews: Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts …if you wanted to destroy hackernews
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoAnything you'd do on Reddit don't do here :). Occasionally a Reddit like humour is allowed though.
- namuol 1y ago> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025. Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough. How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
- tptacek 1y agoAs far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
- abuani 1y agoThere are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless
- tptacek 1y agoAskHistorians is still pretty great too.
- culll_kuprey 1y agoTurns out gatekeeping works
- tptacek 1y agoAbsolutely. Why wouldn't it? All the useful forums are "gatekept" in some fashion; AskHistorians just has an especially legible set of gates.
- bigiain 1y agoWhat was that weightlifting sub that worshiped "Brodin" and "The Church Of (Something? Maybe Iron?)" I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
- b112 1y agoYou mean this forum? http://139.177.194.177/worst.date.ever.jpg http://139.177.194.177/worst.date.ever.jpg
- molticrystal 1y agoI've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years. For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
- PaulKeeble 1y agoJust occasionally I do really want to respond with an image because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more complex thing. At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
- layer8 1y agoLinking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of the things I appreciate about it. [0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PaulKeeble 1y agoOn second thoughts given people are downvoting this as a low quality comment rather than responding on the ways they disagree this audience would descend into the exact same problems on Reddit. My position is thus reversed, it is not something that HN would use properly.
- thegrim33 1y ago>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare Boy what incredibly different universes we live in. If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news". In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
- dooglius 1y agoThank you for helping keep up the quality of the site
- wilg 1y ago[flagged]
- defrost 1y agoFlagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to [dead]). Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded. Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
- ryandrake 1y agoEven if it takes multiple flags to kill an article, that's still vulnerable to brigading. So it takes 10 flags to censor a topic instead of 1? Fine, me and my 9 sockpuppet accounts will flag the article. Or just 10 like-minded people independently deciding to abuse flag as a mega-downvote. Two changes to flagging would really improve it, and cause it to not be used casually as a mega-downvote: 1. Flag-powered users should only get like 1-2 flags a week. 2. Flagging should be attributable back to the user who flagged it. If you feel you're doing the site a good service by flagging trash articles, then you should have no problem with publicly linking your name to the flagging action.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bunabhucan 1y agoThe thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart. There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect. Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
- krapp 1y agoYou can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse. Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
- bunabhucan 1y agoI get that, what's hard is if my made up chip designer is commenting about UI coding or networking topology or something closer to HNs heart.
- krapp 1y agoYeah, the technical content on HN is kind of a crapshoot too, unfortunately. Just slightly less so than everything else. I guess it's better to view HN as entertainment than expertise overall.
- vacuity 1y agoThat's why I like to read most of the comments on a post, because typically I'll find some useful information scattered throughout. After I'm done, I can roughly get a sense for "excellent comments", "comments that probably have a good point", "medium-quality arguing", and "probably just wrong comments". Then I may seek out other submissions of the same topics to get more data. Over time, I refine which points I think are probably valid. HN has its gems, just perhaps not as often or obvious as advertised.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoOdd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
- krapp 1y ago>All major news stories break here. No, they don't. This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
- keyboardJones 1y agoJust want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making this a great virtual space, everyone!
- dismalaf 1y agoHN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
- nozzlegear 1y agoI miss the old HN, the bold HN, straight from the code HN, real founder soul HN. I hate the new HN, the crew HN, the think alike echo HN, only talk about LLMs HN.
- dismalaf 1y agoHah this is gold.
- vid 1y agoIt's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people to post anonymously.
- antod 1y agoIt was also a great experiment in delegated decentralized moderation (and meta moderation) in a pretty hostile environment.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago...and there was the A.I. posts.
- pelzatessa 1y agoWhat I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons: 1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick. 2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
- AaronAPU 1y agoI find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
- krapp 1y agoNot to be "that guy" but Hacker News has an API (linked at the bottom of the page) and you could make an alternate client and try it out. I've messed around with it in Godot, it's fun. Also a lot of frontends for HN get posted here, one of those might still be online and might have tried it with that layout. Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector. Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoCool. I don't disagree. Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
- oncallthrow 1y agoIt’s a fashionable opinion to dunk on HN nowadays, but frankly there is nothing else like it, or even close. (In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
- rstuart4133 1y ago> (In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…) That weirdly rhymes with the criticism of everything else here, like firefox, debian, android, ...
- bezier-curve 1y agoThere's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit. The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far. The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines. If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wakawaka28 1y agoFor real, the downvote access threshold is way too high. If I wanted to get points, I could just join the circle jerk for a while. But actual curiosity is not rewarded.
- dwd 1y agoMy only beef with down votes is you often never know why. Maybe requiring a comment to downvote, or at least if you are the first to down vote a comment would go a long way.
- throw10920 1y agoPiece of advice: I used to care more about downvotes, and was very upset when my comments got a "0" or "-1" next to them. Then I realized that they're just internet points that I'm unnecessarily attached to, and that seeing a downvote on my comment is just my pride being offended. This makes me way less upset about unjust downvotes - and, on average, it seems like I get more unjust upvotes (e.g. upvotes on comments that actually aren't substantial) than downvotes (those which I would say are justified). > at least if you are the first to down vote a comment This is actually a clever idea (that would avoid endless repetitions of the downvote reason) - I like it!
- vunderba 1y agoI'm mostly happy with the minimalistic approach that HN takes. Two minor things I'd like to see addressed though: - the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story. - Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
- cheschire 1y agojust unflag it if you flag it?
- Krssst 1y agoI often din't realize when I accidentally flag something with my big fingers; when I go to my flagged page later I am often surprised to see a few pages I have no memory of and no reason at all for flagging.
- gurjeet 1y agoJust out of curiosity I cheked my list for flagged comments and posts. There are a few comments I flagged, and they've been marked dead, correctly. But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions. I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example: > nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally. So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.
- baubino 1y agoI haven’t flagged anything but just checked and yeah. Now unflagging the wrongly flagged.
- tfsh 1y agoI've been PSAs before on the front page with a reminder to check your flagged stories. I and others visited the link and were surprised to see how many stories I had fat-finger flagged. In fact I had never intentionally flagged a story yet the list was at least 10-15 long
- iambateman 1y agoHN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable. And I know that sometimes that falls into some personalized negativity but it’s useful most of the time. The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing. Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
- nadermx 1y agoBlogging?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoIt is also another good option but I find HN better in the sense that there are usually more chances of somebody responding to your comment/ ask post in HN in a similar minded way as compared to blogging if you are like me who has interests in lots of things. Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.
- ivape 1y agoIt also forces you to make sure you write so that you are understood. This gets rid of a lot of writers block because you are determined to make sure you are understood, almost like a mission. Otherwise, this place doesn’t work. It would be a giant LinkedIn showboat-off.
- ozim 1y agoIt is always surprising how people misinterpret things you wrote. Lots of time people reply to an emotion, “not” jokes don’t work well in writing. If you write first sentence to negate it in the paragraph breaks really fast.
- vivalahn 1y ago[flagged]
- martinpw 1y agoI would like a way to sort all comments on a topic by net upvotes. I believe the current system ranks toplevel posts by net upvotes, and the same recursively for sibling replies, but that means a highly rated reply to a low rated parent comment will get lost in the nether regions of the page. Of course I understand that max upvotes is not the be all and end all, but when there are a dozen interesting posts a day, each with 300+ comments that I want to parse, I need a way to still have some life, so a way to get the net reader take on the top few comments would be a nice filter.
- liqilin1567 1y agoSorry for the self-promo :D, I'm building a project for analyzing comments. Might be helpful, even if it's not exactly what you described.
- James_K 1y ago[flagged]
- schmookeeg 1y agoI would not presume to request changes to HN. I think it's sublime and I love what I discover here. ...but if I did, it would be to wish for a tip jar or some way to give back to the unflappable mods.
- leephillips 1y agoHN is good as the author says. But you can get a better experience by reading it through https://hn-ai.org/ https://hn-ai.org/ instead.
- RaftPeople 1y agoAgree with author, this is one of my favorite places for discussion due to the moderation and culture of respectful interactions. It really allows for exchanges of ideas and learning.
- aydyn 1y agoI agree with the good points about the platform. But the points about the userbase reek of pretentiousness. The New Yorker called it Performative Erudition: frequently, people here are entirely focused on appearing to have insight, appearing smart and avoiding colloquial language to the point where having a straightforward normal conversation is sometimes impossible. To say that the userbase has a "mindset of humility" is almost too ironic for words.
- musicale 1y agoJargon and special terminology aren't necessarily performative; they can also be 1) how people with a shared profession or interest talk to each other, and 2) preferred for precision or context.
- scubbo 1y agoEverything you just said is true. And yet. HNers are still often guilty of Performative Erudition. It's not _just_ the use of technical jargon.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- landl0rd 1y agoYeah but the lingo's pedigree matters. Some words are practical. The dialect you use in an academic paper or the SF set saying "orthogonal" "isomorphic" "non-zero" whatever is performative.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- binary132 1y agoI completely agree. I actually avoided hackernews for years because the users are all so pretentious. Debating in this context is not generally an exercise in self-development. Now I’m completely guilty of it myself. :)
- MountDoom 1y agoHN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away. HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".
- latchkey 1y ago> Slashdot withered away /. withered away because it was sold off multiple times and lost its mojo.
- MountDoom 1y agoPeople say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day. I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.
- km144 1y agoYou hit the nail on the head. There is no place on the internet more broadly susceptible to the same kinds of "founder brain" malaise that has afflicted so many in Silicon Valley--i.e. "I am good at software development so therefore I am confident I have a good understanding of (and opinion on) all sorts of intellectual topics".
- throw-10-13 1y agoHN is just a VC funded echo chamber for out of touch CTO’s to still feel like they are in the game.
- keiferski 1y agoI’d be surprised if CTOs and VCs make up more than 3 or 4% of the user base here.
- bigpeopleareold 1y agoI have read HN for years ... on my profile it says my account was made 11 years ago but I followed it much longer than that. It has been a continual resource of things that I would have never thought of looking into or spark interest in things that I haven't looked at in a long time. As an example, a post on a Lazarus/FP release triggered my multi-month long interest in Pascal again for me. I do like there is a level of civility and this site is not juiced up with advertising and algorithmic personalization. Sometimes though, I feel like this site has some conversations similar to that I had in real life. I would say something and someone, would say 'but!' with a long explanation on why someone I'm wrong, rinse and repeat. It gets annoying to read, but I can at least not bother, because most issues are simple not hills to die on. I will leave it to others here to elucidate this point in other ways, which I dutifully upvoted.
- npn 1y ago> The good parts posts before 2015~2016. that's it.
- tsoukase 1y agoThe intellectual level achieved in HN is unparalleled in the history of internet. The bad parts, except those mentioned other where: 1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop 2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.
- ABCLAW 1y agoThere were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density. The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days. As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps. I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
- vict7 1y ago> relative lower quality in other fields except technology As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here. It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about. No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.
- 1y ago
- cmacleod4 1y agoThe one thing that really annoys me about HN is that when you return to a discussion that you read the day before, there is no way to easily find the comments which are new since your previous visit. This is basic functionality which Usenet always had (and still does).
- Jotalea 1y agoI follow a Telegram channel with a bot that automatically shows posts with >50 votes. and they're generally interesting articles or stories like this one. and if I'm not interested in any of them, I can just scroll past them. however, the amount of content is overwhelming: as of right now, I have ~300 unread notifications from this channel. I do appreciate the fact that, generally, this platform provides high-quality or high-effort content. the one downside I've found is, just like other people mentioned, the gimmicky markdown-like implementation on newlines, having to press enter twice for one to appear. it is kind of annoying, but something I could get used to.