7 ms·

The Background Noise Was Louder than I Realized

147 points by prajjwal 14y ago

nirvana 14y ago
Hacker News has become the source of the noise for me and I'm increasingly not coming here. I often block it in my hosts file, in fact, along with reddit and Facebook. There is still, occasionally, a relevant technical article (that's not primarily opinion) or link to a new open source project that is relevant to my interests. But that seems to be around %2-4 of the content. HN is crowded out with submissions that are designed primarily to be excuses to be outraged at anyone who believes in intellectual property, or that isn't a leftist, with the occasional outrage at violations of privacy thrown in. And you certainly can't have a good discussion on those articles-- haters going to hate, and leftists hate private property and fandroids hate apple. This is the fourth time I've seen this happen. The first was slashdot, which by 2002 or so, was so overrun with GPL fascists that you couldn't say anything short of the party line, less it be downvoted to oblivion. Then Digg which gave so much power to early users that it was pointless to even try. Then Reddit which has its general /r/politics subreddit-- which everyone is subscribe to by default- with a moderation policy that bans anyone who doesn't toe the leftist line well enough to goose step. And now Hacker News. Once I did an experiment. There was an article where I didn't like the outcome, along with most of HN, but the principle involved, a greater principle, one that most on HN claim to espouse, was being violated. I posted a comment noting that I didn't like the outcome, naming the principle, noting that most of us agree with that principle, and then showing how upholding that principle (eg: not being a hypocrite) required us to temper our outrage. I got downvoted to oblivion (which on HN helpfully means your post fades into the background making it impossible to read, which I find hilarious- we're not just going to put you at the bottom of the page, we're going to make it impossible for those who are broad minded enough to scroll down to even read it.) So, despite agreeing with the majority, clearly explaining my position, and why I hated having to reach that conclusion, what the principle was, and why we all generally agree with that principle... I was still downvoted, because I wasn't making a post agreeing with the party line. That's the point when I accepted that moderation is broken, and Hacker News is not a place where good discussion can happen reliably. I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.
- incision 14y ago
  1) Kick things off with sweeping generalizations of four sites spanning ten years as "haters", "fandroids", "leftists" and "fascists". 2) Spend the rest of the tangent hypocritically complaining about name-calling while demanding that someone refute your purely anecdotal evidence. 3) Triumphantly explain how I've somehow proven your point by posting this.
- taybin 14y ago
  How about some specifics? I get suspicious when I see "leftists" thrown around.
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    I find it's best to ignore a post when any rash generalization is made; be it against people I side with or not.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Here's some specifics: Anything having to do with the 2008 fiscal crisis. Anything having to do with monetary policy in general. Hell, just try pointing out that the IR absorption of CO2 is less than that of water vapor (eg: clouds) in a discussion of global warming. You'll get no end of "all scientists believe in global warming[1]" and downvotes, for this scientific fact. [1] This is, by far, the most anti-intellectual and offensive statement. Science doesn't work by majority. Worse, it is simply factually false. There is no survey of scientists to determine their votes, and there is a sizable contingent of scientists who refute it or dispute it. Further, the references to "science" that this side makes generally come from IPCC reports, which is to say, reports prepared by politicians which in the past have often been refuted by the very scientists whose research they claim to be summarizing. This issue is really a good one, because it is a purely scientific one, it is relatively straightforward and easy to disprove (Mars was warming at the same time, with the earth and the solar cycle, despite having no Hummers, the earth has been getting cooler for the past decade, despite CO2 going up, the "warming" period coincides with ice ages, and the "evidence", namely the Mann "hockey stick" was the result of outright fraud).... yet the people who believe it believe it for ideological reasons, and actually reject science, making scientific discussions impossible. (Global warming is the left's creationism!) all you can get is insistence that all scientists believe in it (all christians believe in creationism, right? Actually they don't all believe in it, possibly a majority don't.) Or you can get pointers to scientific sounding blog posts that at the root end up being nonsense. The closest I've ever gotten to an actual scientific debate on global warming was with a physicist who, in the end, was reduced to insisting that man made carbon dioxide had different effects on the atmosphere than "naturally occurring" carbon dioxide. At that point I gave up- I can't argue with a belief like that. How many people do you think on Hacker News believe in Global Warming? How many of them have ever looked up the IR absorption of CO2? Or would listen to that point? How many people on Hacker News reject intellectual property out of hand? How many of them can derive, from first principles, an explanation for any private property ownership? I believe the former is the majority and the latter is a tiny fraction. Yet they "believe in private property" -- but only situationally. (EG: Ok to steal movies, but not cars, or money, unless you're the government, then its ok to steal money if you call it taxes. Is that not a reasonable characterization of "leftist" positions? Ok, then how can a leftist believe in the principle of private property if its sometimes ok to steal? By redefining the word "steal"?)
yawaramin 14y ago
@James Hague: so what are the unusual blogs you're subscribing to? I'm always on the lookout for that kind of stuff. I'll start off with one of my discoveries: the feed for a readlist (http://readlists.com/ http://readlists.com/) created by a guy named Stu Sherwin: http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/ http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/
- akoncius 14y ago
  nice! will check it for further usage of it. i really enjoy HackerMonthly format, and would like to get more like this type of material.
- jseliger 14y ago
  I'm fond of my own blog, which is about books and ideas; you can find in my profile if you're curious. The Feature: http://thefeature.net/ http://thefeature.net/ is excellent. Hooking Up Smart is great if you're interested in sex, gender relations, relationships, and dating: http://www.hookingupsmart.com http://www.hookingupsmart.com. I Use This: http://usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com/ can be surprisingly helpful at times. I discovered Pigma Micron pens through it!
petercooper 14y ago
The author mentions the fine Hacker Monthly but curated e-mails also have a role to play here. If you want something with more coverage and volume but still remain sane, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ is a weekly newsletter with the best of HN's links by HN's own 'duck'. I do similar work with my Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly and StatusCode newsletters and frequently get e-mails from people who say they like being subscribed so they can turn down the 'noise' they get on Twitter, etc. There are thousands of such regular, curated digests in almost any medium you could think of. Not just e-mails or magazines, but podcasts, link blogs, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts too. Have a good look around on the topics that interest you, subscribe to the digests, and then skip the noise.
- kallus 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip! I personally use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the morning and be done. The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-) How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way? I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a few hours? Sites like MetaFilter - http://www.metafilter.com/ http://www.metafilter.com/, Edward Tufte's forum - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1, QBN - http://www.qbn.com/ http://www.qbn.com/ - and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all single threaded (or in the case of blogs, most, but not all).
Camillo 14y ago
Since when is Hacker News a programming news site? AFAICT it's mainly a startup news/self-promotion vehicle, with a few programming articles thrown in to satisfy the technical cofounders.
inerte 14y ago
I too do all these things listed by James, skipping articles and comparisons. But that's because I am now an expert: I've read far too much about dynamic vs. static to have the patient to fully read the good old opinions about this subject. The same about comparisons, I know it's 10% better than last year's because last year I actually read an article, and it was 10%-15% better than 2010, which was 10% better than 2009. Two things helped: I stopped doing the engineering dance, dueling trivia with others. I don't care if the new iPhone does 5 times less network requests on maps when not on wi-fi but gets less POIs because the map provider is pulverized, on China is X while on Iceland is Y, but on San Francisco bla bla bla. Frankly, talking to a Wikipedia is boring. The other thing that helped is that I gave up trying to live on the bleeding edge of anything. I don't sleep on the line to buy an iPad mini, I wait three days if and when I have the free time. I don't know what's the current best SSD, I google it when I am actually about to buy it. Slowing down is one of the best things I ever did. I have lots of friends that complain about being too "anxious" (all properly self-diagnosed). Just don't do something if you know you'll be complaining about it later.
- PaulHoule 14y ago
  I wouldn't take it for granted that it's 10-15% better than last year. Up until a few years ago, for instance, you could count on this year's CPUs being much better than last year's CPUs. After Intel came out with Nehalehm, the pace has slowed down. The really interesting developments are in details like virtualization support, SIMD instruction, and things like AMD's Fusion. And it took me plenty of talking with people to really understand that Fusion is nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was at first, since you can't get high-end (or even medium) GPU performance out of RAM designed for CPU's. The things I build today could be at their market peak three years in the future so understanding the hardware on the market and where its going can be the difference between making somethign that's commercially viable and something that isnt.
orofino 14y ago
I find this interesting, because as some have pointed out here, there is a LOT of noise on HN. There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts. I went for a couple months without checking HN and to be honest I felt like I was missing something. I like knowing what the latest things are and what cool projects people are working on. I enjoy many of the well written comments. I find that the things I learn about on HN aren't necessarily something that is helpful immediately, but something that I can recall when I have an itch. Perhaps we're implementing analytics emails for consumers at work and using PhantomJS is an interesting option. Or... whatever. There is a ton of noise, I simply don't click on posts about languages any longer.
- ExpiredLink 14y ago
  > There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts. There's a slight problem wrt this though, you can't really judge an article by its title.
tedmiston 14y ago
For more about avoiding noise on the web, see The Slow Web by Jack Cheng [1]. 1: http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web
ksikka 14y ago
The fact that this article has 38 comments by now is proof of his point. Noise will happen, you can't change culture. Nothing to debate here.
nirvanaeropple 14y ago
Shut up. All of you.
cmccabe 14y ago
James claims not to be burned out, but I think I can see the telltale signs. If you're interested in programming, you won't arbitrarily declare that big parts of programming are "below the threshold of what matters." That's a pretty bold claim to make-- even most non-technical managers wouldn't go that far. I understand getting fed up with reading endless (often poorly argued) debates online, but that's a different issue.
- adestefan 14y ago
  At one point there's the realization that there are not as many hours in the day as there used to be because of other obligations. That's the point where your threshold of what really matters starts to get pretty close to the ceiling. It has nothing to do with being burnt out and has more to do with coming to grips with the fact that there's more to the world than you. Although today is a special day (in most of the US) because you get that "extra hour." Grumble grumble DST...
jnazario 14y ago
this is a serious struggle i face, too. in my role i have to stay fresh and on top of large areas, new ideas, and what's coming next. curation, while tempting, leads to an echo chamber. i've built curation tools for the past ten years, mostly for myself (and they work really well, i share them with select friends), but ultimately i have to withstand the noise and dig out interesting stuff. i just triage quickly, to be honest, and i try not to rely on other people to do my curation for me (either crowd-based selection or manual selection). i can stil avoid much of the same old noise and debates but i get to see new ideas, perspectives, topics, and things. some of the links here have been great to see, however, and i will have to utilize them. thanks for sharing them.

147 points by prajjwal 14y ago

Hacker News has become the source of the noise for me and I'm increasingly not coming here. I often block it in my hosts file, in fact, along with reddit and Facebook. There is still, occasionally, a relevant technical article (that's not primarily opinion) or link to a new open source project that is relevant to my interests. But that seems to be around %2-4 of the content. HN is crowded out with submissions that are designed primarily to be excuses to be outraged at anyone who believes in intellectual property, or that isn't a leftist, with the occasional outrage at violations of privacy thrown in. And you certainly can't have a good discussion on those articles-- haters going to hate, and leftists hate private property and fandroids hate apple. This is the fourth time I've seen this happen. The first was slashdot, which by 2002 or so, was so overrun with GPL fascists that you couldn't say anything short of the party line, less it be downvoted to oblivion. Then Digg which gave so much power to early users that it was pointless to even try. Then Reddit which has its general /r/politics subreddit-- which everyone is subscribe to by default- with a moderation policy that bans anyone who doesn't toe the leftist line well enough to goose step. And now Hacker News. Once I did an experiment. There was an article where I didn't like the outcome, along with most of HN, but the principle involved, a greater principle, one that most on HN claim to espouse, was being violated. I posted a comment noting that I didn't like the outcome, naming the principle, noting that most of us agree with that principle, and then showing how upholding that principle (eg: not being a hypocrite) required us to temper our outrage. I got downvoted to oblivion (which on HN helpfully means your post fades into the background making it impossible to read, which I find hilarious- we're not just going to put you at the bottom of the page, we're going to make it impossible for those who are broad minded enough to scroll down to even read it.) So, despite agreeing with the majority, clearly explaining my position, and why I hated having to reach that conclusion, what the principle was, and why we all generally agree with that principle... I was still downvoted, because I wasn't making a post agreeing with the party line. That's the point when I accepted that moderation is broken, and Hacker News is not a place where good discussion can happen reliably. I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.

incision 14y ago
1) Kick things off with sweeping generalizations of four sites spanning ten years as "haters", "fandroids", "leftists" and "fascists". 2) Spend the rest of the tangent hypocritically complaining about name-calling while demanding that someone refute your purely anecdotal evidence. 3) Triumphantly explain how I've somehow proven your point by posting this.
taybin 14y ago
How about some specifics? I get suspicious when I see "leftists" thrown around.
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  I find it's best to ignore a post when any rash generalization is made; be it against people I side with or not.
- nirvana 14y ago
  Here's some specifics: Anything having to do with the 2008 fiscal crisis. Anything having to do with monetary policy in general. Hell, just try pointing out that the IR absorption of CO2 is less than that of water vapor (eg: clouds) in a discussion of global warming. You'll get no end of "all scientists believe in global warming[1]" and downvotes, for this scientific fact. [1] This is, by far, the most anti-intellectual and offensive statement. Science doesn't work by majority. Worse, it is simply factually false. There is no survey of scientists to determine their votes, and there is a sizable contingent of scientists who refute it or dispute it. Further, the references to "science" that this side makes generally come from IPCC reports, which is to say, reports prepared by politicians which in the past have often been refuted by the very scientists whose research they claim to be summarizing. This issue is really a good one, because it is a purely scientific one, it is relatively straightforward and easy to disprove (Mars was warming at the same time, with the earth and the solar cycle, despite having no Hummers, the earth has been getting cooler for the past decade, despite CO2 going up, the "warming" period coincides with ice ages, and the "evidence", namely the Mann "hockey stick" was the result of outright fraud).... yet the people who believe it believe it for ideological reasons, and actually reject science, making scientific discussions impossible. (Global warming is the left's creationism!) all you can get is insistence that all scientists believe in it (all christians believe in creationism, right? Actually they don't all believe in it, possibly a majority don't.) Or you can get pointers to scientific sounding blog posts that at the root end up being nonsense. The closest I've ever gotten to an actual scientific debate on global warming was with a physicist who, in the end, was reduced to insisting that man made carbon dioxide had different effects on the atmosphere than "naturally occurring" carbon dioxide. At that point I gave up- I can't argue with a belief like that. How many people do you think on Hacker News believe in Global Warming? How many of them have ever looked up the IR absorption of CO2? Or would listen to that point? How many people on Hacker News reject intellectual property out of hand? How many of them can derive, from first principles, an explanation for any private property ownership? I believe the former is the majority and the latter is a tiny fraction. Yet they "believe in private property" -- but only situationally. (EG: Ok to steal movies, but not cars, or money, unless you're the government, then its ok to steal money if you call it taxes. Is that not a reasonable characterization of "leftist" positions? Ok, then how can a leftist believe in the principle of private property if its sometimes ok to steal? By redefining the word "steal"?)

yawaramin 14y ago

@James Hague: so what are the unusual blogs you're subscribing to? I'm always on the lookout for that kind of stuff. I'll start off with one of my discoveries: the feed for a readlist (http://readlists.com/ http://readlists.com/) created by a guy named Stu Sherwin: http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/ http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/

akoncius 14y ago
nice! will check it for further usage of it. i really enjoy HackerMonthly format, and would like to get more like this type of material.
jseliger 14y ago
I'm fond of my own blog, which is about books and ideas; you can find in my profile if you're curious. The Feature: http://thefeature.net/ http://thefeature.net/ is excellent. Hooking Up Smart is great if you're interested in sex, gender relations, relationships, and dating: http://www.hookingupsmart.com http://www.hookingupsmart.com. I Use This: http://usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com/ can be surprisingly helpful at times. I discovered Pigma Micron pens through it!

petercooper 14y ago

The author mentions the fine Hacker Monthly but curated e-mails also have a role to play here. If you want something with more coverage and volume but still remain sane, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ is a weekly newsletter with the best of HN's links by HN's own 'duck'. I do similar work with my Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly and StatusCode newsletters and frequently get e-mails from people who say they like being subscribed so they can turn down the 'noise' they get on Twitter, etc. There are thousands of such regular, curated digests in almost any medium you could think of. Not just e-mails or magazines, but podcasts, link blogs, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts too. Have a good look around on the topics that interest you, subscribe to the digests, and then skip the noise.

kallus 14y ago
Thanks for the tip! I personally use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the morning and be done. The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?
- petercooper 14y ago
  Isn't the reason you use that service (waste less time here) specifically to avoid getting drawn into the discussions? Serious question! :-) How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way? I think the issue isn't curation, since Slashdot is technically an editor curated news service, but the timing. That is, how do you have a good discussion when the timescales are so large rather than over the course of a few hours? Sites like MetaFilter - http://www.metafilter.com/ http://www.metafilter.com/, Edward Tufte's forum - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1, QBN - http://www.qbn.com/ http://www.qbn.com/ - and numerous blogs have solved this problem to a great extent, IMHO, and intriguingly are all single threaded (or in the case of blogs, most, but not all).

Camillo 14y ago

Since when is Hacker News a programming news site? AFAICT it's mainly a startup news/self-promotion vehicle, with a few programming articles thrown in to satisfy the technical cofounders.

inerte 14y ago

I too do all these things listed by James, skipping articles and comparisons. But that's because I am now an expert: I've read far too much about dynamic vs. static to have the patient to fully read the good old opinions about this subject. The same about comparisons, I know it's 10% better than last year's because last year I actually read an article, and it was 10%-15% better than 2010, which was 10% better than 2009. Two things helped: I stopped doing the engineering dance, dueling trivia with others. I don't care if the new iPhone does 5 times less network requests on maps when not on wi-fi but gets less POIs because the map provider is pulverized, on China is X while on Iceland is Y, but on San Francisco bla bla bla. Frankly, talking to a Wikipedia is boring. The other thing that helped is that I gave up trying to live on the bleeding edge of anything. I don't sleep on the line to buy an iPad mini, I wait three days if and when I have the free time. I don't know what's the current best SSD, I google it when I am actually about to buy it. Slowing down is one of the best things I ever did. I have lots of friends that complain about being too "anxious" (all properly self-diagnosed). Just don't do something if you know you'll be complaining about it later.

PaulHoule 14y ago
I wouldn't take it for granted that it's 10-15% better than last year. Up until a few years ago, for instance, you could count on this year's CPUs being much better than last year's CPUs. After Intel came out with Nehalehm, the pace has slowed down. The really interesting developments are in details like virtualization support, SIMD instruction, and things like AMD's Fusion. And it took me plenty of talking with people to really understand that Fusion is nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was at first, since you can't get high-end (or even medium) GPU performance out of RAM designed for CPU's. The things I build today could be at their market peak three years in the future so understanding the hardware on the market and where its going can be the difference between making somethign that's commercially viable and something that isnt.

orofino 14y ago

I find this interesting, because as some have pointed out here, there is a LOT of noise on HN. There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts. I went for a couple months without checking HN and to be honest I felt like I was missing something. I like knowing what the latest things are and what cool projects people are working on. I enjoy many of the well written comments. I find that the things I learn about on HN aren't necessarily something that is helpful immediately, but something that I can recall when I have an itch. Perhaps we're implementing analytics emails for consumers at work and using PhantomJS is an interesting option. Or... whatever. There is a ton of noise, I simply don't click on posts about languages any longer.

ExpiredLink 14y ago
> There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts. There's a slight problem wrt this though, you can't really judge an article by its title.

tedmiston 14y ago

For more about avoiding noise on the web, see The Slow Web by Jack Cheng [1]. 1: http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web

ksikka 14y ago

The fact that this article has 38 comments by now is proof of his point. Noise will happen, you can't change culture. Nothing to debate here.

nirvanaeropple 14y ago

Shut up. All of you.

cmccabe 14y ago

James claims not to be burned out, but I think I can see the telltale signs. If you're interested in programming, you won't arbitrarily declare that big parts of programming are "below the threshold of what matters." That's a pretty bold claim to make-- even most non-technical managers wouldn't go that far. I understand getting fed up with reading endless (often poorly argued) debates online, but that's a different issue.

adestefan 14y ago
At one point there's the realization that there are not as many hours in the day as there used to be because of other obligations. That's the point where your threshold of what really matters starts to get pretty close to the ceiling. It has nothing to do with being burnt out and has more to do with coming to grips with the fact that there's more to the world than you. Although today is a special day (in most of the US) because you get that "extra hour." Grumble grumble DST...

jnazario 14y ago

this is a serious struggle i face, too. in my role i have to stay fresh and on top of large areas, new ideas, and what's coming next. curation, while tempting, leads to an echo chamber. i've built curation tools for the past ten years, mostly for myself (and they work really well, i share them with select friends), but ultimately i have to withstand the noise and dig out interesting stuff. i just triage quickly, to be honest, and i try not to rely on other people to do my curation for me (either crowd-based selection or manual selection). i can stil avoid much of the same old noise and debates but i get to see new ideas, perspectives, topics, and things. some of the links here have been great to see, however, and i will have to utilize them. thanks for sharing them.