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And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself. PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a pol

And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself. PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it. I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case. It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site. In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else. But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site. If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped. Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.

daniel-levin 14y ago
Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?
- apl 14y ago
  > Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of > middlebrow dismissals) possible? I'll give you a middlebrow dismissal: No. Definitely not at the current state of the art. In fact, not many people agree on whether a given comment qualifies as a "middlebrow" dismissal; personally, I consider many of the examples that pg has labeled as such pertinent points. If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.
  - daniel-levin 14y ago
    What is 'the current state of the art'? Note that I am a total dilettante in the area of machine learning/NLP. And why couldn't the top k HN users (patio11 et al) be given the option to classify comments {dismissive; troll; shallow-cheering; ...;} and this human classification could be the training set of a supervised learning system that could use NLP algorithms to derive useful metrics. Simplistic example: dismissive word ('sucks'; 'never work', 'impossible') density correlating to something that has been flagged as dismissive. Or is this an impossibility? Again, I do not have the hands on knowledge to be able to call this one.
    - tobyjsullivan 14y ago
      The immediate flaw in that approach is that "patio11 et al" are top contributers because they post a lot and have valuable opinions - NOT because they are always right. They're not (I'm confident they would agree here). Therefore their opinions would be inappropriate as an AI training set.
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
        That's true. But doesn't that kind of sidestep the question? It's always going to be a matter of opinion what constitutes middlebrow-dismissalness, so if we accept that then the question is really: "Is it possible to automatically determine if this post would be judged in this way by this person (or group of people)?" It seems like that's a question that has at least a possibility of a "yes" answer.
      - daniel-levin 14y ago
        Sure, totally agree, but a consensus by verified posters was more of what I was aiming for
        spion 14y ago
        I guess I am going to pitch my potential solution again: http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html?m=1 http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathem... it would probably have more weight when i release the test code and datasets though...
raganwald 14y ago
In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not... But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? That's at least half of the value of most posts on this site. Not the content of the posts itself, but rather in the quality of the discussion that follows. And while some posts do a better job than others of sparking that quality discussion, the interesting things is that we have 100% complete control over the quality. I'm reminded of politicians when you ask them a question you don't want to answer. "Mr. Obama, under your presidency, what chance do I have of joining the 1% by starting a cable company?" "Good question. Let's talk about the initiatives I've sponsored to help people create and build businesses in this great land..." We can do the same thing. "Good question! Let's talk about how one could get into this business and especially how one might make this business irrelevant by disrupting it..."
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
polyfractal 14y ago
There is a big difference between negativism and cold reality. For example, these three posts in the original Ask HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 Are all actionable, informative and realistic. They aren't negative comments. Sure, there were some "This is dumb and you are stupid" posts in the thread, but most of the replies were sincerely realistic. It really wasn't middlebrow dismissal...it was "this is going to be hard, and here is why". In all honesty, that is exactly the sort of feedback I would want as someone doing basic research in an area. I would want to know why it is going to be hard, why certain interests/business ideas are entrenched, etc.
angryasian 14y ago
A valuable skill in life is asking the right questions and knowing how to ask it. I think if the original post asked "theoretically how would one disrupt the cable industry" the discussion would of been much different
xyzzy123 14y ago
I think the response on HN was almost reasonable. It could be summarised as 1/3 useful, plus a 2/3 measure of "the fact you're asking us this implies you have no idea how hard this will be." Yes, it might be discouraging. However, someone with the guts, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah to start their own cable company is not going to let a few negative comments on the Internet get in their way.
josephlord 14y ago
Have you actually read the thread he was complaining about? Most (but not all) was very reasonable with specific challenges to be overcome (which if he really wants to do this he should want to know about) and in many cases some suggestions and/or alternative approaches to achieving his apparent aim (different subscription pricing model).

daniel-levin 14y ago

Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?

apl 14y ago
> Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of > middlebrow dismissals) possible? I'll give you a middlebrow dismissal: No. Definitely not at the current state of the art. In fact, not many people agree on whether a given comment qualifies as a "middlebrow" dismissal; personally, I consider many of the examples that pg has labeled as such pertinent points. If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.
- daniel-levin 14y ago
  What is 'the current state of the art'? Note that I am a total dilettante in the area of machine learning/NLP. And why couldn't the top k HN users (patio11 et al) be given the option to classify comments {dismissive; troll; shallow-cheering; ...;} and this human classification could be the training set of a supervised learning system that could use NLP algorithms to derive useful metrics. Simplistic example: dismissive word ('sucks'; 'never work', 'impossible') density correlating to something that has been flagged as dismissive. Or is this an impossibility? Again, I do not have the hands on knowledge to be able to call this one.
  - tobyjsullivan 14y ago
    The immediate flaw in that approach is that "patio11 et al" are top contributers because they post a lot and have valuable opinions - NOT because they are always right. They're not (I'm confident they would agree here). Therefore their opinions would be inappropriate as an AI training set.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      That's true. But doesn't that kind of sidestep the question? It's always going to be a matter of opinion what constitutes middlebrow-dismissalness, so if we accept that then the question is really: "Is it possible to automatically determine if this post would be judged in this way by this person (or group of people)?" It seems like that's a question that has at least a possibility of a "yes" answer.
    - daniel-levin 14y ago
      Sure, totally agree, but a consensus by verified posters was more of what I was aiming for
      - spion 14y ago
        I guess I am going to pitch my potential solution again: http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical-approach.html?m=1 http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathem... it would probably have more weight when i release the test code and datasets though...

raganwald 14y ago

In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not... But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? That's at least half of the value of most posts on this site. Not the content of the posts itself, but rather in the quality of the discussion that follows. And while some posts do a better job than others of sparking that quality discussion, the interesting things is that we have 100% complete control over the quality. I'm reminded of politicians when you ask them a question you don't want to answer. "Mr. Obama, under your presidency, what chance do I have of joining the 1% by starting a cable company?" "Good question. Let's talk about the initiatives I've sponsored to help people create and build businesses in this great land..." We can do the same thing. "Good question! Let's talk about how one could get into this business and especially how one might make this business irrelevant by disrupting it..."

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

polyfractal 14y ago

There is a big difference between negativism and cold reality. For example, these three posts in the original Ask HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 Are all actionable, informative and realistic. They aren't negative comments. Sure, there were some "This is dumb and you are stupid" posts in the thread, but most of the replies were sincerely realistic. It really wasn't middlebrow dismissal...it was "this is going to be hard, and here is why". In all honesty, that is exactly the sort of feedback I would want as someone doing basic research in an area. I would want to know why it is going to be hard, why certain interests/business ideas are entrenched, etc.

angryasian 14y ago

A valuable skill in life is asking the right questions and knowing how to ask it. I think if the original post asked "theoretically how would one disrupt the cable industry" the discussion would of been much different

xyzzy123 14y ago

I think the response on HN was almost reasonable. It could be summarised as 1/3 useful, plus a 2/3 measure of "the fact you're asking us this implies you have no idea how hard this will be." Yes, it might be discouraging. However, someone with the guts, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah to start their own cable company is not going to let a few negative comments on the Internet get in their way.

josephlord 14y ago

Have you actually read the thread he was complaining about? Most (but not all) was very reasonable with specific challenges to be overcome (which if he really wants to do this he should want to know about) and in many cases some suggestions and/or alternative approaches to achieving his apparent aim (different subscription pricing model).