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Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
- Kiro 13y agoI upvoted this because I agree but the tone of the OP is another thing I don't want to see in the comments.
- sker 13y agoI used to dislike the "this is why I love Hacker News" comment. It's not so prevalent anymore, but it was very common 3 or 4 years ago. And while we're on the subject, I dislike the use of the word sure on nerd sites. I say nerd sites because I haven't seen it (ab)used so much on other sites or movies. Basically, people say "I'm sure" to mean "I think" and "I'm pretty sure" to mean "I kind of think." I just went to reddit and the fist thread on my front page had 3 instances of "pretty sure." I'm pretty sure it's the most common phrase and it gets posted thousands of times per day in contexts where the user is not sure at all.
- regularfry 13y agoYou don't see either as often here as certain other sites, but two more that are invariably abused: "Most people..." and "You've obviously never..." The former is almost always code for "Most right-thinking people who fit into my personal worldview, which I am terrified of breaking...", while the latter is "I've got some domain knowledge here which on face value contradicts the precise words you've just written. It therefore follows that it's impossible for me to be wrong about..." and is more often than not followed by a demonstration of exactly how wrong it is possible to be. Any time I see either of these, it's end-of-thread-time.
- GrinningFool 13y agoI tend to use such phrases as a shorthand for "I can say that X is true based on my own experience, but have not explicitly researched this topic and so am open to disagreement from someone more knowledgeable". On the other hand, expecting such nuance to come through in the phrase "I'm almost positive" or "nearly certain" (my preferred variants) is likely a bit unreasonable.
- laichzeit0 13y agoThe comment that gets my anal beads in a knot the most: "Citation please" or "Can you link to a study that.." etc. Sometimes people (myself included) just like to comment. Fart out a completely subjective opinion without worrying about the little army of pedantic party poopers coming along to spoil the fun. It's just a discussion board after all. Must everything be quite so serious. all. the. time. ?
- icebraining 13y agoIt's fine to post subjective opinions ("I think yellow flying monkeys are awesome, and should be venerated as gods"), but those kinds of comments are usually targeted at statements of facts that get thrown around ("Yellow flying monkey's poop cures cancer and diarrhea").
- pekk 13y agoIs it necessary to make groundless claims all the time? The reaction you are seeing has a context of serious subject matter. If you want silly disposable comments, try Reddit
- lmm 13y ago>Must everything be quite so serious. all. the. time. ? Yes. Yes it must. It's what makes HN unique and wonderful. There are thousands of other discussion boards that aren't as serious.
- raverbashing 13y agoHN sometimes looks like an Asperger's meetup. I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism, but sometimes it's more uptight than getting interviewed at a border control. I visit and get value from it, but this article is spot on. Well, I still think [citation needed] is relevant sometimes, in the case of a legitimate/interesting (or maybe questionable) citation that would produce more value with the citation. (But sometimes it goes like this "The sky is blue"[citation needed])
- laichzeit0 13y ago> I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism Is it? [citation please]
- chris_wot 13y agoWARNING!!!! MISUSE OF CITATION NEEDED!
- pavlov 13y agoYes, sometimes you want to see a source, but why would you use that phrasing? The passive form doesn't feel like a conversation. Like the original poster wrote, it comes across as passive-aggressive. Imagine someone walking into a coffee shop and ordering coffee by saying: "Coffee required" -- while drawing imaginary square brackets around his head with his fingers.
- pekk 13y agoIt isn't a request for a source. It is like saying 'if you want others to believe this thing you are claiming publicly, you need to back it up better than asking us to take you on your word.'
- pavlov 13y agoWhat's the difference? To me, your formulation is just another somewhat passive-aggressive way of asking for a source.
- oelmekki 13y agoPersonally, I'm tired of comments complaining about HN commenters (not saying author did so, though, those are helpful and non aggressive recommendations). HN is by far the place on the internet where I find the most insightful comments.
- lutusp 13y agoUnfortunately there are too many useful rhetorical devices in the list, devices that serve a purpose. Ironically, the list starts off with "correlation is not causation," an expression that in most cases is raised for very good reasons -- for example, any popular science story that includes the word "linked" but without adequate qualifiers. If more people were science-literate, these platitudes wouldn't be necessary. But they aren't, so they are.
- TelmoMenezes 13y agoI agree. The author says "If there's some specific reason you think a a study is wrong, describe it". Unfortunately, this is very often precisely the problem: many times not in the study itself but in the way it's reported. "Correlation is not causation" mistakes are not always obvious. Especially when there's ideological bias. E.g: the claim that owning a gun increases the chances that you will be violently killed by X%.
- lutusp 13y ago> The author says "If there's some specific reason you think a a study is wrong, describe it". Unfortunately, this is very often precisely the problem: many times not in the study itself but in the way it's reported. Too true. My recent favorite was a popular account of a marijuana study. The popular article was titled "Marijuana causes psychosis" or words to that effect. The popular account went on about how teenagers went crazy after smoking killer weed. The study itself said, "We don't know whether marijuana use sometimes causes psychosis, or psychosis sometimes causes marijuana use. More study is needed."
- chilldream 13y ago"Correlation is not causation" started useful but has become less useful the more cliched it became. And OP is right that it's particularly useless among people who've already heard it. The whole reason people felt the need to mention "correlation is not causation" is that correlation is evidence of causation. Some people seem to think this catchphrase means the two are unrelated which is also false.
- gilgoomesh 13y agoThe first 8 points are all totally valid comments and I don't think they can be rejected out-of-hand. The author seems annoyed by a perception that they're thrown into the mix in snarky, passive aggressive or ad hominem ways but that doesn't invalidate their use when they are accurately applied. Facile, poorly reasoned content is abundant on the internet. Hacker News is a firehose of content – both good and bad – and commenters aim to filter that by tagging the content through comments. It is not always a good use of your time to make a reasoned argument against blatant logical fallacies, scientific/engineering ignorance and failure to understand modern tech business practices. If you're spending more time discounting vapid content than its idiot author spent creating it, then the world is suffering a net loss.
- saurik 13y agoThe inevitable comments about Bettridge's law of headlines every time a title ends in a question mark are not helpful. They don't make an argument, as the article is hardly ever arguing for the question. It is just indicating "look at me, I know of this exotic jargon term, and it happens to apply to this article title". Like, this article could have been "would hacker news improve if we stopped posting certain kinds of comments?"; the answer might be "no", but saying "no, due to Bettridge's law of headlines" provides no value or understanding to the reader.
- pekk 13y agoSensationalized, misleading titles are not helpful.
- saurik 13y agoThis, also, is not useful to point out every time an article title ends in a question mark. I'm not advocating for articles with titles that end in question marks, only that there is no value in reflexively pointing out "this article's title ends in a question mark" every time it happens: Bettridge's law of headlines exists, the point has been made, and even to the people who haven't heard about it, it doesn't give the reader any insight. I maintain that the only use of that particular comment is to make the person writing it feel smart for knowing a jargon term.
- benologist 13y agoRandom PG quote I've kept on my clipboard for days looking for the right day to paste it. GOD I HOPE HE SEES. Copying != stealing, because apparently time stopped about 8 years ago. And this is digg. IE is hard to develop for even though all the problems it had have been solved for approximately 11 thousand years before anyone alive today was even born. First they came for [whatever we're talking about] and I said nothing ...
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoI've not read the link yet so I'm curious to see if this is meant as a parody of bad posts or is sincere.
- moomin 13y agoCliches like this are OK. What really annoys me is that the top rated comment is invariably a straight-forward contradiction of the original article's thesis. Like this comment here.
- k__ 13y agoIs there already a law for this? I would love this to be called "Moomin's Law"
- sker 13y agoI personally call it Pwnage Culture. Karma-based sites love it when a user debunks an article or another user's comment. You get extra points if you start your reply with a cold remark such as "No." "Wrong." "False." And then you put some random citations to Pubmed or Wikipedia at the bottom of your comment.
- RivieraKid 13y ago"You get extra points if you start your reply with a cold remark such as "No." "Wrong." "False." Exactly, I automatically downvote comments like that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lotsofcows 13y agoThat'll teach them! It's fortunate that nerds are psychic. It's ok, you can downvote this, I know it'll make you feel better about yourself.
- RivieraKid 13y agoYes, it makes me feel better, that's the only reason I do it.
- 13y ago
- mryan 13y agohttp://xkcd.com/1053/ http://xkcd.com/1053/ For each of these irritants, perhaps someone has just recently discovered them and is keen to appear knowledgable the next time the debate comes up. If I had my way, a comment that matched something like /^This\./ would result in an immediate hellban. I don't know why this particular habit annoys me so much.
- chatman 13y agoThis.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gnur 13y agoWhile this is true for long time readers, there are new readers on this website every single day. Perhaps someone hasn't learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect and learns something new. Perhaps the point that he wants to make (I think) doesn't come through, he wants comments to be more then short stubs, comments that really make a point.
- shaggyfrog 13y ago> What comments bother you the most? How about you do one for story submissions? #1 on the list can be ones whose titles are link-baiting "N Xs that Y" types.
- quchen 13y ago"I just quit my job at AwesomeCompany"
- anigbrowl 13y agoAlso smugbait 'Why you will (do something that's likely to become popular)' and the imperious 'Begin/stop doing something right now'. Yes, those headlines do get my attention. In a way that makes me wish to slap the writer for their lack of manners.
- citricsquid 13y agoThe biggest problem with Hacker News comments -- actually, make that all comments -- is fundamental: the sort of people that leave comments are (more often than not) people that want something, ANYTHING, to say, not people that have something to say.
- RBerenguel 13y agoSomehow I think your comment applies to TV, radio and writers. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse and worse I think (as a side note, I thing signal-to-noise is also one of the frequent HN comments :D)
- sker 13y agoI don't think that's a problem. I think that's by design. Internet forums are similar to bars where people gather to hang out and talk about common interests. There are other outlets where the people that have something to say can say it.
- kybernetyk 13y agoa) the internet (and HN) can't get full b) there are downvote arrows To me it's OK if people just leave anything as a comment here because it will be modded down if it's irrelevant to the discussion.
- DanBC 13y ago> it's OK if people just leave anything as a comment here because it will be modded down if it's irrelevant to the discussion. It would be great if down voting was more prevalent. Many people don't down vote for anything but the absolute worst comment. Some people downvote for disagreement and not poor comment.
- dredmorbius 13y agothe internet (and HN) can't get full My reading buffer most certainly can. If the s/n dips sufficiently, I'm out. It's the Yogi Berra Restaurant Syndrome, or the Evaporative Cooling Effect: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
- brador 13y agoIf you start getting annoyed enough to post about it it's usually a sign to take a break.
- michaelwww 13y agoTelling us how ridiculously little time it took you to build something cool. Most of the time I enjoy what you built, but telling me that you did it "over the weekend" cheapens it for me. Are you bragging, trying to excuse it's shortcomings, or lying? All three most likely. Unless you're a team of people in a weekend competition [1], I'd skip the part about only caring to put a couple days into it before showing it off. [1] http://garage48.org/blogger/list-of-projects-built-over-weekend-in-garage48-helsinki-2011 http://garage48.org/blogger/list-of-projects-built-over-week...
- zalew 13y ago> > What comments bother you the most? "just use bootstrap/heroku/nodejs/techoftheday" "hn is turning into reddit" "http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Anything that good hackers would find interesting." complaints about: negativity, wrong tone and cursing. looking for reasons to get offended.
- erikb 13y agoThis is not criticism, but just an idea I had while ago while writing similar articles: Maybe only people read this who only consider the gain you get from reading their comment. Probably people who don't care about the other users at all will not read it.
- anigbrowl 13y ago[citation needed] - This isn't Wikipedia, so skip the passive-aggressive comments. If you think something's wrong, explain why. The reason to post this is not so much thinking the comment is necessarily wrong as that it makes an extraordinary or absolutist claim absent any evidence, which if accepted as fact is going to change the shape of the whole discussion...perhaps appropriately, but the onus is on the person making the claim to support it. A link to a logical fallacy, such as ad hominem or more pretentiously tu quoque - this isn't a debate team and you don't score points for this. Considering the requests that if one thinks something is wrong, one should explain why, I'd say that identifying errors in reasoning is quite appropriate; though some of them are so frequent that I just downvote rather than pointing them out yet again. Fallacies of composition are astonishingly frequent, for example.
- rjtavares 13y agoWhat bothers me is the link. If you say it's ad hominem and I don't know what that is, I can google it. Adding a link just feels pretentious.
- duaneb 13y agoI consider linking helpful; that's just being a good citizen. Ad hominem is recognizable, but e.g. "Begging the question" is more often misunderstood and linking helps clarify.
- lutusp 13y ago> Adding a link just feels pretentious. I sometimes find myself debating with people who never do any research, who expect to get by with flowery rhetoric. For such people, links can serve as a reality check.
- jessedhillon 13y agoYes, but on the other hand, fallacious reasoning is rarely the source of disagreement or controversy in a debate. At least in my experience. All you're doing by saying "ad hominem" is shifting the focus to technical delivery of the argument rather than focusing on the real matter of the discussion. And most people forget that calling something an ad hominem attack does not mean that it's wrong. Most things which get called ad hominem are usually not, in fact -- saying "you are dumb and your arguments is wrong because of X, Y, Z" is different than saying "your argument is wrong because you are dumb" (the latter would be ad hominem, the former is merely an irrelevant statement)
- BetaCygni 13y agoI'm actually quite happy that the list contains these items. Yes, when overused they are annoying (like everything else) but by itself they are all (except the "general internet comment") valid.
- Toshio 13y ago> "What comments bother you the most?" Mindless evangelism of proprietary technologies, disguised as an attempt at an insightful comment (microsoft's mvps and evangelists are particularly guilty of this).
- regularfry 13y agoEmphasis on the "mindless". I'm horribly spoilt in that I'm always hideously disappointed when cool tech comes along that's not open source, but there's some very interesting work going on behind closed doors that is worth evangelising.
- pekk 13y agoSuch work is not worth evangelizing. It is worth technical discussion. There is a difference.
- regularfry 13y agoIf the work's going on behind closed doors, the technical discussion won't happen without some kind of evangelism.
- jamesjguthrie 13y agoDefinitely sick of seeing [citation needed] Sometimes discussion boards need to have opinions on them and not just facts, IMO!
- asgard1024 13y agoIt would be nice to have a sort of an "argument" database, so instead of putting the argument in the comment again, you could just link to the database. Then computers could filter these arguments automatically for the people who already know it. Maybe the arguments could be parametrized, to make the connection to the problem at hand more obvious. Ah well.. a man can only dream.
- melling 13y agoA lot of arguments are repeated endlessly on the Internet, and elsewhere. I've often thought that someone should build a graph database for this. Then maybe we could move past the basic argument and go a little deeper.
- asgard1024 13y agoI agree. There was Debatepedia (http://dbp.idebate.org http://dbp.idebate.org), but it seems dead. Unless the arguments are in sort of machine readable format, any filtering will be difficult. The problem is the format - I believe AI researchers still struggle with that one.
- lostlogin 13y agoIs this really relevant to Hacker News? What does it have to do with hacking?
- nikatwork 13y agoComments that focus on a single ambiguous phrasing or definition, then begins a giant chain of people pedantically arguing about technicalities. Can we please discuss ideas and concepts?
- regularfry 13y agoThe HN comment that really bores me is the one that totally denigrates the project described in the link because it's "been done before", "won't work because X" where X is a woolly hypothetical, "doesn't solve Y" where it's blindingly obvious that Y is either incredibly hard or tangential to the point, or "could simply be done with just A, B and C" where A, B and C are some permutation of a raspberry pi, arduino, a kinect, some random combination of open source libraries, emacs and a blender. There is benefit in new approaches to old problems. Incomplete attempts are still useful. Actually getting a project into a state that more than one person can use it, even if that use is just "Here, read the code. It doesn't work, but you might find it enlightening," is an effort worth respecting. It's extremely rare that these comments have any worthwhile content in them. They seem to serve to point at the commenter's username and say "Aren't I clever for spotting the problems with your project?" What effect is that supposed to have past your own ego? You can't rewind the universe to a state where the project didn't happen, so why not take 3 minutes instead of 2 and find something positive to highlight rather than a negative to pick on?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoTo put an even finer point on it, one of the worst and most pervasive comments is of this type: "This is a cat, but I like dogs, why isn't this a dog?" Once you understand the type you start noticing it everywhere all the time. Any time there is a creative work there will always be someone complaining that it's not the thing they wanted created instead.
- RivieraKid 13y agoThis annoys me too, it's just people who want to feel superior.
- GrinningFool 13y agoThis isn't specific to HN though. You can see it on slashdot, reddit, and elsewhere -- basically anywhere people are free to post ideas or accomplishments. Those kinds of replies always read to me in one of three ways: 1. "I wish I'd thought of this obvious application of X, and because I didn't I will denigrate it." Typical responses are as you described. 2. "I am special. I am more special than the person who posted this thing or had this idea, so I will discuss how neither the person who had this idea nor the idea itself aren't that special in a passive-aggressive way" These are especially common when the person originating the idea is exceptionally young or otherwise noteworthy. 3. "This person is not as smart as I am. I will prove it by attacking his or her idea." These replies are typified by off-the-cuff responses that outline one or more extremely obvious weaknesses in the idea/approach being discussed. Such responses ignore the likelihood that the person or people who have spent weeks/months/years formulating the idea could have possibly considered such a basic flaw that the respondent spotted immediately. There is also a fourth reply: genuine criticism of the idea, including suggestions on how to improve it. In fairness to HN, I see that type of reply more often here than anywhere else. It would be cool if more people realized that someone else's intelligence and/or good ideas don't reduce the intelligence of other people, nor take away from the ideas of other people.
- RivieraKid 13y ago100% agree and I'd add other things I hate about HN: * First comment debunks the article. * Comments that start with "No." It's worse if the "No." is in its own paragraph. * Mentioning Maslow's hierarchy of needs. * General passive-agressivness. * Lack of humour and light-heartedness. * People upvote some really shitty stuff. The newest submissions page is sometimes more interesting than the homepage. * People love to upvote blogposts of some people, e.g daringfireball.net or paulgraham.com, no matter the quality.
- caw 13y agoThe humor is why I also browse Slashdot, even though they're generally late (like by days) with the submissions. There's a little bit of serious discussion, a lot of memes, but then some generally humorous discussions based off misinterpretations of comments, articles, and titles.
- basicallydan 13y agoWhat comments am I tired of seeing, you ask? This one: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." If you want to argue against surveillance, please do it with your words instead of just going "Well Benjamin Franklin said..." I'm not saying don't quote him or use his arguments in yours, but simply quoting a man who has been dead for hundreds is not an argument.
- paulnechifor 13y agoI think that's perfectly valid. Sometimes a dead guy can make an argument better than I can and it's better to quote him than rephrase it in my own words and pretend I'm insightful. This does however mean that I'm supposed to respond to criticism of the content of the quote since I agree with it.
- basicallydan 13y agoI agree with it too, and yes it's insightful. I think the key thing missing though is anything more to explain why you feel that way - as you say, you need to respond to criticism of the content of the quote :)
- est 13y agoThis is the kind of headline I am tired of seeing. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it.
- bane 13y agoI was expecting this to contain the inevitable "why didn't you do this in Haskell?" that seems to come and go in waves. I've come to think that there's a non-trivial percentage of HN users that are simply bots (written in Haskell) that insert this into a random percentage of threads. If they're responded to it then brings in a human to continue the conversation. More seriously, these aren't just gripes, most of these have some kind of remediation step too. Most of the comments here seem to be missing that. That being said, most of these are still very valid things to be said here, the problem is not that they're being said, but that they have to be said. People in general are lazy and carry around terribly poor models of the world in the heads. 8 of these are really constant, low pressure attempts to correct this problem with the last one just being a cultural issue that this isn't reddit.
- danieldk 13y agoGiven that this comment is also about Haskell, can we assume that one of the bots became sentient?
- bane 13y agoHello, my name is "bane" how can I further our conversational goals about Haskell and functional programming? Have you considered the importance of the lambda calculus in your daily life?
- jmadsen 13y agoI'll go with people who read your full paragraph, find the not quite 100% perfect analogy in the 5th most important point, and worry it like a terrier with a chew toy These people should be shot in the face with a double barrel shotgun. (You may now commence to argue over whether or not both barrels are really necessary )
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jasonkester 13y agoMy personal favorite is "The plural of anecdote is not data". Correct. The plural of anecdote is conversation, which is exactly the reason we're here. I think this one comes down to people misunderstanding the reason we're here in the first place. If you start to notice that the discussion here resembles the sort of conversation you'd have around the watercooler, that's probably has to do with the fact that Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler. Complaining that that seems to be the case and asking people to stop having lively conversation is not really helping anybody. As much as some folks want this to be the Royal Society for Correctly And Properly Dismissing The Ideas Of Other People, it's not. Good thing, too. That place wouldn't be any fun.
- pekk 13y agoThe water cooler is a place for things like gossip, stupid jokes and discussions of television shows. I hope we don't all begin to assume this is what HN should be, particularly when consequential topics are being discussed (vaccination, etc.) If I apply a corrosive black salve to my face and I feel that this saved me from cancer and really want to share it as advice, my story actually does nothing to establish self-application of black salve as an advisable practice. It is indeed an anecdote, not data. It should not be taken as data. This is very important, or people will be misled and burn their noses off.
- javajosh 13y agoIt's a water cooler for people who really, really like to understand how things work - and who also tend to have a lot of ideas that they want to share freely.
- DanBC 13y agoIt's immensely frustrating when someone is discussing a well conducted study showing an interesting result to have another person say "This feels wrong. I had $ANECDOTE, so maybe they researchers are missing $CONCLUSION_FROM_ANECDOTE?", which has been covered in the study and in the HN comments and is just a weird point anyway.
- nekopa 13y agoThis. Just because these comments appear quite frequently it doesn't necessarily mean that they are responsible for making your eyes tired, after all, correlation is not causation. Maybe try to adjust the font on your browser or use one of the popular HN chrome extension. Remember that HN is a free site and if you're not paying for it, you're the product, so try to see how you can improve your comments, thereby improving the product. Even though Pg has a legal duty to maximize shareholder value for YC [citation needed] changing how people comment would be premature optimization - why don't we see how the site shakes out after a couple of years. Saying that this is a place for discussion is at best a leaky abstraction, like Playboy magazine, I come here predominately to read the articles. I feel that I understand most of the technical articles posted here, even though some people say I suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect I feel that is just a needless ad hominem. You can read more about this in a blog post I wrote: Is the quality of HN discussion falling?
- puzzlingcaptcha 13y agoWhy didn't you write this reply in Haskell/Node.js/Go/Rust? I did a naive implementation (since I am still kinda new to this) of your post in all those languages and here are my benchmark results:
- jacques_chester 13y agoPlease make sure to follow up with a blog post about how you coped with being on the front page of HN.
- mindcrime 13y agoAnd somebody please make an unsolicited re-design of that blog post and submit that to HN.
- Fortaymedia 13y agoThe temptation to reply with one of those was great. But I resisted. Nice Post :)
- Dewie 13y agoWhat grates me is people that use "order of magnitude" for everything. It's fine if you're talking about different kinds of memory access or the acidity of some lake due to acid rain. But writing phrases like "Ever since I started biking to work, I feel an order of magnitude better" just makes you look pretentious, to me. Of course this is more of an aesthetic gripe rather than a gripe with some rhetorical device.
- alexchamberlain 13y agoGood summary: This article sums up some of the comments that annoy me too, but not because the comments is wrong or inherently annoying, but because the comment is simply incomplete. For example, "Correlation is not causation" is one of my more favourite sayings, but one should explain what was wrong in that case too. I, also, get annoyed with comments that are far too long for the point being made - go write an article in response if you want. Expletives are also a no go.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 13y ago> "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" This also sometimes misses the point. EG, when YouTubers complain about being cut off from monetising they're not the customer, nor the product. Google is the customer, choosing whether to buy the product or not.
- ilyanep 13y agoOh no. Is Hacker News going to start down the ever-descending death spiral of angst that made parts of reddit so unbearable to me (until the angst became a self-fulfilling prophecy)? Many of these classes of comments are fairly reasonable in many cases (as discussed in the rest of the comments here), and I really hope that we're not about to begin the cycle of "I hate this place, it used to be so much better" that seems to start up when Internet communities mature when I just got here.
- jacques_chester 13y agoYes. Before HN, Reddit. Before Reddit, K5. Before K5, Slashdot. Before Slashdot, Usenet and Listserv. Before Usenet and Listserv, every community ever.
- asdashopping 13y agoAnother thing that annoys me is people citing articles using numbered references beginning with 0 ([0][1]...) I can maybe understand the point of using numbered references like this (although honestly it barely affects readability having links inline) but you're not a computer. It just comes across as pretentious when you start counting at 0 as though you're referencing an array of references or something. We get that you Know Computers.
- shurcooL 13y agoI have _never_ seen the 7 of 9 of those comments here. "FTFY" stuff is from reddit.
- DanBC 13y agoWait, what? You're the product (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22you're+the+product%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22you're+the+...) Betteridge (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22betteridge%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22betteridge%...) Correlation is not causation (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22correlation+is+not+causation%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22correlation...) Maximise shareholder value is trickier, but here are three (and there are many mnay more) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001366) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4262187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4262187) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045044) Citation needed (scroll through the list a bit) (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22citation+needed%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22citation+ne...) Dunning Kruger (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=dunning+kruger&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=dunning+k...) FTFY (https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=ftfy&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=ftfy&star...)
- pohl 13y agoI recall the FTFY meme from pre-reddit slashdot. (User 872 here)
- zainny 13y agoOne thing that really annoys me about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. Responses typically take the most absolute narrow and unforgiving interpretation of any point you are trying to make and subsequently use that to spin a counterpoint. Drives me batty.
- crazytony 13y agoI don't know. You seem to be agreeing in tone with the post so it can't be everyone who is contrarian. Sorry. :)
- pointernil 13y agoYup, seams like only the greater of minds and personalities will acknowledge or even accept inputs from others and ADD to it. The default seams to be distortion along the simple and absolute black & white spectrum and then stating the opposite to be (much more/really) true. While in certain "communities" this maybe is driven by the profession it self (oh, CS and all its true/false 0/1 domains ;), very seldom "cooperative discussion" is presented as something beneficial... just check most newspaper and tv reports... we get controversy presented as the way to go while the world is clearly much more complex as to be grasped in simple black/white true/false terms. For single humans tending to such patterns in thinking certain medical conditions are associated with... in our societies looks like we embrace it much more thoughtlessly. All has to be a controversy (Parties, Companies, People)
- dredmorbius 13y agoI see that. I don't find it overly common. And if someone's disagreeing with either an inconsequential point or misconception of what I've written, I'll point it out. I find that productive discussions do grow out of conversations with people who can note both what they agree with and what they don't. I've actually learned quite a bit from this.
- 7952 13y agoI hate it when discussion's turn into a fight over semantics rather than the actual substantive argument. I am interested in how the world actually is rather than someone else's abstraction.
- olalonde 13y agoComments that annoy me most (mostly because they are blatant attempts at fishing for karma): "I would use this but it's in Javascript, there are better languages like X and Y." "The web is utterly broken, when are people going to realize this?" "For all these years I ignored RMS/Assange/etc. but now I know he was right." Comments with the words "nail" and "hammer".
- MichaelMoser123 13y ago'Leaky abstractions': I think its the wrong question if an abstraction leaks or not; any abstraction is leaky by definition, an abstraction is created by omitting details that are not relevant to the analysis, with the wish to extract the essence; The right question is if the abstraction is relevant or not. Wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction "Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying essence of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena."
- hrktb 13y agoThis would be the kind of comment the author hates...but isn't "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" a fallacy as well ? Paying for something is orthogonal to being a part of what's sold to to someone else. For instance newspapers/magazines cost a price but still "sell" their audience to advertisers. And yes, I love communities nitpicking news items, because it's not as if the internet is in lack of discussion boards, and seeing different approaches on the same items is so interesting.
- jaredsohn 13y agoThat statement is not a fallacy. Assuming a product is made by a business that hopes to become profitable, if the users aren't paying for it then what other business reason can there be to having users at all? Your example doesn't support the argument since it just states that if users pay for something it doesn't mean that they aren't also the product. So it is possible to pay for something and be part of the product, to pay for something and not be a part of the product, and to not pay something and be a part of the product but not possible to not pay for something and not be a part of the product.
- hrktb 13y ago> but not possible to not pay for something and not be a part of the product. I'll reuse a newspaper example fo simplicity. An ad company might pay to reach some portion of the audience (for instance the female worker segment between 18 and 30). But you don't control who will actually accesses the paper, and the 5 years old boy using it to craft paper boats is not in the target and just happens to use the product. A company doesn't have to monetize 100% of their user base, and it might not want to for any reason. There is no binding forcing a user of something to be on some side of a product/not product fence. It can be neither, ot can be both.
- chris_wot 13y agoAs the original author of [citation needed], I quite agree. That was designed by myself to originally ensure that Wikipedians sourced their material, not as a way to win arguments!
- stevekinney 13y agoMy least favorite—and all too popular—comment is the classic "How [or Why] did this make the front page of HN?" I have gotten to the point where I almost expect to see it near the top of every comments thread. In fairness, the HN guidelines are pretty clear about this one: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
- dredmorbius 13y agoOn balance I disagree with most of Ken's observations, though not always or in all cases. A useful comment is one which moves the conversation forward. A non-useful comment is one which serves NO useful purpose. Correlation is not causation. This is useful where a naive correlation is shown without causal mechanism. It's not useful when a correlation is shown and there's a strong causal link known. http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=552:_Correlation http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=552:_Correla... If you're not paying for it, you're the product. I disagree that that this is useless, though it's not necessary to point it out without some justification. "the legal duty to maximize shareholder value" Agree. Companies have numerous stakeholders. The "shareholder value" proposition was birthed by Milton Friedman and given a solid kick into the public eye by Jack Welch, who later called it "the world's dumbest idea": http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-orig... [citation needed] Appropriate when someone makes an extraordinary, unsubstantiated, and difficult-to-source claim. No, this isn't Wikipedia, but it is a high quality, high s/n discussion site. Not appropriate where source is trivially confirmed or when intent is strictly snarky. Premature optimization Depends on technical context. If substantiated, it's a fair gripe. Dunning-Kruger effect Sadly, far too often appropriate, IMO. Betteridge's law of headlines This is most often a meta-commentary: the story posted is vague and poorly conceived, it really shouldn't have made the front page. Increasingly I'm flagging such items (but not the Betteridge comments on them). Logical fallacies As with "citation needed": the quality of discourse is served when people don't take cheap shots or rhetorical evasions. If you're trying to make a point and you're committing obvious logical fallacies, you deserve to be called on it. Cue ... FTFY ... Cue: http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/406/282/2b8.jpg http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/406/282/2b8...
- randomsearch 13y ago"If you're not paying for it, you're the product." I have to say that I disagree with this meme in general. Google does not sell me (yet, at least) to its advertisers. It sells screen real estate and placed links. Sure, the links are very targeted, and more specific than much (probably not all) advertising that preceded it. I know that this meme is trying to make a general point, i.e. "there's a hidden cost to using this service", but I think it's overly-general and unnecessarily negative. Many people enjoy newspapers and TV that rely primarily on advertising for their revenue. I actually find Google's sponsored links on their search results to be very helpful on occasion, and at other times I find advertising a problem. Why the tendency to be so dismissive and over-simplify? I also think that this meme is part of a general trend of finding pithy ways to sound smart without acknowledging that most issues, such as the way web services should be funded, are actually quite complicated.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gfodor 13y agoI know this is off topic, but is anyone else annoyed that JavaScript is required for this page, or that the text is too small, or that the color scheme clashes, or that it requires Facebook connect, or any other surface level detail that provides a soap box for me to rant about the personal axe I have to grind?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- belorn 13y agoThe one comment I truly get tired of seeing, is those that bring back the old flame wars over the definition of the word "free", and if one license is "free'er" than the other. Of all the classic flame wars, this one still lurks around and makes noise once every few months, and is equally boring each time.
- amerika_blog 13y agoI'm tired of seeing the errors that prompt most of those comments. The comments themselves are often very much legitimate.
- vermontdevil 13y agoMy favorite is the 'most politicians or CEOs are sociopaths' I think the psychology of sociopath is complicated enough without the need to assume one who made it to the top is a sociopath.
- d4nt 13y agoPart of the problem here is that any open [web] community will eventually contain more people who've joined after you than people who joined before you. Consequently, stuff you learned long ago is still new and interesting to the majority of the population. I had a interesting discussion with @ColinWright a few months back about how you might design a forum based separate cohorts for each time period in which people joined, and on scoring each post separately within each cohort - if I had a few months to spare I would love to try building & launching that. Sadly, I don't.
- GalacticDomin8r 13y agoSo we should eliminate any methodolgy which ensures accurate communication and the burden should be placed on anyone who wishes to challenge an assertion? At least it's evident this isn't an academic forum, however any forum can be thought of as a "debate team". People ought to be held to some standard of rigor if they decide to make an assertion. For me, that standard starts with the original assertion, not with someone who decides to question it.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoMeh. Not so much. The problem here is the difference between a conversation and a mob of emotional ranters (And I plead guilty to being in the latter category many times). Most of these comments are meant to provide context. The author seems to forget that it's much better to have a reasonable conversation in context than it is to simply wander far afield on whatever the outrage of the day is. Correlation does not equal context. Companies are there to provide shareholder value. Google doesn't owe you anything. And so on. Yes, these can be throwaway catchphrases (bumper stickers), but hell, I'd rather have the usual half-dozen bumper stickers and then talk reasonably about something that try to un-fuck a conversation built of some bullshit fallacy with somebody talking very emotionally about things about which they aren't fully informed. We make the mistake over and over again of rewarding emotional content, not useful content. I'd argue this post is a prime example of that. The reason the same phrases come back again and again is that we continue to make the same cognitive mistakes again and again. Ignoring that won't make it go away.
- Demiurge 13y agoCan someone rewrite this article in Go?
- insteadof 13y agoJust another example of the overzealous moderation on Stack Overflow to close any and every question ever asked because it in some way managed to be useful to anyone but their narrow minded view of what constitutes a programming question that didn't fit their formula of Q&A.
- coherentpony 13y agoNo need to read this -- just another Buzzfeed post.
- robomartin 13y agoIn general terms HN manages to maintain a very high signal to noise ratio. This is a credit to pg, the rules he created as well as active HN participants. If you have spent any time at all on USENET you know exactly what I am talking about. HN is always interesting to read. You can learn a lot from people posting on a variety of subjects while always tending to return to the core tech mission of the site. I enjoy this aspect a lot. And, yes, things go off in tangents sometimes yet HN has proven to self correct. I don't really understand the focus on these comments.
- weego 13y agoRazors. Don't made vague references to some obscure razor you looked up on wikipedia and force me to do the same. Use the words in your head to explain what you mean.
- amiune 13y agoOne thing that I really love about HN is how damn contrarian everyone always tries to be. This is always good when you can keep low the number of trolls. If you don't like other people opinions then you can always do Mathematics. The paradise where other people opinions don't care.
- tingletech 13y agoWhat about "this is not redit" or "who changed the title?" (shouldn't someone change this title to just "Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing"?)
- RickyShaww 13y agoExplaining a company's actions by "the legal duty to maximize shareholder value" - Since this can be used to explain any action by a company, it explains nothing. Not to mention the validity of statement is controversial.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tokenadult 13y agoPaul Graham (the site founder) has commented on a type of comment that he thinks is very harmful to the community, but hard to identify by a key phrase: the "middlebrow dismissal." He wrote, "The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The 'U R a fag's get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the 'comments' link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 As other readers have noticed, my idea of an interesting water cooler conversation with colleagues is referring to verifiable facts about the external world while checking the reasoning of a submitted article. The Internet is, indeed, mostly about sharing unsupported opinions, as the article kindly submitted here suggests, but I enjoy having my opinions examined by comparing them to facts in the real world, and I try to extend the same favor to the friends I meet here.
- vor_ 13y agoOf all the cliches, I've hated "This" ever since I started seeing it on other forums years ago. The only one that bugs me more is "tl;dr". People have become terrified of writing long text, so they apologize beforehand. Either stand by your long text or shorten it so it's not long. I skip every "tl;dr" summary. It adds nothing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- islon 13y agoWrong. Correlation is premature optimization, this is just a anecdotal strawman hominen Dunning-Kruger headline that needs citation. By the way you should have done it in Go.js on Arduino.