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Show HN: Infinite Monkeys – Pooling the Wisdom of Hacker News Comments
- chaghalibaghali 11y agoInspired by the recent 'What are the most uplifting comments you've read on HN?' discussion [1], I've compiled some of my favourites into an eBook. Pull requests welcome! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213
- laex 11y agoAwesome work. Thanks a lot for this. Reading on a epub is so much better than digging through the HN posts.
- bndr 11y agoYou should write that in your README file.
- Munksgaard 11y agoMay I suggest a gh-pages branch so one can view the html online?
- chaghalibaghali 11y agoDone!
- kenbellows 11y agojust submitted a little PR with a bootstrap-based index.html for easier reading, and to give the project a front page
- chaghalibaghali 11y agoMerged - thanks for this, it looks so much nicer!
- ArekDymalski 11y agoBrilliant idea. I regret that I didn't bookmark many pearls of wisdom (and wit) which appeared here.
- jdiez17 11y agoFrom the name I thought it was going to be a book of text generated by a Markov chain trained on HN comment data. Took me a while to figure out it wasn't. Anyway, good collection of comments. It'd be useful to have a HTML version linked in the README.
- chaghalibaghali 11y agoThe HTML version is now linked, enjoy!
- miket 11y agoIs there any way to generate this algorithmically, or otherwise view the most upvoted comments on HN?
- ColinWright 11y agoYou mean like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments Linked via "lists" from the bottom of almost every page: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoNot entirely sure that would be useful. Without handpicked curation you will lack context in many instances.
- minimaxir 11y agoHere are the most upvoted comments for each month of HN (generated Oct 2014): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZwonVX_KlDYhuhPnAAnVpdVRgu4LxldP74-c_kvOd5k/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZwonVX_KlDYhuhPnAAnV... Note that finding comment scores is no longer possible for recent comments, as the API disabled returning comment scores for dates after that spreadsheet was generated.
- timdaub 11y agoI'm currently working on a similar idea: https://github.com/TimDaub/hnwisdom https://github.com/TimDaub/hnwisdom I'm trying to collect wise hackernews comments.
- shubhamjain 11y agoFor anyone interested, an active HNer Edward Weismann (edw519) made an eBook[1] out of his contributions on HN. Certain of his opinions can be disagreed with but there is a lot of wisdom in his comments. [1]: http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html
- hackuser 11y ago> active HNer Edward Weismann (edw519) made an eBook[1] out of his contributions Perhaps we all should think of our contributions as material for a future book. Imagine the thoughtfulness of our comments and the reduction in noise.
- untog 11y agoBut Hacker News isn't a platform for posting essays. You're supposed to have back and forth discussions. If all we get a treatises from on high discussion threads aren't going to be worth reading.
- beat 11y agoIt'd be interesting to separate upvotes from downvotes somehow. I've observed that many of my most-upvoted comments receive a lot of downvotes as well - usually for questioning HN conventional wisdom. And I find most of the comments that I really like, that I think are really outstanding, are at odds with the groupthink as well.
- dragonwriter 11y agoIt seems to me that most of the claims that posts are "att odds with the groupthink" and claims that posts are "downvoted for questioning HN conventional wisdom" refer to posts that are in line with the frequently-articulated positions of at least as large of a segment of the HN community as any that they are at odds with. Its natural to want to think that those who disagree with or downvote you are engaging in "groupthink" or defending "conventional wisdom" and those who agree with or upvote you are independent thinkers or rewarding independent thought. But I don't think upvoting is any less prone to groupthink or downvoting any less prone to having a substantive basis.
- beat 11y agoWell, sure. You're not going to get upvoted at all if everyone disagrees with you. But I've noted a very distressing tendency toward comments accumulating significant downvotes not for being wrong, but for being different. Hell, I just got multiple downvotes for saying you should use containers for development even if you're developing on a Linux desktop, because containers are repeatable and your desktop is not. That's kind of a duh thing, but apparently people find it offensive. That's one example, but I've seen it happen a lot, and to a lot of posters making technically correct and logically valid points.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> But I've noted a very distressing tendency toward comments accumulating significant downvotes not for being wrong, but for being different. I've noted a very distressing tendency for people on HN to assume that no one could possibly disagree with their subjective interpretation of the relevance and degree of substantive contribution of a post, and to therefore assume that downvotes of posts that the complaining poster agrees finds to be insightful must be based on differentness, not on differing subjective interpretations on relevance and degree of substantive contribution. And, further, to state the conclusion of this stack of assumptions as a simple fact.
- colanderman 11y agoLet us not forget https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says -- pooling the "wisdom" of Hacker News comments.