Probably the best advice I've gotten on here is from reading 'patio11 and 'tptacek posts on how to bill for consulting work. I don't have a particular comment as they've written it many times over, but it's really changed the game for me.
There are lots with good advice (worth searching site:news.ycombinator.com tptacek/patio11 billing/consulting/etc), but the main thing is to stop billing hourly, here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1880096
I found my current job (since 2015) working 100% remote in the whoishiring thread, and I'm super grateful for that. Besides that, it's been my go-to source for tech and startup news and great (sometimes frustrating) discussions.
HN is my main source of up to date news. The technical orientation and relative absence of mainstream "noise" is well aligned with my interests. For example I found out about Golang and Closure by reading HN.
I know this is tongue and cheek but if anyone out there really feels this, there's two good directions to go: 1) Choose _any_ of your candidate frameworks and gogogo. 2) Choose something like golang and learn to bring-your-own-framework. Either way you'll come out _far_ ahead of where you'd be if you'd spent your time just evaluating.
For me the coolest thing about HN is the breadth of experts here for any (even niche) tech field. This allows for in depth understanding of new products (when someone who actually worked on the team making it is here) or calling out conspiracy theories about why some company shut down some product (because they have inside knowledge and can actually explain the reasoning).
I can't count how many times I've read 'I work on the team that built that' with some new insights or opinions just sitting nested in a comment chain 4 levels deep.
Agreed. The wide spread of experts who come out and give first hand accounts of the event/product being discussed adds a tremendous amount of value to the discussion on the site.
Discussion on this site is by no means perfect but it is miles ahead of the alternatives out there.
Hadley Wickham (R & beautiful API's for data stuff) once replied to my comment about buying a dead tree copy of his book and recommended the HTML version.
Interesting you have jblow on there, as I just was watching his programming stream on twitch yesterday and he said he doesn't really come to HN much anymore. His reasoning was basically that he wanted a place where programmers were working on harder things (basically CRUD web devs).
I think he is missing a lot of content on here if that's his true opinion. I think you can find all sorts of varying levels of depths on a vast amount of technical issues.
Mainly, early exposure to a wide variety of languages, libraries, and even more obscure projects that I wouldn't have heard of, or not as early. Also, a somewhat wider vocabulary for talking about many aspects of software.
Lectured at for over 2 years that I knew why I was rate limited. Got told for 2 years that I made “low quality” posts. It gave me a sense on injustice. You be the judge.
So then why on earth are you still on here?? (rhetorical question) Life's too short. Well, some people seem to just enjoy playing the wronged, misunderstood martyr, for whatever reason.
Not much of a rhetorical question, you seem to think you know why I'm here. It's because I personally find Hacker News is quite interesting and insightful. And I have contributions I can make, and the upvotes to most of them seem to show that others think so too.
Ok, so yet again you reply in a snarky, downvote-worthy tone. I guess you just don't realize you're doing it. Your first sentence just isn't a nice way to talk to people. It's got more of a YouTube vibe than HN.
No, I didn't know why, given that "What has HN given you" just produced a list of angry-sounding complaints from you. And by rhetorical I meant, I wasn't asking a question to get an answer, like usual, but to make a point, to suggest something. I was just going by what you'd written. But it's nice to hear the positive side of your experience, not sure why you didn't write any of that initially.
People get up and downvoted all the time. Why would that discourage you? A person can't live life without being questioned. And I'd much rather be questioned by smart strangers (even if I disagree) than argue with significant others.
Maybe the delay when you are allowed to reply to comments? I think this is a pretty good idea and certainly has managed to keep me from getting too carried in "heated" discussions.
When accounts post too many unsubstantive comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars, we sometimes penalize the account by rate limiting it, which means the software won't let it post as often. Actually it limits the account to posting no more than a certain % of all the posts appearing on the site.
When people ask us about this we're happy to answer, and to take the penalty off if they commit to using HN as intended in the future. If we don't get that commitment, though, we don't take the penalty off, and we put it back on if they revert to their old ways. This is one of the software tools we use for preventing the signal/noise ratio from getting too low here.
That's very interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
I guess it's not happened to me.
Related question, how come sometimes comments can be downvoted or upvoted and sometimes they can only be upvoted, even though they aren't greyed? I thought it was whether I'd already contributed to the thread, then I thought it was a relative karma thing, but I see later it's neither of those things.
I rather not try to dig up the best specific opportunity or lesson learned from my nine years here. HN promotes the positive and entrepreneurial mindset necessary to have an impact on the world, however small that impact might be.
Paul Graham set excellent example early on. Upward mobility from curious, resourceful, and already successful people deciding to help one another.
I've been through a lot of web communities. HN is easily the most intellectual, respectful, and diverse. The simple reason is that we like to be here!
In the same way that it takes a village to raise a child, your understanding of the world around you is drastically deepened by various points of view. I don't expect to find a better village anytime soon.
I'd just add that frequently someone will mention something, anywhere from some open-source project to some deep area of science, and the author mentioned, (who is already a member!) chimes in with clarifications and further explanation. Wow.
Completely agree. To add to that, HN also makes me feel inadequate, but in a good way. That in return "forces" me to always improve and strive for the better especially in my career.
I'm very curious as to whether there are any other communities on the web that are as generally "high quality" as HN (bonus points if those communities are tech-focused or tech-adjacent). Anybody got any links?
To date HN has the highest (consistent) quality of any online community I've encountered
It was very good in the beginning.
Now it is mostly people trying to show off any way they can. And it attracted too many ... well, let's call them ordinary mainstream people.
Just a note, you have to pay a one time fee of $5 to comment on metafilter.
Also I say the following as a long time member of metafilter: it's really gone downhill. If you're the type of person who thinks dissenting opinion on hacker news is restricted you will probably be shocked by what goes on at metafilter. They have a serious problem with passive aggressive bullying and groupthink on political and social justice issues.I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the conversation there has been hijacked by a handful of aggressive users who shameless brigade threads to their narrative. Metafilter is a shadow of what it was even 5 years ago.
That said, ask.metafilter.com is the best part of metafilter and is worth the $5 price of admission alone.
I remember when I first joined that I really liked how people who disagree here do not downvote but rather challenge you through a comment. It was a nice change from reddit...
But times have changed and people love to downvote here these days.
I think hacker news does an ok job at mitigating this by not allowing you to downvote until you reach a certain amount of karma.
Obviously that creates its own problems but at least you have to have a little bit invested in the community before you can start trying to dictate the conversation.
> HN is easily the most intellectual, respectful, and diverse.
I might agree with the first point, but the latter two have a checkered past, and would indeed be two points of improvement I think we as a community would do well to focus more on.
I would not say diverse though. This community is hugely biased towards an american, transhumanist point of view. There's an "european" minority who does not seems as egocentric (and libertarian maybe ?) as the majority, which is a bit reassuring.
Anyways as much as I like HN and its often insightful comments, this has proven me that I would have a hard time living/working in the US as we don't share the same values at all it seems. I kinda understand the valley's spirit better though, which is nice considering its huge impact on everyone's tech life.
> This community is hugely biased towards an american, transhumanist point of view.
I used to think this too, but after thinking about it a little more, I've come to the conclusion that the perception of bias towards a certain viewpoint in any thread is colored by the day of week (some old-timers frequent on weekends), the time of day (US lunch breaks and close of business), and the members who are drawn to the topics that you are interested in.
In other words, my perception of the "prevailing" bias tends to fluctuate with the time of day (I don't have a fixed schedule for visiting HN) or topics I currently have open.
Sometimes, out of curiosity, I click on a random thread (typically high comments/upvotes) with a title that I would ordinarily have not clicked on, just to get a sense of what the community is yapping about :).
American as in use your car because public transportation is for poor people anyways (and who cares about ecology nowadays when everything will be resolved with technology ? -at least according to some people here, see second point-), be fat and sick. I really have the impression that people are not so healthy overall, I mean of course there's a bias as you don't speak to talk about your fine shape, but still.
Transhumanist as in there will always be some guy in every biology/medicine thread to talk about how we will evolve as a species, or claim that immortality is achievable or the likes. This is especially prominent here (and was shocking to me at first), because these opinions are not so common otherwise (in society or online communities). I guess it's just the demographics and personal interests of people here that explain this phenomenon, but I was very surprised.
I've felt the trans-humanist vibe historically but to be honest lately I've felt things swinging the other way (towards more pragmatic humanism).
Can you explain more about this "irresponsible indifferent American fat and sick" thing you've encountered? As an American, I'm curious what has given you that impression specifically on HN.
But PT is not seen as viable, people enjoy living in suburbs and being reliant on private cars for anything, culturally less sensible to ecological matters overall compared to europeans (even though in Europe it scales, and I've felt people enclined to think ecologically most in Switzerland and Germany), mass consumption (people really love Amazon... I mean Europeans do too but Prime is less of a thing here).
Also in healthcare threads (which I browse a lot since that's my original field) I've often seen comments about massive weight loss, illnesses esp diet/digestive or diabetus related (like, in a scale I don't see as much amongst my regional communities). Also how people seem to discover once in a while what a healthy diet is (culturally less prevalent in the US than over here it seems).
This is probably especially shocking to me since I have above average interest in these topics, granted. But I'm still very shocked by the US culture which imo shows and prevails here in subtle things. But every now and then I'm like "ah, true, this is most probably an US user". At least it calms down the lust I could have after working there :)
Interesting.. yeah I don't have an eye out like you do so I didn't quite understand how you were getting the sense that more Americans are less healthy (which I don't disagree with) just from HN comments.
I get to feel very stupid, but in a comforting, always learning way. I have a PhD in HPC and HN always humbles me with the depth of knowledge contained by the community.
It has given me a lot of things through the years: lots of insight both on things I'm interested into as well as things I don't pay much attention to, quite a few interesting articles and entertainment.
But the thing it really stuck with me is inspiration: the endurance and obstacles you must overcome to create a new product. The original post on Dropbox[1] had a lot of naysayers: on how the problem is already solved, that you have to install something, that is seems that is a solution looking for a problem, etc.
I must say that the HN community has cranked my career trajectory up a notch. Like many commenters here have said, this remains one of the healthier and more intellectual online communities out there. I've learned many more things here than I do during my day job, and it has continued to motivate me to do better every single day.
I learned about Bitcoin here when it was just a whitepaper, but didn't recognize the opportunity then.
A year ago, another user mentioned Monero so I looked into and discovered it's more "bitcoin" than Bitcoin and bought what I could.
I'm not a millionaire, but it sure has helped me financially, so I'm really appreciative that I took advantage of that opportunity.
EDIT: and for something a little more intrinsic: Everyone's experiences on different things. I've read lots of great comments on raising kids, and hope to take advantage of that shared knowledge when I have a family.
Tell me about it. I remember when it was single digit dollars, and it was a curiosity, but it didn't hold my interest.
Then it was double digits, and I was like, "huh."
Then is was somewhere around $40, and I thought "maybe I should get a couple? But money's kind of tight, maybe later."
Then it was over $100, and I thought "surely this can't go much higher? This definitely isn't the time to buy."
I thought that same thing when it hit over $300, and over $700, and then over $3000, and then when it was well over $15k.
I've learned a valuable lesson. I'm far too risk averse to invest in something like this, because I'm still not sure I could convince myself to invest even though it seems to have hit a bottom and is climbing again.
I looked at bitcoin very early, when it was pitched as digital currency free from the problems of fiat money. My impression was that the proponents did not understand currency and that bitcoin would make a terrible currency.
As it turns out, I was right. But by being right, I missed a huge speculative windfall. While it would have been nice to make a bunch of money for nothing, I don't really have regrets because my decision was sound at the time.
I still wonder whether the early bitcoin marketing was uninformed but they lucked out... or if the early proponents knew it was a terrible currency, but that they had to sell it that way early in order to inflate the speculative bubble.
Most people I know invested in still talk about it as a currency. We talk transaction rates and all that, but they are still convinced it is the "money of the future." So I think a lot still luck out. There are clear market manipulations. But that's why I still stay out. I do not see it as a missed opportunity.
I take issue with the term 'invest' being used here. When somebody invests in something, they expect returns to come in the form of dividends, interest, or something of the sort. When somebody buys something because they expect to sell it later at a higher price, they aren't investing, they're speculating
> When somebody buys something because they expect to sell it later at a higher price
I guess I should dump my AMZN, GOOG, and FB stock. I can't believe what I could have been thinking when I put money in such a speculative product like Amazon. Add in Berkshire Hathaway, and 4 of the top 10 largest companies in the world don't pay out. Between the 4 of them, they account for more than 10% of the S&P500, and they are just 4 of the nearly 100 companies in the S&P500 that don't pay dividends.
Oh, sorry, is the pool not growing? Has crypto gotten to thousands of transactions per second? Because last I was aware they haven't even broken 20 transactions per second and the mempool is still growing.
Maybe I'm project the experience of people close to me and my own, but it helps to not feel left out that we have jobs in somewhat valued careers with somewhat guaranteed future employment.
I've been noticing that the more fragile the professional situation, the more people seem to regret or actively join the (already at full speed) bandwagon
I definitely see this correlation too. But I equate it to "I should have played on the craps table, tons of people just won." The part that bothers me is that people consider those that played that table as smart. And those that didn't play the table as dumb. Hindsight is 20/20 and there are still clear reasons to be wary of cryptocurrencies.
> I've learned a valuable lesson. I'm far too risk averse to invest in something like this
I find myself often bathing in regret and telling myself "if I could travel back in time, I'd just ...". But these days I try to snap myself out of it and say "You are traveling in time, but you're traveling forward in time -- take that risk now and travel into the future and reap your rewards." It doesn't always work, but it helps give me some perspective.
Yes, shorting a stock is not a long term investment tactic, and it is risky. "Smart" is, in my opinion, too subjective a term to use in this particular situation. I was too risk averse at the time to take action, and part of my risk aversion was based on my lack of trust in the foresight of HN articles.
My experience as well - Bitcoin was still in single digits when HN made me stumble over it. Many ycombinator applications and projects later I launched a Bitcoin related company and couldn't be happier. The first HN discussion I saw was the one where someone had asked how he could store data and make sure it's still readable 40 years later... the answers where so smart, funny, detailed and out of this world it got me hooked. Thanks HN &a community.
I got a few Amazon gift cards after some of my comments. That's always amazing, and surprising. (And if someone created a cryptocurrency tipping browser plugin for HN (that I can use on Firefox) I'd probably tip people small amounts here and there.)
Someone got in touch about books for children and I got some nice recommendations.
Someone else got in touch about some work they're doing around mental ill health. It was fascinating, and it gave me some ideas that I wanted to shamelessly steal.
I've got an appreciation of the difficulties of building for the modern web, with competing demands from unclueful bosses / clients, vs visitors and users. I still don't quite understand why text can't just be text, or why mobile browsers have such terrible defaults for plain HTML pages.
I've got a bunch of useful links and I've learnt a lot.
I've managed to smooth out some of the rough edges, I think.
About 6 years ago, I posted an article I wrote about my experience on the app store[1] and somebody (now a good friend of mine) reached out and asked why I wasn't living in silicon valley. Long story short[2] I ended up moving to San Francisco less than a month later and I've been here ever since. That was unexpected.
HN is an echo chamber, to some extent. For example, try making valid criticisms against Go or JavaScript and you will be downvoted without explanation. I think HN would be better if it required an explanation in order to downvote something. At least then it would be clear to everyone reading whether the negativity was legitimate or not.
See what I mean? Hehe. You asked. I answered, with a purposeful example to illustrate, and there’s the immediate downvote. Thanks for making my point, to whoever did.
Many members find language wars boring. Most are already aware of strengths and weaknesses of various languages. People have language preferences (I know I do), and those vary from person to person. What’s more important is what you’re accomplishing. If you bring up criticism when it’s not the topic of conversation (for example, complaining about the use of JS on a Show HN), people may downvote because it’s off-topic.
As for requiring comments for downvoted, search the archives if you’re really interested in more discussion, but those that aren’t interested in leaving comments are just going to leave junk comments if required, and then there would be endless litigation as to what constitutes a valid reason.
As the guidelines request, just don’t comment about downvotes. If you’re really worried about it, take some time to review the guidelines and look at the behavior of other comments that are downvoted. Speculate to yourself why they might have been downvoted. Improve your own comments taking that into account. But in general, I suggest just not worrying too much about it.
To clarify, I'm not talking about language wars. I'm talking about legitimate constructive criticism on threads about specific languages. My degree is in writing, and I cannot stress enough the importance of criticism in achieving one's highest quality work. Therefore, it seems to me, we would serve ourselves better by considering constructive criticism with an open mind, and working to make our languages better, than to up and down vote based on preferences and emotion. A downvote offered simply because someone said something about one's favorite language is no more intellectual or objective than a commenter who writes, "<whatever language> sucks!" Both should be scorned.
As you say, we all have our favorite languages (all of which have flaws). Mine are currently Elixir and Elm. However, neither of those are perfect and those imperfections can sometimes hinder me. Since, for me, the point of HN is knowledge, it is unhelpful when a critical comment is downvoted, even though it contains good information that would help me in choosing the best language for my project, based entirely on team-sport emotions.
I'm sorry this got long; however, I also wanted to clarify, from my side, your point about the mention of language in an Ask HN post. I did not criticize any language. I was answering someone else's question, and simply used the criticism of popular languages as an example. Yes, you could argue that their question itself was off-topic, but since the point of HN, at least for me, is knowledge, I did what I could to answer it. I'm not remotely concerned about karma points, as you can probably tell from the age of my account vs. my low karma score. I'm on "the spectrum" and tend to rub people the wrong way all the time. I'm used to it and I don't expect to be treated any differently here. My only criticism is that many of the downvotes are emotional and unhelpful, and HN should do what it can to eliminate worthless downvotes the same way it tries to eliminate worthless comments.
> Point out that a clever solution is not that useful or applicable and you get a lot of downvotes
I have exactly the opposite impression, that this is one of the easiest ways to get cheap upvotes. So much so that we have to moderate to prevent such subthreads from choking out others.
Great question. So far.. links to so many interesting websites, books, papers, blogs—mostly linked to in comments and in AskHN. (And then, maybe even more, the sources mentioned in turn by all those.) Way too many really. Already I'm thinking of having a break from here for a while to actually read all those books (have read some..e.g. just the other day got Crucial Conversations thanks to a mention on here, started reading it with my housemate, it's going to transform our lives—at home and work, everywhere—for sure, and already has helped) and to concentrate solely on what I'm doing, rather than the endless stream of fascinating leads on here to new stuff. But I've got more in a few months on here than I would in many years elsewhere. It's fascinating reading the comments too, usually—typically far more than the linked articles. Thanks so much.
Oh that's hard to answer, sorry! - I didn't keep a record of which things I got from here or elsewhere, or from mentions in the stuff I learnt about here. Or from searching topics I learnt about on here. And I was checking out everything I could get from "best programming/mathematics books" lists online for a couple of years before coming here regularly. Youtube videos too - e.g. Matt Might's "Winning the War on Error: Solving Halting Problem, Curing Cancer" and Rich Hickey's talks were..elevating; Julia Evans, Doug Crockford I probably heard about on here. I googled quite a few AskHN lists of fav books, books that changed your life, books you wished you'd read earlier, books you wished your co-workers had read etc and looked at anything that sounded interesting. Sorry I can't be more specific. Well, what is great depends on the reader too. Good luck!
Next to nothing. I scan for links and sometimes find one or two to my interest. I might scan the comments to see if the link is being revered or dissed before I visit. If I'm bored, I've made a few comments. Otherwise HN is nothing more than a link list to me.
What’s your version of what HN is to other people? In the way that people learn about new things, connect with others in various niches, etc—where do you go for that?
I don't have such a thing. Eventually they all turn into reddit, populated by kids and amateurs and unemployed wannabe programmers. So they are all for skimming only.
The last great place to go was Stack Overflow but it, too, is now overrun by redditors and other amateurs and I no longer help out there even though I'm in the upper three percent. There is one forum I still go to but the past year has shown an erosion there as it has become popular among the non-elite tech group.
There are some mailing lists which are exclusive but sparsely visited unfortunately. Same with IRC. So its better to be good at Googling and gleaning fact over fiction, not finding a good forum.
The same is true of "news". There is no good source for news anymore and you have to do your own vetting, something news editors used to do but no more.
Same here. The discussion rarely add something really useful to the topic compared to what you would find by skimming through a book, an article, or by doing your own investigation.
But it gave me a good, if sad, insight about crowd behavior. Write something that people want to hear and you get upvotes regardless on how true or insightful it is.
Write something people don't want to hear and you get downvotes.
Theres a lot of really intelligent people on here. To me, its often more interesting to read their insights and debates on an article than the article itself. HN always introduces me to new technologies and new ideas. I love it.
601 comments
[ 743 ms ] story [ 6824 ms ] threadI can't count how many times I've read 'I work on the team that built that' with some new insights or opinions just sitting nested in a comment chain 4 levels deep.
Discussion on this site is by no means perfect but it is miles ahead of the alternatives out there.
Low level optimization - nkurz BeeOnRope dragontamer
Programming Languages - pcwalton jordwalke chrisseaton
Other people who work on well-known things that comment frequently:
jblow (The Witness, Braid) phire (The Dolphin Emulator) pizlonator (Webkit/JSC)
I made a web app just so I could subscribe and read all their comments via RSS: http://hnblogs.thume.ca/
I was pretty excited when he responded to my comment one time
I think he is missing a lot of content on here if that's his true opinion. I think you can find all sorts of varying levels of depths on a vast amount of technical issues.
I discovered attrs here, which really has been very useful.
No, I didn't know why, given that "What has HN given you" just produced a list of angry-sounding complaints from you. And by rhetorical I meant, I wasn't asking a question to get an answer, like usual, but to make a point, to suggest something. I was just going by what you'd written. But it's nice to hear the positive side of your experience, not sure why you didn't write any of that initially.
People get up and downvoted all the time. Why would that discourage you? A person can't live life without being questioned. And I'd much rather be questioned by smart strangers (even if I disagree) than argue with significant others.
When people ask us about this we're happy to answer, and to take the penalty off if they commit to using HN as intended in the future. If we don't get that commitment, though, we don't take the penalty off, and we put it back on if they revert to their old ways. This is one of the software tools we use for preventing the signal/noise ratio from getting too low here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I guess it's not happened to me.
Related question, how come sometimes comments can be downvoted or upvoted and sometimes they can only be upvoted, even though they aren't greyed? I thought it was whether I'd already contributed to the thread, then I thought it was a relative karma thing, but I see later it's neither of those things.
Paul Graham set excellent example early on. Upward mobility from curious, resourceful, and already successful people deciding to help one another.
In the same way that it takes a village to raise a child, your understanding of the world around you is drastically deepened by various points of view. I don't expect to find a better village anytime soon.
I'd just add that frequently someone will mention something, anywhere from some open-source project to some deep area of science, and the author mentioned, (who is already a member!) chimes in with clarifications and further explanation. Wow.
To date HN has the highest (consistent) quality of any online community I've encountered
[0]: https://lobste.rs/
"Deldo is a sex toy control and teledildonics mode for Emacs"
Also I say the following as a long time member of metafilter: it's really gone downhill. If you're the type of person who thinks dissenting opinion on hacker news is restricted you will probably be shocked by what goes on at metafilter. They have a serious problem with passive aggressive bullying and groupthink on political and social justice issues.I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the conversation there has been hijacked by a handful of aggressive users who shameless brigade threads to their narrative. Metafilter is a shadow of what it was even 5 years ago.
That said, ask.metafilter.com is the best part of metafilter and is worth the $5 price of admission alone.
But times have changed and people love to downvote here these days.
Obviously that creates its own problems but at least you have to have a little bit invested in the community before you can start trying to dictate the conversation.
I might agree with the first point, but the latter two have a checkered past, and would indeed be two points of improvement I think we as a community would do well to focus more on.
Anyways as much as I like HN and its often insightful comments, this has proven me that I would have a hard time living/working in the US as we don't share the same values at all it seems. I kinda understand the valley's spirit better though, which is nice considering its huge impact on everyone's tech life.
I used to think this too, but after thinking about it a little more, I've come to the conclusion that the perception of bias towards a certain viewpoint in any thread is colored by the day of week (some old-timers frequent on weekends), the time of day (US lunch breaks and close of business), and the members who are drawn to the topics that you are interested in.
In other words, my perception of the "prevailing" bias tends to fluctuate with the time of day (I don't have a fixed schedule for visiting HN) or topics I currently have open.
Sometimes, out of curiosity, I click on a random thread (typically high comments/upvotes) with a title that I would ordinarily have not clicked on, just to get a sense of what the community is yapping about :).
And I am a european, though I don't see libertarian views beeing the majority at all ... rather the contrary ..
Transhumanist as in there will always be some guy in every biology/medicine thread to talk about how we will evolve as a species, or claim that immortality is achievable or the likes. This is especially prominent here (and was shocking to me at first), because these opinions are not so common otherwise (in society or online communities). I guess it's just the demographics and personal interests of people here that explain this phenomenon, but I was very surprised.
Can you explain more about this "irresponsible indifferent American fat and sick" thing you've encountered? As an American, I'm curious what has given you that impression specifically on HN.
But PT is not seen as viable, people enjoy living in suburbs and being reliant on private cars for anything, culturally less sensible to ecological matters overall compared to europeans (even though in Europe it scales, and I've felt people enclined to think ecologically most in Switzerland and Germany), mass consumption (people really love Amazon... I mean Europeans do too but Prime is less of a thing here).
Also in healthcare threads (which I browse a lot since that's my original field) I've often seen comments about massive weight loss, illnesses esp diet/digestive or diabetus related (like, in a scale I don't see as much amongst my regional communities). Also how people seem to discover once in a while what a healthy diet is (culturally less prevalent in the US than over here it seems).
This is probably especially shocking to me since I have above average interest in these topics, granted. But I'm still very shocked by the US culture which imo shows and prevails here in subtle things. But every now and then I'm like "ah, true, this is most probably an US user". At least it calms down the lust I could have after working there :)
But the thing it really stuck with me is inspiration: the endurance and obstacles you must overcome to create a new product. The original post on Dropbox[1] had a lot of naysayers: on how the problem is already solved, that you have to install something, that is seems that is a solution looking for a problem, etc.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
A year ago, another user mentioned Monero so I looked into and discovered it's more "bitcoin" than Bitcoin and bought what I could.
I'm not a millionaire, but it sure has helped me financially, so I'm really appreciative that I took advantage of that opportunity.
EDIT: and for something a little more intrinsic: Everyone's experiences on different things. I've read lots of great comments on raising kids, and hope to take advantage of that shared knowledge when I have a family.
Then it was double digits, and I was like, "huh."
Then is was somewhere around $40, and I thought "maybe I should get a couple? But money's kind of tight, maybe later."
Then it was over $100, and I thought "surely this can't go much higher? This definitely isn't the time to buy."
I thought that same thing when it hit over $300, and over $700, and then over $3000, and then when it was well over $15k.
I've learned a valuable lesson. I'm far too risk averse to invest in something like this, because I'm still not sure I could convince myself to invest even though it seems to have hit a bottom and is climbing again.
As it turns out, I was right. But by being right, I missed a huge speculative windfall. While it would have been nice to make a bunch of money for nothing, I don't really have regrets because my decision was sound at the time.
I still wonder whether the early bitcoin marketing was uninformed but they lucked out... or if the early proponents knew it was a terrible currency, but that they had to sell it that way early in order to inflate the speculative bubble.
I guess I should dump my AMZN, GOOG, and FB stock. I can't believe what I could have been thinking when I put money in such a speculative product like Amazon. Add in Berkshire Hathaway, and 4 of the top 10 largest companies in the world don't pay out. Between the 4 of them, they account for more than 10% of the S&P500, and they are just 4 of the nearly 100 companies in the S&P500 that don't pay dividends.
It is going to take a hard fork to fix this.
I've been noticing that the more fragile the professional situation, the more people seem to regret or actively join the (already at full speed) bandwagon
I find myself often bathing in regret and telling myself "if I could travel back in time, I'd just ...". But these days I try to snap myself out of it and say "You are traveling in time, but you're traveling forward in time -- take that risk now and travel into the future and reap your rewards." It doesn't always work, but it helps give me some perspective.
I was too green to understand just how far ahead HN is though, and I just watched instead as it all played out without me.
Someone got in touch about books for children and I got some nice recommendations.
Someone else got in touch about some work they're doing around mental ill health. It was fascinating, and it gave me some ideas that I wanted to shamelessly steal.
I've got an appreciation of the difficulties of building for the modern web, with competing demands from unclueful bosses / clients, vs visitors and users. I still don't quite understand why text can't just be text, or why mobile browsers have such terrible defaults for plain HTML pages.
I've got a bunch of useful links and I've learnt a lot.
I've managed to smooth out some of the rough edges, I think.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705440 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424592
I’m genuinely curious.
As for requiring comments for downvoted, search the archives if you’re really interested in more discussion, but those that aren’t interested in leaving comments are just going to leave junk comments if required, and then there would be endless litigation as to what constitutes a valid reason.
As the guidelines request, just don’t comment about downvotes. If you’re really worried about it, take some time to review the guidelines and look at the behavior of other comments that are downvoted. Speculate to yourself why they might have been downvoted. Improve your own comments taking that into account. But in general, I suggest just not worrying too much about it.
As you say, we all have our favorite languages (all of which have flaws). Mine are currently Elixir and Elm. However, neither of those are perfect and those imperfections can sometimes hinder me. Since, for me, the point of HN is knowledge, it is unhelpful when a critical comment is downvoted, even though it contains good information that would help me in choosing the best language for my project, based entirely on team-sport emotions.
I'm sorry this got long; however, I also wanted to clarify, from my side, your point about the mention of language in an Ask HN post. I did not criticize any language. I was answering someone else's question, and simply used the criticism of popular languages as an example. Yes, you could argue that their question itself was off-topic, but since the point of HN, at least for me, is knowledge, I did what I could to answer it. I'm not remotely concerned about karma points, as you can probably tell from the age of my account vs. my low karma score. I'm on "the spectrum" and tend to rub people the wrong way all the time. I'm used to it and I don't expect to be treated any differently here. My only criticism is that many of the downvotes are emotional and unhelpful, and HN should do what it can to eliminate worthless downvotes the same way it tries to eliminate worthless comments.
Point out that a clever solution is not that useful or applicable and you get a lot of downvotes.
I wish I could have a comment ranking system not based on sheer popularity.
I have exactly the opposite impression, that this is one of the easiest ways to get cheap upvotes. So much so that we have to moderate to prevent such subthreads from choking out others.
The last great place to go was Stack Overflow but it, too, is now overrun by redditors and other amateurs and I no longer help out there even though I'm in the upper three percent. There is one forum I still go to but the past year has shown an erosion there as it has become popular among the non-elite tech group.
There are some mailing lists which are exclusive but sparsely visited unfortunately. Same with IRC. So its better to be good at Googling and gleaning fact over fiction, not finding a good forum.
The same is true of "news". There is no good source for news anymore and you have to do your own vetting, something news editors used to do but no more.
I mostly agree.
I come here for the links, and HN does deliver some quality links each day. I've lowered my expectations for discussion to "mediocre subreddit."
But it gave me a good, if sad, insight about crowd behavior. Write something that people want to hear and you get upvotes regardless on how true or insightful it is. Write something people don't want to hear and you get downvotes.
You've got to check out this new Hotmail thing.