"The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool
doesn’t know he doesn’t know."
I'd add the wisdom of Bokonon[0] to that sentiment:
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn
something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser
than before. He is full of murderous resentment
of people who are ignorant without having come
by their ignorance the hard way. "
I'd point out that "Hacker News Disease" as defined by the author is most certainly not limited to, nor did it begin with, tech discussion sites like HN.
It's becoming more widespread and the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.
But that doesn't comport with all non-tech, non-elites who also engage in this sort of thing.
In fact, it's pretty much the same thing discussed by Tom Nichols in his 2017 book[1], The Death of Expertise. I recommend it.
> the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.
Clearly you didn't read the second paragraph of the article:
> In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News. It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of smart people meet general tech industry discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of places that suffer from Hacker News Disease (and they probably had it first, have a terminal case of it, and are much less civil about it too) but HN is just the only one I’ve participated in, so they have the misfortune of being the community I’ve named it after.
it's funny because i think the edgy tech subculture that uses the term really doesn't realize how absurdly offensive it sounds to normal people. it's one of those things that can instantly alienate you, or mark you as "that guy" with zero social understanding
By normal people, do you mean the terminally online twittersphere? Your average person has no problem with most of the pejoratives the internet sees as off limit.
This is pure personal opinion ofc - but my perspective here is of someone in tech who's entire social bubble is comprised of random professionals not in tech (europe).
You mean like me and most folks I know? None of us are retarded. Nor do we deliberately insult others.
However, we also don't cower in fear that words used without malice are actually hurtful.
Those that are differently-abled are to be accepted and respected for who they are.
Those that jump down others' throats as the vocabulary police are the retarded ones, IMHO.
And yes, some folks have very thin skin, metaphorically speaking. And that's okay. But I don't need the sorts of folks who can't or won't understand context/nuance in my life.
In fact, to those particular folks I say, fuck off!
Such a smart person who can "see it all" does not know that lawyers are paid by the hour so they have a pervasive incentive to take any case (even incluing lost ones) and milk those cases for as many hours as possible, since this earns them more money?
I've seen it first hand in other industry. (some) Lawyers are always willing to litigate since this is their job. They dont care if you will win or lose, they just want your money. Obviously the "good lawyer" should advice you when not to litigate, but since cases take years, managers switch jobs (exactly as described in the article) and some bullshit excuses can be made - nobody really checked their success ratio.
In fact, is there a study in effectiveness of those lawsuits? They probably earned some money due to chilling factor, but was it higher than cost of litigation? Probably yes as well, but the author barely even touches this subject.
The situation is often even more pervasive in IT projects - where I have seen multiple cases of consultants paid by the hour, what translated to zero incentive to actually ever finish anything. They wont kill the golden goose that lays them golden eggs.
If I didnt know the decision makers (who have MBAs - so supposedly not random people), I would suspect collusion - getting kickbacks from the consultants to keep them on (who probably spend their days doing side projects for other customers). But no, it was sheer incompetence.
There are lots of people who dont care if their job makes sense or not - they will litigate/write code/do whatever as long as you pay them. They are supposed to advise you when their services are not needed, but then it might mean that they lose jobs / money, so they dont have any incentives for that.
Sadly I guess the theme of this submission is that "hacker news is stupid", so if anyone points out a flaw in the article, they will get downvoted to oblivion. Because the author is much smarter than us and obviously their article is flawless.
Also companies dont waste millions on fruitless projects /s
Most companies dont even make any retrospectives into their projects, probably because so many fail.
...a pejorative term for a particular kind of person who has studied in these areas at university or works in these fields who holds a pretentious, condescending attitude to anyone who has studied in any other fields, particularly the Arts and Humanities. They typically believe themselves to be more "intelligent" and "rational", while generally remaining incredibly ignorant outside of their areas of expertise and having the charisma of a rotting pig's backside."
Computer science is extremely vertical field of study these days. At first it wasn't even seen as higher education and was often combined with other fields. Philosophy was a popular choice.
That said, I think while amost everybody knows someone like that, I believe that it is often the opposite and many devs should be enouraged to be a bit more forthcomming.
I think the "disease" is common in fresh graduents of university in general.
> In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News.
Entertaining read. But find the perfect discussion group then.. its quite a challenge, I gather. Disease symptoms aren't just endemic, but do we actually have 'disease-free' places anywhere on the web?
I respectfully disagree. I'm have been in close contact with stupidity and ignorance from a young age, and find that now I engage in large quantities of both without suffering any ill-effects.
Stupidity is a perjorative term for an abundantly natural and ubiquitous state. Its results may be frustrating, but accepting the profound intellectual limitations of oneself and others is essential for emotional well-being.
Sort of unrelated to the digging - the comments in the original thread on warner / lessig are pretty well balanced. Very little to no prescriptive law talk, which is the only law talk worth attacking from the perspective of the authority and knowledge of law and its application. There's nothing at all wrong with speculation around the outcome of dmca notices, using whatever legal knowledge you can dig up. It's not legal advice to either party. This goes doubly so in 2009 when all of this was much less understood. Seems like a pretty bad example case for the OP (OP).
I was a court watcher then, too. Not much has changed wrt the public's understanding of law and legal proceedings than I can tell. The forums are still just as full of breathless techies extolling how they wish the law worked rather than observing what actually happens.
This is a non-sequitur. I can "extoll how I wish the law worked" all day, and that says nothing about observing what actually happens.
Attacking "breathless techies" for discussing how they would like something to be, because observed outcomes are not this way, makes no sense what-so-ever.
The topic of the article was ragging on internet commentors in tech forums for not being subject matter experts in every topic they discuss. It's one of the worst takes I've read in a while to be honest.
As long as everyone is being reasonably descriptive, it's perfectly fine for anybody to discuss anything.
For example, "ip law is bullshit because of {my_differing_moral_base_presumption}" is an absolutely fine thing to say, and argue. You're not being prescriptive and nobody is ill-effected, or directed to be ill-effected, by your opinions stemming from your differing moral base.
Furthermore, claims about what you think the outcome of something might be - given your limited knowledge - are perfectly fine too. For example, "I think a reasonable court would find that the claim was bullshit because it's a 30 second segment of the song mixed over some anime, out of a 50 minute talk. It's clear the intent wasn't to republish the work for profit."
There's absolutely no problem with this from the perspective of healthy conversation. You're taking a good faith approach to the discussion and saying what you think might happen given your knowledge. You may ultimately be _wrong_ but you were never saying you were _more right_ than subject matter experts anyway.
Basically the only times it's a good idea to dump on people is when someone ignorant is being prescriptive. "When you're licensing your work you should add {some_clause} because of {bad_understanding_of_law}". That's when it's harmful. Or, if you're acting in plain old bad faith.
So if the article was complaining about this kind of harmful prescriptive talk, I'd agree, but that isn't at all what I'm getting from it.
The OP is a serial content thief who's been spamming Reddit for more than a decade and has been shadowbanned/suspended dozens of times. He rotates through Medium.com and Vocal.Media sub-sites like this and rehosts other people's work as his own. That's literally all he does all day for a living. Looks like he's set his sights on HN now, too.
More than happy to but I have many years worth of evidence I can show and I'd rather not spam this post with the info. Is there someone I can DM my evidence to? To start, I actually found this post via his current reddit account: https://redd.it/pnbi59 Deleted to hide, of course - that's his M.O. One can't prove he's a spammer from a casual glance since he covers his tracks and deletes stuff constantly. It's trivial to dig his posts out of archives and point to 20 variations of the same name that's been banned on medium or the same 20 accounts posting the same 50 or so stolen clickbait articles he regularly reposts year after year.
Edit: a plain account ban won't work, he'll just make more accounts. Mods/admins need to be creative here since he'll just rotate his IP and be back an hour later.
All: please email hn@ycombinator.com if you see abuse like this. Protecting the quality of the site is our #1 priority and we can't address problems we don't know about!
What, so people are commenting on things they don't have a degree in? Cry me a river. Most of the Hacker News crowd doesn't have a CS degree, and came to programming precisely because intelligence transfers between skills. The idea that we can't do research and accidentally become vastly knowledgeable in a multitude of subjects is just absurd. You run into people every day on HN who know a lot despite lack of training.
I have some pretty significant criticisms (and agreements) with this but do not think it should be flagged. This is on topic. People, please consider writing a well thought out comment if you disagree rather than just smashing a `flag' button.
40 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] threadIt's becoming more widespread and the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.
But that doesn't comport with all non-tech, non-elites who also engage in this sort of thing.
In fact, it's pretty much the same thing discussed by Tom Nichols in his 2017 book[1], The Death of Expertise. I recommend it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Edit: Removed extraneous article.
Clearly you didn't read the second paragraph of the article:
> In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News. It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of smart people meet general tech industry discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of places that suffer from Hacker News Disease (and they probably had it first, have a terminal case of it, and are much less civil about it too) but HN is just the only one I’ve participated in, so they have the misfortune of being the community I’ve named it after.
Actually, I did. In fact, your quote is specifically referring to tech discussion websites, as it explicitly says:
What do you think the author means by "smart people meet general tech industry discussion?"please don't use terminology like 'retarded' in your article, we should be moving away from this as a whole
By normal people, do you mean the terminally online twittersphere? Your average person has no problem with most of the pejoratives the internet sees as off limit.
This is pure personal opinion ofc - but my perspective here is of someone in tech who's entire social bubble is comprised of random professionals not in tech (europe).
Because I'm not at all clear as to the people to whom you are referring.
You mean like me and most folks I know? None of us are retarded. Nor do we deliberately insult others.
However, we also don't cower in fear that words used without malice are actually hurtful.
Those that are differently-abled are to be accepted and respected for who they are.
Those that jump down others' throats as the vocabulary police are the retarded ones, IMHO.
And yes, some folks have very thin skin, metaphorically speaking. And that's okay. But I don't need the sorts of folks who can't or won't understand context/nuance in my life.
In fact, to those particular folks I say, fuck off!
Rest is "old man angry at the clouds" material.
I've seen it first hand in other industry. (some) Lawyers are always willing to litigate since this is their job. They dont care if you will win or lose, they just want your money. Obviously the "good lawyer" should advice you when not to litigate, but since cases take years, managers switch jobs (exactly as described in the article) and some bullshit excuses can be made - nobody really checked their success ratio. In fact, is there a study in effectiveness of those lawsuits? They probably earned some money due to chilling factor, but was it higher than cost of litigation? Probably yes as well, but the author barely even touches this subject.
The situation is often even more pervasive in IT projects - where I have seen multiple cases of consultants paid by the hour, what translated to zero incentive to actually ever finish anything. They wont kill the golden goose that lays them golden eggs. If I didnt know the decision makers (who have MBAs - so supposedly not random people), I would suspect collusion - getting kickbacks from the consultants to keep them on (who probably spend their days doing side projects for other customers). But no, it was sheer incompetence.
There are lots of people who dont care if their job makes sense or not - they will litigate/write code/do whatever as long as you pay them. They are supposed to advise you when their services are not needed, but then it might mean that they lose jobs / money, so they dont have any incentives for that.
Sadly I guess the theme of this submission is that "hacker news is stupid", so if anyone points out a flaw in the article, they will get downvoted to oblivion. Because the author is much smarter than us and obviously their article is flawless.
Also companies dont waste millions on fruitless projects /s Most companies dont even make any retrospectives into their projects, probably because so many fail.
"STEMlord
...a pejorative term for a particular kind of person who has studied in these areas at university or works in these fields who holds a pretentious, condescending attitude to anyone who has studied in any other fields, particularly the Arts and Humanities. They typically believe themselves to be more "intelligent" and "rational", while generally remaining incredibly ignorant outside of their areas of expertise and having the charisma of a rotting pig's backside."
That said, I think while amost everybody knows someone like that, I believe that it is often the opposite and many devs should be enouraged to be a bit more forthcomming.
I think the "disease" is common in fresh graduents of university in general.
Entertaining read. But find the perfect discussion group then.. its quite a challenge, I gather. Disease symptoms aren't just endemic, but do we actually have 'disease-free' places anywhere on the web?
No, you can't inoculate yourself from stupidity and ignorance. This applies to the author as well.
Stupidity is a perjorative term for an abundantly natural and ubiquitous state. Its results may be frustrating, but accepting the profound intellectual limitations of oneself and others is essential for emotional well-being.
Original article by user matmaroon in 2009:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824103317/http://mattmaroon...
Spurred by their own comment in the original thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586154
And first posted to hn by matmaroon also in 2009:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588752
Sort of unrelated to the digging - the comments in the original thread on warner / lessig are pretty well balanced. Very little to no prescriptive law talk, which is the only law talk worth attacking from the perspective of the authority and knowledge of law and its application. There's nothing at all wrong with speculation around the outcome of dmca notices, using whatever legal knowledge you can dig up. It's not legal advice to either party. This goes doubly so in 2009 when all of this was much less understood. Seems like a pretty bad example case for the OP (OP).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586100
Attacking "breathless techies" for discussing how they would like something to be, because observed outcomes are not this way, makes no sense what-so-ever.
As long as everyone is being reasonably descriptive, it's perfectly fine for anybody to discuss anything.
For example, "ip law is bullshit because of {my_differing_moral_base_presumption}" is an absolutely fine thing to say, and argue. You're not being prescriptive and nobody is ill-effected, or directed to be ill-effected, by your opinions stemming from your differing moral base.
Furthermore, claims about what you think the outcome of something might be - given your limited knowledge - are perfectly fine too. For example, "I think a reasonable court would find that the claim was bullshit because it's a 30 second segment of the song mixed over some anime, out of a 50 minute talk. It's clear the intent wasn't to republish the work for profit."
There's absolutely no problem with this from the perspective of healthy conversation. You're taking a good faith approach to the discussion and saying what you think might happen given your knowledge. You may ultimately be _wrong_ but you were never saying you were _more right_ than subject matter experts anyway.
Basically the only times it's a good idea to dump on people is when someone ignorant is being prescriptive. "When you're licensing your work you should add {some_clause} because of {bad_understanding_of_law}". That's when it's harmful. Or, if you're acting in plain old bad faith.
So if the article was complaining about this kind of harmful prescriptive talk, I'd agree, but that isn't at all what I'm getting from it.
Edit: a plain account ban won't work, he'll just make more accounts. Mods/admins need to be creative here since he'll just rotate his IP and be back an hour later.