361 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] thread
This is cool (only read the first two lines so far) but if you're really interested in Hacker News Parody software you should check out our startup: https://zombo.com/#HACKER_NEWS_PARODY_DOT_IO
i only read the first word and i completely agree with this take.
Definitely this changes the game (I am the cofounder of the author of the parent comment).
I’d like to make a broader point here…
Did you even read the article?
I never laugh out loud in front of the screen. Especially in public places. Almost never.
“Firefox nightlys does” had me in fits.
That's how I found out that the reply button does not work. I wanted to post a link to the issue and explain how they got it wrong.
I disagree with the author. I know he's incredibly successful and right about pretty much everything he's ever said, but I've had some experience in this area and just finished reading through some of the archives and I think his focus is wrong. I'm going to ignore the technical issue and talk about the bigger picture and higher level things than what was said in the blog post. If the OP thinks that the process is most important, it's really about end results. But if he thinks it should be about the end results then he's an idiot for not thinking about the process. I'll weasel in a reference the startup I co-founded even though it's not directly relevant.
> tangential statement

I'm honestly really curious about this. Could you elaborate?

Yes, I can elaborate, however, this information should have been taught to you by the age of 2. Silly HN.

  A tangent is simply a line that touches a non-linear curve (like a circle) at only a single point. It represents an equation with the relationship between the coordinates “x” and “y” on a two-dimensional graph.

  The tangential velocity is the measurement of the speed at any point tangent to a rotating wheel in a circular motion. Thus angular velocity, ω, is related to the tangential velocity, Vt, through the formula. Tangential velocity is the component of the motion along the edge of a circle measured at any arbitrary point of time. As per its name, tangential velocity describes the motion of an object along the edge of the circle, whose direction at any given point on the circle is always along the tangent to that point.
[1] https://me

[2] http://me

[3] localhost:8080

> localhost:8080

Whoa, I just checked that link, and there's some really offensive stuff on there. Is flamebait like this allowed around here?

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Did you even read the article?
No, OP is correct.

* You omitted his point about hyper-anal correction.

* You misunderstood the meaning of a parody.

* Here's point of a parody you didn't account for

The only thing missing is the actual expert making a clueful statement at the very bottom of the page where nobody reads. Possibly downvoted a couple of times.
Queue the hn reply: "Did you actually read the article? There is such a comment (guru3)."
I hate to be pedantic but surely you mean “cue”?
Well actually in this instance I specifically wanted to evoke the image of the commenter waiting in line to deliver their retort.

jkjk

"turnsout" You're submitting too fast. Please slow down.

Thanks

Nonsense, you don’t hate being pedantic :)
And when you click on their unsuspecting profile called "jolly_rogers123" it goes:

>link to their site

>creator of (literally the thing being discussed), 2007

>20+ YoE in everything

Please downvote this person
To be fair that's often missing on HN too.
Overly critical comment focusing on some obscure technical facet of the post, giving the impression of not understanding it is a parody.
I don't know why you need to bring politics into this.
I dislike Elon Musk and also it’s the apocalypse.
You picked an appropriate username for your comment
I like Elon Musk and it’s actually 4D chess
lets not forget...

* 5-day/40hr work weeks should be abolished in favor of 3-day/24hr work weeks

* I will never, ever work in an office again - work from home/remote 100% only

* I will sabatoge my work place if I am forced to work on nights/weekends

* All bosses are ssholes and should never be trusted

* Senior leadership (CEOs, etc) should forfit all their money and die if they ever lay off people

* People with more money than me suck

I post to simply state my appreciation and amusement :D

... but I will be downvoted due to being neither insightful nor argumentative.

Unrealistic.

Not a single person complained about link not working with JavaScript disabled.

I wish they would just rewrite the website in a safe language like Rust.
I have stuff to say about JIT.
I have a correction to your understanding of JIT.
*zig

Rust feels too 2019

As a ruby guy, does it really matter which language it's written in if it works?
As a Perl guy: yes. :(
There is no escape.
As a Perl guy: yes. :(

Warning all, don’t paste this into your shell!

I would love to talk about zig!
And lets put the comments on the blockchain.

Everything is better with blockchainTM

Since it was missing there I realized how am I overusing '[-]' instead of scrolling. Like Tarzan swing on vines.

(Also is this relavant or am I just piggy-backing your top comment?)

In 10 years of reading hacker news I never thought to press the [-] until this moment.
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I always assumed [-] subtracted a point from that comment.
[-] collapses the replies so that you can easily see what's next. On reddit the equivalent functionality is a button literally called "hide child comments."

But as another comment mentioned, you can click root | parent | prev | next to get navigated through the thread. Personally, I prefer the collapse, though, as having the top of my screen move without my direct control is a bit jarring, but there's more functionality from these buttons.

Important fact: The [-] does not remove a point. After you get 500 points, you earn the privilege of down voting, you will get a "down triangle" underneath the "up vote up triangle" that you can click on.
> In 10 years of reading hacker news I never thought to press the [-] until this moment.

I thought you had to click the [-]. How do I press the [-]?

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I don’t understand if I should click or press [-] What does it do?
Don't do it! If I understand it correctly, every time you use it, it takes away one of your valuable internet points.
A friend of mine did this too many times. He is in rehab now. His wife left him, his liberal left kids commited suicide etc. Harsh times.
> I thought you had to click the [-].

I cannot click anything on my phone.

Wow. I just realized the [-] feature. This changes everything about HN!
And I just realized “root|parent|prev|next” despite being ride or die with [-]
I call it the "minimize bullshit" feature. Reddit also has it.
I might actually read more of the top level comments below the first one now.
Have you heard about our lord and savior root|parent|prev|next ?
> our lord and savior root|parent|prev|next

You are welcome! My very small contribution to the system (I asked and "pushed" for it) - of course, Dang and/or his team implemented it. It is pleasant to read about it in such appreciative terms.

Hey that's awesome! They work really, really well for the way I read HN. Thanks for suggesting this, and thanks to 'dang et al for the implementation!
You've earned true universe karma points there. Thank you.
Or back button hijack
Off-topic aside, but why do people complain about back-button hijack when you can long-press or right-click and get out of the site? It works on any browser AIUI.
Why do sites do a back-button hijack if it’s possible to use the long-press menu-select feature?

Because it’s nowhere near equally convenient or standard to do so.

1. Long press doesn't show full history, it limits to 10-15(? Might be more). I've seen the occasional scummy background script that exploits this with numerous scripted redirects (usually pages with seo snippets cloned from SO). You have to disable the network to go back without being re-redirected, then go through a couple rounds of the back button history to get back to your original page.

2. If you're not using a full browser or are set up to keep a short history, you're basically SOL (Materialistic for HN has a built-in WebView, and I've used similar apps for other sites)

3. I shouldn't have to use history just because some site decided that it should add multiple history entries when I tried to scroll down an infinite list. I'm only on your website because it showed up in a search result, I'm not here to browse other unrelated content.

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Not a single person went on about vue
No Svelte either, I'm in shambles.
As a JavaScript guy, does this really matter for 95% of the world?
I appreciate the juicy center of good humor inside your comment of rage. Maybe the following will help. You're right, of course. It's just that there are competing values, so we have to make a tradeoff. One value is usability and having web content be less annoying, intrusive, abusive, and so on. No disagreement there. I think most HN readers share similar feelings about these things; certainly I do. The other value is curiosity. Curiosity likes new things, different things [0], unexpected things—things it can learn from. It doesn't do so well with repetition [1], indignation, or genericness [2]. These two values conflict because complaints about the former tend to be repetitive, indignant, and generic. How to decide the conflict? That question actually has a clear answer, because we're trying to optimize for just one thing here, namely intellectual curiosity [3]. So that value has to win. This is one of those cases where it's super helpful to have just one thing you're optimizing for and to know exactly what it is. It's not that this is the 'right' decision, the 'correct' guideline, or anything like that—it's just correct relative to what we're trying to optimize for.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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Or about how React bloatware introduces tens of petabytes of completely unnecessary dependencies, is destroying the Web, a perfectly-designed hypertext platform for linking documents together for reading on all manner of devices from screenreaders to Braille interfaces and toaster ovens.
Nodding along .... - “oh shit this is a parody thread”
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... and no one about site's contrast or scroll hijacking...
Or complained about accessibility
Also missing:

How does this compare to X? (where X is an obscure project on github with no documentation of what it's feature boundaries are, has at best 1000 stars and further internet sleuthing suggests its at best only tangentially associated with the original comments domain.

The end result being the author feels obliged to figure it out and reply incase not doing so seems arrogant and/or poorly educated in the domain)

Oh no, not a mere 1000 Facebook likes!
Why isn't this at the top?
Even worse, not a single comment about Rust and use-after-free bugs.
It's got one glaring omission IMO - references to sci-fi literature. They crop up in a lot of threads :)
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> Here's a long detailed, objective explanation of everything related to this issue. It's probably more useful than the actual link and it may serve as one of the best efforts to consolidate information on this subject on the entire Internet. If it contains original research only a couple of readers will be qualified to tell. Half the people who upvote this won't understand more than the first two paragraphs.

Exactly explains the value of hn, when this happens.

Absolutely. Sometimes you get a comment thread where some specialists add way more than “average” commenters could actually add. I like it because it gives insights in difficult subjects!
There are so many problems that affect many working programmers which you only learn the good answers to by lucking into spending years in the right job.

I always upvote when people share that specialized knowledge and edify the rest of us.

I think that's when HN is at its best.

Missed the part where people use acronyms that no one understands.
> simulated HN top bar

Here's a hyper-anal correction that is itself correct, but doesn't exactly contradict the OP.

Actually, logged-in simulation-user icandownvote (500 karma) can't actually down vote yet.

This is genius

Also, check out the top bar link hrefs:

new | threads | comments | ask | jobs | submit

new - http://news.ycombinator.com/TakeADeepBreath

threads - http://news.ycombinator.com/CheckRepliesToMyComments?id=ican...

comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/KillACoupleMinutes

ask - http://news.ycombinator.com/KickstartADiscussionNoOneWillPar...

jobs - http://news.ycombinator.com/AnyoneActuallyClickThis?

submit - http://news.ycombinator.com/ACommentorIncludedAnAwesomeLink,...

Sound the klaxons, that link includes http not https don't people know the security risks?!

Also, I'm going for a couple of genres with the above

>Here's a hyper-anal correction that is itself correct, but doesn't exactly contradict the OP.

I've always hated this. Thankfully I've found it happens much, much less on HN vs say reddit haha.

The cherry on top is how the correction is effectively useless.

But to the ultra self important pedants, they don’t see it that way at all…it’s not useless it’s a fundamental reality that you’d be a complete idiot not to fully appreciate…just make sure you also worship their brilliance in deigning to illuminate you
I'm missing a rant about why is it a Twitter thread and not a blog post
Also the long, tedious argument following from a polite correction to using the wrong pronouns for the author.
Is it really a parody if its indistinguishable from the real thing?

Also missing a section where someone makes a statement as a fact and has a response from an expert explaining why they are wrong.

Usually also highly upvoted because it sounds right.
Too bad that n-gate.com stopped updating in mid-2021. It was great for this stuff, and arguably it still is.

Edit: Don't miss the usernames in OP's parody thread though, they're just as hard to spot as on actual HN (which is a great feature of this site) but I thought they were the funniest part.

The definitive hacker news mindset takedown. A cold bucket of water on silicon valley. I miss it so much, mostly because it was so insightful.

Alas, no one will know because... you didn't pilotfish-post on firstpost comment.

I was scrolling for this. I always forget the URL and when I find it I'm saddened to find no updates :\",
When telling people about HN, I'd emphasize first reading the guidelines, and not treating it like other social media. Then I'd say, when some comment thread goes intolerable, they can get relief by reading some n-gate. (Though the content of the last post precluded mentioning it at the company where I was working.)

I hope the n-gate person is well, and that they didn't blow a gasket, taking on the burdens of too many HNers.

Missing "I can't view the site on my mobile phone."
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

On a tangential note, did this guideline change recently? In some search results "e.g." changes to "things like".

Really missing n-gate.com. It was good. Hope he's alright
Same, I occasionally go back and re-read the archive of posts for laffs. The satire there is better than 95% of the flotsam posted here.
An internet attempts a third-rate mockery of Hackernews. Hackernews pulls a "this, but unironically", earnestly replicating every joke comment in the original article, right down to the obligatory XKCD.
I miss it too. For being "satire" it was often more insightful than HN.