People (reddit and elsewhere, internet and elsewhere) have a crippling mental condition where if they haven't experienced a problem on a personal level, it must not exist. It's a glaring logical problem that should be as obvious as the word "NO" on a 500 foot tall, illuminated billboard.
Another logical fallacy I've seen is kind of the contrapositive (if I remember ethics class correctly): If people hear an anecdote of a problem affecting someone in a group, the problem exists throughout the entire group.
E.g. the other day Reddit had a story about an atheist who dropped out of West Point because he felt there was too much religion, which somehow mutated on some of the subreddits to how all atheists in all of the military branches are continuously being oppressed (which is far and away untrue).
Even more astoundingly, even people who've run headlong into this attitude from others still don't realise when they're doing it themselves. For instance, a lot of feminists have trouble grasping that racism does actually exist, anti-racism activists can't understand why sexism is a big deal, etc...
Every online community needs a good flounce every now and again. Extra points for the 'I just wanted to see if you all loved me really' reverse flounce shortly afterwards!
Polarized comments? Usually it's all the apologists and me in there. I didn't know there was anyone else who wasn't an apologist for copyright infringement. Nice to meet you
And then the post mortem / lessons learned and how next time I'll use Lean Startup (shit, do I need to pay Eric Rice a licensing fee for mentioning the generic term that existed since he was in diapers, but trademarked somehow?).
You are missing the "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup that teaches people how to live out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while..."
I laughed at "How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :) I always wondered why this was a thing on HN, it doesn't matter if something took one weekend, one month or one year to finish - it's the result that matters, and saying "I build it in 24h" is the same as saying "it has a lot of bugs, but I want to launch it anyway".
If computer keyboards were velocity sensitive like music keyboards, maybe you could do it through discriminating touch velocity (force). I imagine it could be tricky to get used to though! Idea, maybe key down duration could be used as proxy for velocity, as in, more forceful key press last less?
I was thinking something simpler. Holding down caps lock produces the same effect as holding down either esc or ctrl, but after you release it the mode for the next time toggles to the other.
The Emacs Wiki has an item about remapping the space bar to be both space when pressed alone and Ctrl when pressed with another key. With implementations for OS X, X11 and Windows. Might be suitable for adaption.
I love HN but this made me laugh :P, nailed it pretty much.
I would just add "Why X sucks because now I'm learning a trendy hipster new Y that no one knows of"
Unfortunately it's too late for me - I decided years ago (in favour of learning). However you're right, both articles (and associated discussions) had excellent points and were well worth reading.
Well, I think anyone who has a desire to learn programming should do so. The original debate was about whether or not absolutely everyone should learn at least the basics of programming, regardless of their passion or career. It was a good debate but as always a lot of the titles of the various blog posts involved were very link-baity.
Yeah, but apparently you can use Go for the backend and scale up to 2 Billion users
(And someone will use this fact as a reason to not use Go. Of course their website will melt after a couple of minutes on the front page of HN because they forgot to do any basic load testing on their servers and didn't catch something very simple)
Some of them have been thought out - "how I mapped caps lock" by yakshaver, "derailed by a pedantic comment" by wellactually(I suffer from this; working on it), "apple's downfall" by armchairceo; the comment puns(stylish, worn-out, nebolous) are pretty meh.
Despite this being a parody, I would still like to point out "a labor of love you can say mean things about". I have seen it happen here way too often. Someone posts something and the crowd goes wild - "this is a feature not a product", "as a designer I can tell you you suck", "another cool aid drinkers pretending node.js is cool" etc. Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it. And the worse part is, you pretend you were doing him a favor - "I was only giving feedback which the poster asked for". The poster asked for feedback, not for insults. It doesn't matter if you are a programming god(most of the people doing it aren't, but still) - there is a difference between feedback and "look at this pathetic shit thinking he is worth anything".
I am sure I am not the only one who thinks people go overboard with their so-called feedback. pg especially made a post about the flood of launches coming in and being nice to them.
Please be nice to them. For you their launch may be "yet another YC startup," but for each individual startup this is their big moment.
I've noticed a drop in meanness since it was brought to the attention of the community. It still happens, but many people appear to be making a conscious effort to avoid it in their comments and combat it editorially in the comments of others.
Some comments are mean because the poster is a jerk. But some of the most valuable comments you will get are angry diatribes from people who probably saw potential in your idea but were disappointed for some reason. These are well worth tuning into. The worst type of comment is the one that wasn't made because no one gave a damn one way or the other.
If I do a "Show HN", I will read each and every comment and think about it. But that's not the point of contention here. The point is you can be honest, unfiltered, upset and can still not be an asshole.
> Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it.
the right definitely exists and should be cherished. I agree that being nice is a nice goal but I also love unfiltered honest feedback like you can easily get from this community.
But saying that people don't have the right to do otherwise is a much stronger statement than what you just stated. In fact, people in general have the right to do many things which are immoral or even unethical, e.g. the Westboro Baptist protests at funerals.
> But saying that people don't have the right to do otherwise
I should have worded it differently - I didn't mean right as in legal definition of rights(which isn't applicable here anyway) Let's just rephrase it as someone asking for feedback doesn't mean you can walk over it.
As for what rights people have, HN is private property and what speech is acceptable and what is not is totally up to the owners.
I wish more people had a sense of humor online. A real one. As it is, sometimes I feel like all my comments have to be bland. You never know how someone will interpret something.
What right? If you are talking about free speech, that isn't applicable here. Owners of site can allow or disallow expressions on their discretion.
When I said right, I meant the typical defense - "They posted it here. They asked for it.". I am saying just because someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't imply you can be a jerk and hide behind "but they wanted feedback".
> unfiltered honest
The problem with "unfiltered and honest" is it doesn't have a agreed-on definition.
You must be blind to not notice the crime against humanity that "white on yellow" text is.
The white on yellow text is unreadable.
To some people, 1 might look honest and unfiltered; to me it looks like some asshole trying to be tough guy on the web.
2 isn't filtering anything and is honest. "Not being an asshole" and "being honest and straight forward" aren't mutually exclusive.
Hyperbole isn't the same thing as dishonesty or malice. If you believe a poster sincerely thinks white on yellow text is a crime against humanity in a world of child soldiers, oppressive regimes, systemic corruption and walled garden app ecosystems, then why would you consider their opinion relevant in the first place?
> If you believe a poster sincerely thinks white on yellow text is a crime against humanity in a world of child soldiers, oppressive regimes, systemic corruption and walled garden app ecosystems, then why would you consider their opinion relevant in the first place?
Inserting 10000 records, each in their own transaction, is a crime against humanity.
Posting comments with get requests and without csrf tokens is a crime against humanity
I can sincerely believe these are crimes against humanity, and still be right. What I believe to be crimes against humanity is not going to affect xss in any way.
By your analogy, if Hitler says exercising is good, you will respond "why would you consider his opinion in the first place".
Hitler had some good qualities? Yes. Do you have to be Hitler to have those? No. Does being Hitler help? No.
The point is simply that you can ignore someone telling you that your font kerning is giving babies cancer. It doesn't mean your font kerning is good, but, for most applications of font kerning, you don't have to worry about the cancer.
The thing of it is, I'm of two minds on this: yes, it seems that HN (and the Internet in general) can be overly harsh, especially considering that many of the harshest critics will probably never do anything substantialy close to a lot of what gets submitted. OTOH, it's sort of like boot camp: if someone can't handle mean things said about their idea, then they probably won't survive the slings and arrows of the market (and yes, I know not all of the "Show HNs" are business related). Also, many people, when they see something that seems obvious, already done, or simply wrong, tend to have a bad reaction (see http://xkcd.com/386/). Still, criticisms could be phrased better; OTOH again, but many of the originators of "Show HNs" that seemed like the most likely to suceed were the ones who show up, acknowledge valid criticism, and fix faults with their projects. Some of the best even thank polite critics for input.
> Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it
I didn't realize that signing up to HN entitled me to negativity free advertising for my pet project.
Wouldn't you expect people posting Show HN posts to know what happens in the comment threads of all of them?
I agree that the community should try to discourage plain insults, but I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community. If that critique is harsh then it's harsh. Welcome to going public with your idea. I agree with you about the insults, but you are also drifting towards encouraging protecting egos that are tied to their product. That's not a helpful community norm. Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.
Also, we're coming up on a decade of digg/reddit/HN style social news sites. Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?
> Wouldn't you expect people posting Show HN posts to know what happens in the comment threads of all of them?
It happens all the time and posters are well aware of the behavior. Neither of these mean it's desirable to put down everyone who does a "Show HN". If anything, it happens all the time is the reason behind the concern.
> I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community.
> Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.
I am not advocating heaps of praise for anyone who does a "Show HN". Honesty and not being an asshole aren't mutually exclusive.
> Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?
I am not too sure if HN incentivises being a jerk to "Show HN" or posts in general. But if it does, it should stop. Just because it happens doesn't make it desirable.
> But if it does, it should stop. Just because it happens doesn't make it desirable.
Never said it was desirable. I'm just fairly convinced that this is the type of interaction that humans do when they communicate in this medium. Like I said, we have 7 or 8 years of experiments and people acting pretty much the same throughout. Some combination of anonymity, fake points to score every contribution with voting and emphasis on many short nuggets of information rather than long form maybe? who knows.
> it should stop
"why can't everyone just get along". I think it's safe to assume by now that this behaviour is human nature + this communication medium. You can tell people to "stop it" or you can change the system that encourages/causes/incentivises that behaviour. Only one of those approaches has ever worked.
For some reason, using closing parens instead of proper smileys with colons caught on in Russia and some Eastern Europe countries (never seen one from anyone living in Western Europe).
Not to offend dschiptsov, but (ab)using them is an awful habit to have.
I've also only seen it from some EE girls I've dated. It's really odd isn't. It drove me insane initially. I guess they'd argue it reduces typing time by 50%!
I have always heard that it was because Russian/Eastern Europe keyboards doesn't have a colon in their layout, but looking at the layout[0] that doesn't seem to be true.
But the colon combination is a bit awkward for adding quick smileys (SHIFT+6) which makes it understandable that one would use )) instead.
A bit unrelated, but I once had a guy trying to scam me on Steam using some neat chat request trick using a friends name. Disregarding all the other scamming signs I easily spotted this being another user because of the )) overuse.
I know it is silly, but I can't help but chuckle a little bit when I see )) or similar.
...and somebody would complain why this thing is in the front page, and other person questioning why HN becoming like Reddit, and someone will downvote the comment.
..but then some other guy would defend it by saying "but it is hacker-y, etc"
169 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadYet it keeps happening.
E.g. the other day Reddit had a story about an atheist who dropped out of West Point because he felt there was too much religion, which somehow mutated on some of the subreddits to how all atheists in all of the military branches are continuously being oppressed (which is far and away untrue).
If a community can't laugh at itself, then it's surely doomed :D
I think that's why my 'double stealth' parody was such a hit a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183
You should write a book ... although too many people would probably take it as serious advice and start following it :/
How is it done? Does your buddy use X, mac or where in the stack is the hack?
I have not figured out how to do it on Windows, but I imagine that it might be possible with AutoHotKey.
and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my business"
and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"
and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup"
Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...
"How I learn to program in 30 minutes and bootstrapped my first startup"
"Show HN: My new social network that will change the world", from the author of the previous article
they have fixed gear bikes, we have custom compiled FreeBSD kernels because we don't know what we are doing.
"How iPad kills PCs"
"My iCruft and Me"
Unknown or expired link. http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=ZVizUZJ5Ar
"Why you should always validate your first $100M in sales with a mockup, before writing a single line of code"
"How we can implement Ayn Rand's ideas on success to solve world hunger with crowdsourced electronics"
"What is success, anyway?"
12 hours later...
"Why C++ Is Back."
That really got me thinking. Then I realized I was reading a parody. I am still thinking.
http://emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey#toc24
So, guys, should I or should I not learn to code? :D.
"Surely I can spin this Tweet into an article"
"Why latest Apple product is the best thing you have ever seen" - Marco, Gruber or MG
(And someone will use this fact as a reason to not use Go. Of course their website will melt after a couple of minutes on the front page of HN because they forgot to do any basic load testing on their servers and didn't catch something very simple)
Despite this being a parody, I would still like to point out "a labor of love you can say mean things about". I have seen it happen here way too often. Someone posts something and the crowd goes wild - "this is a feature not a product", "as a designer I can tell you you suck", "another cool aid drinkers pretending node.js is cool" etc. Someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't mean you get the right to walk all over it. And the worse part is, you pretend you were doing him a favor - "I was only giving feedback which the poster asked for". The poster asked for feedback, not for insults. It doesn't matter if you are a programming god(most of the people doing it aren't, but still) - there is a difference between feedback and "look at this pathetic shit thinking he is worth anything".
I am sure I am not the only one who thinks people go overboard with their so-called feedback. pg especially made a post about the flood of launches coming in and being nice to them.
Please be nice to them. For you their launch may be "yet another YC startup," but for each individual startup this is their big moment.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862067
If I do a "Show HN", I will read each and every comment and think about it. But that's not the point of contention here. The point is you can be honest, unfiltered, upset and can still not be an asshole.
the right definitely exists and should be cherished. I agree that being nice is a nice goal but I also love unfiltered honest feedback like you can easily get from this community.
You can give great, thoughtful feedback that accurately describes your feelings without being unprofessional or disrespectful.
But saying that people don't have the right to do otherwise is a much stronger statement than what you just stated. In fact, people in general have the right to do many things which are immoral or even unethical, e.g. the Westboro Baptist protests at funerals.
I should have worded it differently - I didn't mean right as in legal definition of rights(which isn't applicable here anyway) Let's just rephrase it as someone asking for feedback doesn't mean you can walk over it.
As for what rights people have, HN is private property and what speech is acceptable and what is not is totally up to the owners.
What right? If you are talking about free speech, that isn't applicable here. Owners of site can allow or disallow expressions on their discretion.
When I said right, I meant the typical defense - "They posted it here. They asked for it.". I am saying just because someone posts a "Show HN" doesn't imply you can be a jerk and hide behind "but they wanted feedback".
> unfiltered honest
The problem with "unfiltered and honest" is it doesn't have a agreed-on definition.
You must be blind to not notice the crime against humanity that "white on yellow" text is.
The white on yellow text is unreadable.
To some people, 1 might look honest and unfiltered; to me it looks like some asshole trying to be tough guy on the web.
2 isn't filtering anything and is honest. "Not being an asshole" and "being honest and straight forward" aren't mutually exclusive.
Inserting 10000 records, each in their own transaction, is a crime against humanity.
Posting comments with get requests and without csrf tokens is a crime against humanity
I can sincerely believe these are crimes against humanity, and still be right. What I believe to be crimes against humanity is not going to affect xss in any way.
By your analogy, if Hitler says exercising is good, you will respond "why would you consider his opinion in the first place".
Hitler had some good qualities? Yes. Do you have to be Hitler to have those? No. Does being Hitler help? No.
I didn't realize that signing up to HN entitled me to negativity free advertising for my pet project.
Wouldn't you expect people posting Show HN posts to know what happens in the comment threads of all of them?
I agree that the community should try to discourage plain insults, but I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community. If that critique is harsh then it's harsh. Welcome to going public with your idea. I agree with you about the insults, but you are also drifting towards encouraging protecting egos that are tied to their product. That's not a helpful community norm. Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.
Also, we're coming up on a decade of digg/reddit/HN style social news sites. Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?
It happens all the time and posters are well aware of the behavior. Neither of these mean it's desirable to put down everyone who does a "Show HN". If anything, it happens all the time is the reason behind the concern.
> I want to see well reasoned thoughts and critiques of other projects from the community.
> Be supportive of people working hard and ruthlessly honest about their ideas and products.
I am not advocating heaps of praise for anyone who does a "Show HN". Honesty and not being an asshole aren't mutually exclusive.
> Is it time to stop being surprised that the behaviour that this medium incentivises is the behaviour we keep seeing?
I am not too sure if HN incentivises being a jerk to "Show HN" or posts in general. But if it does, it should stop. Just because it happens doesn't make it desirable.
Never said it was desirable. I'm just fairly convinced that this is the type of interaction that humans do when they communicate in this medium. Like I said, we have 7 or 8 years of experiments and people acting pretty much the same throughout. Some combination of anonymity, fake points to score every contribution with voting and emphasis on many short nuggets of information rather than long form maybe? who knows.
> it should stop
"why can't everyone just get along". I think it's safe to assume by now that this behaviour is human nature + this communication medium. You can tell people to "stop it" or you can change the system that encourages/causes/incentivises that behaviour. Only one of those approaches has ever worked.
The next level is a realization that it isn't any different form /b/ - just a flow of a community-generated content about some buzzwords.))
Well, we must admit that a distribution of our interests is a little bit broader, but it is a substitution-based activity nevertheless.)
Not to offend dschiptsov, but (ab)using them is an awful habit to have.
(at least where I came from, EE girls are very rare)
But they do type smiles properly.
I would assume EE types would have other problems with typyjng, or maybe not;
Tipzntrix: hi Tipzntrix: )
The closing paren is supposed to be attached to the colon to make a super quick happy face.
or sad face.
Tipzntrix: (
But the colon combination is a bit awkward for adding quick smileys (SHIFT+6) which makes it understandable that one would use )) instead.
A bit unrelated, but I once had a guy trying to scam me on Steam using some neat chat request trick using a friends name. Disregarding all the other scamming signs I easily spotted this being another user because of the )) overuse. I know it is silly, but I can't help but chuckle a little bit when I see )) or similar.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Russian.svg
..but then some other guy would defend it by saying "but it is hacker-y, etc"