I realize that here at HN we don't really do humour, mostly because I think we fear turning into Reddit with useless gigantic threads of people making sophomoric jokes and bad puns.
And I admit that that link was sophomoric. But given some of the large personalities that get linked from this site and the general tone of HN, I thought this piece of humour was very welcome. It lets everyone here laugh out loud about themselves, their ambitions and this community in general.
Many of those rockstar programmers are probably rockstars in the sense of Spinal Tap.
I'm pretty concerned by the upvoting and commenting patterns going on in this post... This is absolutely a Reddit-mentality thread, and, looking at the other comments, it is mostly liked by people who enjoy making one-liner jokes (i.e. reddit folks).
Hey, Reddit folks, you came to the wrong site - go back to Reddit. Kthx.
Look what else is happening, though. The people who are explaining why they upvoted this story in a very Hacker News-ish way are being down-voted. It's not all cut and dry.
I've flagged it as well, but I don't think flagging is all that useful. pg has said that after 10 upvotes, flags won't automatically kill a submission. So we're just waiting until a mod sees this.
I don't know if more flags makes it more likely that a mod sees it, especially if we take into account that this submission is #1.
I upvoted it for a bit of perspective, which is always relevant. It reminded me that, outside of this particular culture, there's a whole world of people who have never heard of the people that we look up to. If I wore a shirt that said "pg was right" for a week straight, I would maybe run into 3 people that have any idea what it's talking about.
I would probably get far more comments on the fact that I'm wearing the same shirt for a week.
Once something hits the front page it usually will garner enough votes to stay there for a while, once it goes above the fold it is going to go into a feedback loop simply because that's the page that most people start from when they read HN.
That and plenty of people vote based on titles, not on articles. That could be mitigated by requiring a click on the link before allowing you to vote an article up.
People are wondering who upvoted, I think it's interesting to see that as most people who are upvoting this do it from title. Often people vote from interesting title, then click to read, only after. Title was appealing, expecting some article pointing and explaining what is wrong with "big shot" programmers. And finally, it's not, it's a stupid thing. But it got upvoted, thanks to title. Interesting, really.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadI realize that here at HN we don't really do humour, mostly because I think we fear turning into Reddit with useless gigantic threads of people making sophomoric jokes and bad puns.
And I admit that that link was sophomoric. But given some of the large personalities that get linked from this site and the general tone of HN, I thought this piece of humour was very welcome. It lets everyone here laugh out loud about themselves, their ambitions and this community in general.
Many of those rockstar programmers are probably rockstars in the sense of Spinal Tap.
Hey, Reddit folks, you came to the wrong site - go back to Reddit. Kthx.
I don't know if more flags makes it more likely that a mod sees it, especially if we take into account that this submission is #1.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750113
I would probably get far more comments on the fact that I'm wearing the same shirt for a week.
That and plenty of people vote based on titles, not on articles. That could be mitigated by requiring a click on the link before allowing you to vote an article up.