Hacker News Reader

> Seriously, is HN fostering a culture where it's OK to spew pseudo-intellectual garbage as long as you're being nice?

Not at all. It's fine and encouraged to correct or contradict someone. It's not OK to be personally abusive when you do it.

The civility guideline has been in place since the very beginning of HN, and it's one of the biggest reasons why people keep coming back.

The commenter was just recounting their own recollection. There's no need to be combative. If they're wrong, just point it out politely. No big deal.

The commenter was not being combative or abusive in any way. They did point out the other person was wrong politely. They still got downvoted to hell.

People don't come to HN for civility. They come because they can be smug polite idiots around other smug polite idiots and "the rules" protect and enforce this behavior.

If you don't believe that disproving something stupid is hard, I give you Donald Trump. Sometimes you just need to speak out against stupidity without providing a groveling mathematical proof.

A cursory glance at that commenter's recent history shows little evidence of politeness or intention to be polite.

You don't have to like this community but surely you have better things to do than making it worse by trashing it like this?

Also, invoking US politics drama to score points in this discussion topic shows quite a lack of sense of proportion. We are talking about a single person's casually-communicated recollections of their past experiences with a computer operating system. It really isn't worth getting wound up about.

This is a great example of not reading charitably. You're reading a bunch of stuff that just isn't in the text you're replying to. Who said anything about big data? Who is trying to write journal publication quality comments? You seem to have an axe to grind that has nothing to do with this thread.

My reading was just that the parent commenter was telling a story by relating an interesting anecdote. That's exactly what I come here for. People won't do that as much if the common response is weird aggression like your comments in this thread. That would be a shame.

You could have just written a little comment saying, "in my experience, you're incorrect about the speed of reading from /dev/zero". The difference in your remembered experiences and your conversation about it would have been interesting to me. Instead you picked a fight, which is not interesting.

> in my experience, you're incorrect about the speed of reading from /dev/zero

> Instead you picked a fight

So I harshly pointed out that they're mistaken. Then it was pointed out to me that I wasn't being nice. So I responded by showing why I didn't feel the need to be nice and provided my reasoning for it.

Since it seems to be too much trouble, here is the post I'm getting the "imaginary" quotes you refer to from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14544002

You can point out how people are wrong and people won't have a problem with your posts. Be a jerk about it and people will. Hacker News, for its (many) faults, doesn't ascribe to the "you can be a sneering asshole but if you're Right you're Right". It's very possible to be both right and a jerk. It's incumbent upon you to avoid being a jerk or to not whine when people don't like jerks. This is basic-functioning-person stuff.

I don't know who is right or wrong. I am a software developer and familiar with Unix/Linux. I actively try to be well informed about other topics related to this. When engineering I actively try to remain emotionally dispassionate. I understand what the argument is about and I see how in a technical sense either side could be "correct" here.

Despite all that, the level of vitriol and defensiveness you have demonstrated makes me want to agree with everyone else. I am curious what the opinions are of people less informed on this topic and more emotionally in touch. You damage your side of the argument, not with your content, but your portrayal of the content.

Some of the things you said have merit, but they are ignored and derided because they are attached to you and you are attached to vitriol and vitriol rightly gets ignored and derided. The best thing you can do for anything resembling your side of the argument is to just back down. If you don't say anything for a day or two it will all just blow over and you can try again later when people are more willing to listen. You can try approaching the conversation like an engineering problem and perhaps see that manners and politeness are to conversation as lubricant is to an engine (or perhaps high clocks speeds to software). You can have a conversation without manners, run an engine without oil or run software on low clocking parts, but it won't turn out as well as it could have.

So it's not what I said it's just how I said it.

I think "you don't know what you're talking about" is substantively different than "in my experience, you are wrong about this". Firstly, lots of people who do know what they're talking about are wrong about lots of things. Making it about the person instead of about the thing was (for me) the problem with your comment. Also, "in my experience" is not just polite fluff. I have come across diminishingly few things in computing that are not dependent on circumstances.

The interesting version of this conversation would have been you saying, "no that sounds wrong to me", followed by a discussion of (to the best of your memories) what kind of hardware, drivers, kernel and compiler versions, etc. you were each using. Maybe you would have convinced me that there is no combination of those things for which the original commenter's experience could possibly have been right. But your throwaway ad hominem comment didn't, and couldn't ever, accomplish that.

Mostly...

But notice how you still post and the downvote brigade still obliterates your score.

You can't say anything and get upvotes because you have angered so many with how you said some things.

> But notice how you still post and the downvote brigade still obliterates your score.

And even posts with actual data are being downvoted :)

This only goes to show just how subjective and emotional this community has become, where everyone just wants to share "but in my opinion" or "but in my experience" without having to back up any of their arguments, or even have any of their arguments or claims challenged and questioned and called out.

This essentially turns concrete, testable claims into happy dreaming about technology. And that's really what this has become: everyone sharing their idea of what something should be and presenting it as fact.

I guess I've made a very good point today!

It has literally nothing to do with people saying "in my experience" or even you choosing to challenge an argument. It has to do with you being a jerk about it. The people you interact with through your keyboard are real and how you treat them matters.

The only point you've made today is that self-righteousness exists and exhibits itself as rudeness. And you know it's rude; you're actively trying to downplay it by calling how you've chosen to approach other people as "harsh". You should use this awareness to be better, not to continue to be unkind. Because, ultimately, this is a you problem.

> And even posts with actual data are being downvoted

Of course they are, its not your data that people don't like. They aren't downvoting the post, they are downvoting you. People don't like you, and anything you say will be downvoted at present. Remove yourself or mod might.

You have made no points today, unless you are trolling then you have angered many and that is your measure of success. I will not respond to you further.

> Of course they are, its not your data that people don't like. They aren't downvoting the post, they are downvoting you.

Exactly my point.

> You have made no points today

Sure I did. One of them is right in your comment :)

You are a troll and deserve all the downvotes.

> Seriously, is HN fostering a culture where it's OK to spew pseudo-intellectual garbage as long as you're being nice?

The comment I called out had no technical content, argument, etc. and was only an attack on someone's credibility. That contributes nothing of value and in my book is worse than “pseudo-intellectual” because it's not even trying to contribute anything other than noise to the conversation.

You would not be getting such intense negative reaction if your comment had been “Do you recall which operating system that was?” or “How long ago was that?”. That's how an actual engineering conversation should go, especially in a field such a long history of people uncovering unexpected performance issues caused by unintended consequences.

As a simple example: in the early 2000s, a colleague reported that tools like grep and wc were running slower than our storage. That seemed odd since those are usually considered fast and certainly hadn't had that problem years earlier but a little testing confirmed that the switch to assuming Unicode by default had made a previously unoptimized code path the default and I'm sure the person who did that had assumed that someone would have noticed if code which had been shipped for years was that slow. The fact that for many years before and after you could mentally bucket those Unix shell tools into the “fast” bucket didn't change the fact that there was a multi-year period where you had to check.

I have no reason to doubt that joosters' reported experience actually happened, especially given how rocky the 90s Unix world was. That was back when you couldn't even rely on a vendor's own C compiler not producing pathologically bad code. Someone having a /dev/zero implementation which triggered extra or slow kernel transitions, unnecessary access checks or audit logging, etc. would be disappointing but far from shocking[1].

More to the point, what do you hope to gain from such an unnecessarily combative style? You're not preventing any bad outcome, helping yourself or others improve, or otherwise doing anything other than lowering the level of discourse here.

1. Here's an example from 2012(!): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/minix3/M3fjpvvOkuY

Oh dear. So sorry that my memory is crap enough to not provide you with the exact details you require.

...every comment is trying to look like a paper published in a highly acclaimed journal

It was an anecdote about my previous experience with 'yes' and /dev/zero, it seemed somewhat on-topic. I'm not trying to justify anything or win magic internet points.

If you're expecting journal-quality posts, perhaps you should go read a journal and not an internet forum chat.

"obviously incorrect"

You admit that you don't have enough details to know exactly what they're referring to, yet you're confident enough to call their personal experience "obviously incorrect"?

It's not an argument, it's an explanation based on personal past experience. You can't find any evidence, and you don't need to, because the claim being made won't influence how you do things today anyway.

People's personal experiences can be interesting, and that adds to the conversation. Your overwrought criticism adds nothing. Kindly stop.

> You admit that you don't have enough details to know exactly what they're referring to, yet you're confident enough to call their personal experience "obviously incorrect"?

I didn't admit to not having enough details. You have two tools:

1. Reasoning about the abstractions and implementations of how yes and /dev/zero work: the claims become obviously incorrect, even their own tests later in the thread show that on a "modern system".

2. Actually running the tests they claim (which would prove them correct): no freaking way to do that. Even they do not offer any numbers to back their own claims because everything in the argument is a maybe or a remember or a might or a may have.

> People's personal experiences can be interesting, and that adds to the conversation.

People claiming their personal experiences are fact without proving anything is hugely problematic. Remember that woman claiming her child got autism due to vaccines? Remember that US president claiming a child got autism due to vaccines?

I remember seeing the earth as flat when I was working as an astronaut on the ISS. Go check my "personal experiences".

I hope you see what I'm trying to convey here.

I really don't see how it's "obviously incorrect" when yes only needs to make system calls for writing, whereas /dev/zero needs to make system calls for both reading and writing. Furthermore you're assuming that both are highly optimized, whereas it's entirely conceivable that /dev/zero is less optimized.

If what you're trying to convey is that abstract reasoning based on fundamental principles without any consideration of real-world complications is a superior approach to determining what's true, well, I reject that.

> I really don't see how it's "obviously incorrect" when yes only needs to make system calls for writing, whereas /dev/zero needs to make system calls for both reading and writing. Furthermore you're assuming that both are highly optimized, whereas it's entirely conceivable that /dev/zero is less optimized.

When you're "only writing", there is a counterpart that needs to read, and you have to wait for that, same as /dev/zero. It's more conceivable /dev/zero is more optimized than yes: you know, because of how pipes and streams are an essential part of a UNIX or UNIX-like system.

> If what you're trying to convey is that abstract reasoning based on fundamental principles without any consideration of real-world complications is a superior approach to determining what's true, well, I reject that.

I agree with that. But the original comment only gives us few options to check for its validity, and some of those are not feasible.

1. Actually finding all those systems, version-specific, combinations of userspace tools, setting them up and running the tests on hardware that was at OP's hand "back then": Not feasible.

2. Reasoning abstractly would tell us quickly that the original comment is plain wrong.

3. Running the tests on a modern system (some default linux install or whatever) shows that (2) is even more probably correct.

Is it "more conceivable" or is it "obviously incorrect"? You switch freely between arguing that your conclusion is more probable and arguing that it's obviously correct.

I agree with you that your conclusion is more probable. But that's an entirely different thing. It is more probable that a Tesla P100D is faster than a Pinto. It is not obviously incorrect that one time a Pinto beat a Tesla, maybe because the Tesla was dragging a bunch of rocks and the Pinto was dropped off a cliff.

Make up your mind what your argument is: is the statement in question merely unlikely, or is it "obviously incorrect"? Once it is, make your argument without being a jackass.

I responded in the terms you were using, hoping that it would become clearer to you.

> It is not obviously incorrect that one time a Pinto beat a Tesla

Yes it is, because OP forgot to mention the Tesla was dragging a bunch of rocks and the Pinto was dropped off a cliff. So was I supposed to have the power to read OP's memories and go back in time to check whether they provided us with all the information we needed to check their claims? No, I worked with exactly what's in the comment.

So without catering to your language/terms you use: it is obviously incorrect. Even OP's own comment later in the thread (on a modern system though, mind you) shows that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14544002

You appear to be incapable of understanding any middle ground between "obviously incorrect" and "obviously correct." Is the concept of uncertainty that foreign to you?

Really? Because when it comes to something testable, like in this case either running a test of yes vs /dev/zero or looking at the source code of everything involved, there isn't any uncertainty that OP's statement is obviously incorrect.

The only uncertainty is OP's use of "back then", "from memory", "maybe", "could have", etc... without providing any evidence to support their statement.

They were talking about things in the distant past. (Distant in computer terms.) The only way there isn't uncertainty is if you tried all the systems that were available at the time in question.

The claim is testable, in theory. You didn't test it, nor did anyone else here, so the fact that it's testable doesn't remove any uncertainty.

> The claim is testable, in theory.

It's not feasible to test in any practical way.

You said it yourself:

> If what you're trying to convey is that abstract reasoning based on fundamental principles without any consideration of real-world complications is a superior approach to determining what's true, well, I reject that.

Enjoy :)

Other tests by other people show that /dev/zero is slower.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14544261

People are suggesting that it's because of the use of cat. So, if someone writes a program, and the only difference is between /dev/zero and yes, and one is slower than the other, it's fairly reasonable to make the assumption that /dev/zero is slower.

> People are suggesting that it's because of the use of cat.

It is:

    > cat /dev/zero | pv >/dev/null
    ^C97GiB 0:00:05 [1.79GiB/s]

    > < /dev/zero pv >/dev/null
    ^C.3GiB 0:00:06 [10.2GiB/s]

OP's own comment shows that /dev/zero is faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14544002