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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas.

If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases.

If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top.

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> If you want to feel less overwhelmed, try reading the comments starting at the bottom of the page instead of the top

This should be a preference. Ego-boosting sort.

Sort of anti-learning, pro-ego comment reading? :D

On some days you want to be the wind shield. on other days the bug ;)

I'd also suggest reading The Pragmatic Programmer (http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer, written by @pragdave) and the The Passionate Programmer (http://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer).

People who are passionate about what they do have a tendency to stand out (pg makes a similar argument on Amateur section of http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html).

If you are passionate enough about software development aspects, most HN articles will not feel overwhelming, as you will be constantly improving on your craft. But then you will know how much more there is to learn. Just don't feel overwhelmed then.

I sometimes feel like I'm dragged into too many directions at the same time. Damn interest. But that's it. I love to spin, reading about 3 or 4 frameworks in 2 or 3 languages serially until I feel something like information satisfaction or I'm getting tired.

I think I actually need the diversity of information. Sort of brain stimulation through information overflow. ;)

But it works. Diversity is very good for the brain, i think it's irrelevant in wich form.

And when you're talking about pragprog: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear...

My favourite pragprog book so far.

My wife has the occasional habit of cherry picking the best bits of all of our friends/acquaintances lives, combining them into one and using that as the yardstick as to how we are doing. She'd be the first to admit this btw:)

Like wives tend to want the best qualities of all their friends' husbands all rolled into theirs :)

To be fair, we want the same thing in return, while trying to get by with the minimum effort exerted by the other husbands.

Has she purchased any Old Spice for you recently, by chance...?

Ha. Here we have the rarest of local species: a Reddit-style one-liner that merits an upvote here.

While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comments are awesome.

I suppose I can accept the fact that the majority of people don't represent anything to get flustered about. However, there are people way more talented than me, doing much more important-seeming (that is to say, things that are getting more attention) things, and in general just being more successful than I. I truly mean it when I say "good for them," but it eats away at me. Quarter-life crisis I suppose.

I was on this site as a different name over a year ago and have recently returned. I can tell you that I noticed a pretty significant difference in the quality of users now on this site. There are more low/medium quality comments, and the quips aren't as clever. What's more concerning is the upvote counts on those comments...

That being said, there's no other place I'd rather be.

What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up?

I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on and on. Most people I know with real talent feel similarly about HN. Heck, I even know YC guys who feel this way about it.

I cannot know whether or not you would qualify my abilities as "talent". The way you've constructed your response leads me to believe that if I told you I won the Nobel Prize in Javascript, you'd list stupid things that Nobel Prize winners have done.

Even if this site is mostly "talentless wantrepreneurial pundits," which has some truth to it, you're not the slightest bit overwhelmed at the amount of high quality information here?

My awesome comment counter just went up by one.

spotting trolls should be an intelligence test

Intelligence has may sides. In my opinion, one of them is being able to handle people. Offending people is rarely a clever thing to do. I'm not talking about criticism here, I'm talking about offending people. Even if someone's super-intelligent in terms of science, being rude to people means that he or she has never managed to learn how to interact with people.

This is an incredibly important skill; I've found that it's a lot easier to enjoy life if people like you or at least don't dislike you.

Ignore post's questioning your talent, If you've been on HN long enough, you'll know where you stand in terms of talent in the LAMP world.

Talking of talent, ping me on duxy786 at google's mail and maybe we can work together!

Hilarious. So why are you reading let alone commenting? Maybe you're just as thick as the rest of us.

More often than not, it's these sort of comments that sadden me most when reading HN. I actually expected the OP to be about this very topic.

Although my account isn't very old, I've lurked at HN off and on for quite a while. It is my impression that they are increasing, although maybe I only pay more attention now that I have an account.

ignoring the tone from galois - what do we think the untalented should do? certainly someone will be in the ops position (including reading hn / awareness of the wider tech industry) without actually being talented.

I'm not sure that 'untalented' is really a significant concept, since being talented is much more a perception than a definite reality. It's like saying someone is uncharismatic. I guess the severity of such claims would depend on who was doing the assessment. Just as valid is 'latent talent' that even the potentially talented person may not be fully aware of until later in their life. Anyway, I think it's nearly safe to assume that anyone who has made it a habit of reading HN, would not have to risk the disappointment of actually being technically untalented.

Judging by the rest of your comments on this site you're far too intelligent to be commenting here in the first place, so why keep at it? My hunch is that you find enjoyment in talking about how intelligent you are and making others feel less intelligent then you. That or you have something to prove as a result of being inadequate your entire life, but internally, you just know how brilliant you are and have to shout it from the rooftops while bringing down others.

I'm curious, what have you accomplished that's so great? Do YOU have any achievements to back up your arrogance?

I'd venture to say that you're actually not that intelligent at all. An intelligent person would realize striking a balance between radiating their inner brilliance and being a modest and kind person is necessary in life. You have clearly not yet learned that lesson.

Intelligence won't get you very far when no one wants to work with you because you're a huge dick to everyone around you.

Judging by the rest of your comments on this site you're far too intelligent

What comments are you talking about? The ones I see are either retarded, extremely arrogant (but not intelligent), or about average (relative to other comments on this site). From his previous comments, I would guess hes of average intelligence, for this site, but EXTREMELY arrogant. Not really a desirable combination, if you ask me.

He was being a little bit sarcastic about it. ;)

Well, that does make more sense.

Okay, it's a jerk comment, but I do like that word, "wantreprenuerial". I knew a farmer who raised sheep and sold their wastes as fertilizer. Called himself an "entremanure"

I think it was heinlein who wrote that you can break intelligent people into two categories. One sort knows (s)he is better than average but is concerned with levels of intelligence, how smart they are and is susceptible to flattery. Another sort knows they are intelligent enough not to worry about it, knows that other things are the limiting factors in their life and perhaps even feels like a bit of a freak.

also I've seen enough from this username that I think, troll???????????????????????????

"However, there are people way more talented than me"

Oh, and one thing that you have to learn to become comfortable with (or at least Zen about)...there is always somebody better at something than me.

What is great about that is that there is always someone to learn from.

Unless you're Jon Skeet.

Admit it, you're awesome too :)

But yes, I've felt like you do.

There are people here that make me feel inadequate as a programmer. I realize that many - if not most of them happen to be people who live & breathe programming, and solving problems and quenching their thirst for knowledge. This means they're world-class programmers, and used to actually using their brains, but it doesn't mean that they're guaranteed to be considerably more intelligent than I am.

Then there are people like patio11, for example. Whenever this guy says anything, it's always brimming with insight & razor-sharp wit. Now, he's kind of a bummer :)

<i>However, there are people way more talented than me, doing much more important-seeming (that is to say, things that are getting more attention) things, and in general just being more successful than I. </i>

Yes, Pinky, and there always will be. There's always a faster gunfighter.

Also remember that in the comments you'll get a heavy selection bias. I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on ;)

I, for example, comment more heavily on kernel development, virtual machine R&D, HPC, and RDBMS engines 'cause that's what I work on

See, its comments like this that make the OP and others feel bad :)

"If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases."

I'd rather trade ten smart people for one person who ships.

Amen. I know a guy who is an extremely talented programmer, but for a number of reasons currently has a very poor work ethic. While he is able to be considerably more productive than a number of his lesser clued co-workers, he isn't.

And why do you think that is? I've seen too many situations where the reward for being more productive than lesser-clued co-workers was a greater share of grief and stress.

Well in his case it's because he's obsessed with finding the shortest possible solutions to the more difficult levels in the puzzle game Fish Fillets. He's recently rewritten the game's undo/redo system to help him in this.

Sometimes people, even smart people, are unproductive for the usual reasons -- they're lazy/unmotivated or simply just goofing off.

Those smart people can also give you more ideas for things to ship.

I think HN has enough upvote/downvote data for all its users such that it could be feeding us articles based on our voting history and the voting history of people similar to us (non-trivial problem, of course).

I think it's possible to build a news-site that feeds, say the OP, a news feed that he is 'comfortable with'.

In a more general sense, news sites like HN that use up/down are 'dumb' in the sense that they make a crude (but reasonable) approximation to what each individual wants via a simple[1] summation of what the group wants.

[1] unless I'm mistaken

I think reddit tried to do exactly that a while ago and didn't have much luck. It may have been smaller than HN at the time, but I think they kept trying for quite a while.

Interesting, do you, or anyone else know why they didn't succeed?

Maybe user-created groups (i.e., subreddits) was simpler and effective.

I wouldn't feel comfortable with this, as it would destroy the amount of discovery I do on HN.

Not all of the articles are within my technical experience, and some I only barely understand, but I find some seriously mind-blowing things out there.

To the OP...yes. I'm constantly impressed with those who have not only the knowledge and skills, but the sheer drive to build and run a successful startup. Even if I had some crazy-awesome idea that had almost no chance of failure (just as an example), the notion of just...picking up and doing my own thing is a very scary thing to do. I've been job with income stability for so long that the idea of going it on my own scares the hell out of me.

You should also remember that a lot of the time, you're reading about efforts that take teams of extremely bright individuals to make successful. Sure, there's the occasional lone gunman out there, but two brains are almost always better than one.

In fact, in my own experience, I have found it is very difficult for one person (me) to be amazing at all the different things needed to make an idea successful. I'm pretty amazing, but not superman! ;)

I just typed up a reply and realized pg's suggestion of reading bottom-to-top is an excellent idea.

It's like only reading Nobel-prize-winning publications and then complaining you feel dumb...

>>my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases.

if it worries you so much, why don't you try to make it less popular? eg. by blocking all popular search engines.

how about hacker news gold, with a special restricted-access area only? ;)

a bit more seriously, are there any plans to increase the number of karma-locked features? if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them.

"if people knew that there were more benefits to contributing high quality content/submissions/comments, they might put a bit more time and effort into contributing them."

I find that I carefully word what I write on HN by default. That is the 'culture' of the site. I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well. Of course, there are raging dicks everywhere, and people being people will sometimes go off on a tangent. If there was a 'quality of comments' scale, YouTube would probably be near the bottom (just go onto some sorry excuse for a music video and read some spam and inspired fan comments), and HN near the top.

> I don't think the median HN reader needs further encouragement to write well.

perhaps, for now. but if PG's concerns are valid, then it may be the case that this will change. alternatively, consider it a functional way to reinforce the culture.

I doubt the comments here would ever descend to near YouTube levels. For one, trolls on this site are mercilessly modded into the negative, and quickly. The last time I tried to make a snarky comment just for the sake of snark, it got downmodded so fast that I just deleted it. This same comment would probably have hundreds of thumbs up on YouTube by now.

I changed all of my videos to moderated comments on YouTube, and I still receive completely inane ones every day, along with "thumbs up if ____" comments. These, again, would be modded into oblivion here.

Maybe I'm one of the unwelcome newbies that are changing this site for the worse (as I'm not involved in a startup), but I don't think this culture has anything to fear as far as quality dilution goes. Noisy, sure, but still high quality.

More likely they would just spam submissions and vote-bait comments in the hope of gaining enough karma.

I like not having to worry about karma because it means I can speak my mind, instead of simply commenting the popular responses in hope of karma.

thats already happening, more or less. except the culture here is to flag things out of line, and they usually get dealt with. if they're not out of line, then why would it matter?

They get dealt with now, sure, I'm just asking if giving people more incentives to karma whore will have the effect you desire (better submissions/comments; instead of more me-too karma farming comments).

Also to add to what pg said - http://sushrutbidwai.com/?p=232

Remember the tools that you had at your disposal and some one else. Dont get overwhelmed by what others have achieved or seems to have achieved.

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