Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing (2013)

righto.com

38 pointsmtmail34 comments

My standards are probably different, but I don't feel like I see very much those those kind of comments. Our conversations are really pretty decent in contrast to much of the web.

The overattribution of notable effects and fallacies gets a bit tiring, though. As the article mentions, we love to bring up things like the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Peter Principle, the confirmation bias, etc. Sometimes I don't think people actually know what they're talking about when they say that someone has "confirmation bias"; it's just become a 115 IQ way of saying that the other person is stupid.

When it comes to comments, I see downvote abuse happen a little more frequently than I'd hope. I'm not just complaining about my own comments, but just about every day I see a comment that got downvoted for saying nothing objectively wrong or controversial. It's only a few people abusing the system, really, but it'd still be nice if I noticed such things less often.

Tbh, you can blame pg for that. He famously said downvoting to disagree is fine and people have let that reasoning turn into downvoting for almost everything.

When someone cites the Dunning-Kruger Effect I like to counter with the Dunning-Kruger Effect Effect.[1] This also illustrates my own pet-peeve of starting references with index [0].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12918362

As I recall, either Dunning or Kruger also pointed out a long time ago that the effect they were observing shouldn't be seen so much as an indictment of stupid people, but as a warning to anyone who thought they were smart.

Dunning and Kruger hadn't experienced the Internet...

They had to make that comment because that is exactly how it was and is used, e.g. see ConceptJunkie's reply.

as a reformed C programmer, I get a little kick out of the elevators in Europe starting on floor 0. Starting with index [0] is a little thing. Can we have little things? I'm not trying to antagonize anyone, it isn't a finger in anyone's eye, I'm not trying to make your day worse - it just a little thing that makes my life very slightly nicer for a very short period of time.

No problem, its not a serious pet-peeve. I even find it a bit amusing.

I think the first citation in the comment you link to gets something wrong. It states that there is a correlation "very closed to zero" between actual performance and perceived ability. If you take a look at the paper, it addresses that. The better-than-average heuristic accounts for the compression you see, and once you remove it's effects from the picture, the correlation appears.

I feel like a lot of 'platitudes' are worth repeating. Again and again, ad nauseum, long past where people are tired of hearing it. Because they're true, but they're very easy to forget.

If platitudes can be used to dismiss most articles out of hand, well, maybe things that look like "interesting news" at first glance are often... not.

My personal list:

- From the article: Correlation IS NOT causation. This should be written in giant flaming letters above every study. It dismisses almost all of them out of hand.

- Nearly every judgment you make about somebody is fundamental attribution error. For example, every technical interview ever is nearly fatally flawed. (No, I don't currently have better alternatives.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

- Goodhart's law. Also known as the tragedy of the OKR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Alas, if we were to stop using these phrases solely because they have been "overused" despite their value, then we risk denying the lucky 10,000 of tomorrow.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I haven't seen a couple of these recently. Especially the +1 seems to be less popular (personal observation, not backed up by any data).

My addition would be "Oh [based on the title] I thought the article was about [something totally different]" which adds no value to other readers.

You don’t see much of any of these tropes anymore, at least without being downvoted and/or flagged and/or chided by the moderators.

I check the comments to see if the article is worth reading. That type of comment can be helpful.

The thing is I joined in 2013, and unless things were substantially different before then, isomorphisms of "+1" comments were always heavily downvoted to maintain the HN level SNR. I wasn't aware they were ever welcome.

Also, many people share a comment consisting of one of the annoyances they list but go on to explain and elaborate. That's much better and just because someone goes "causation != correlation" doesn't invalidate their post if they give good reasoning for how it's relevant.

I agree with most of the list, except this one.

> Comments starting with "No." "Wrong." or "False."

What's wrong with that? If the post you're replying to is wrong and you go on to provide evidence of why it's wrong, then isn't this just clear, unambiguous communication?

I've noticed exchanges here where it's very difficult to tell if a particular comment is intended to agree, disagree or is completely irrelevent to what is being discussed. This is because a lot of comments here are not communicated well due to the programmer's tendency to abstract and ambiguate.

For me, it’s just being (or seems?) more courteous by changing a common ‘No/Wrong. Your idea...’ to ‘I actually disagree. The reasons being...’

Text makes it difficult to parse tone and intent and we need to adapt accordingly.

As a foreigner getting tech news here, I have learned a lot about the culture from the comments here. If once a kind of comment is said it couldn't be said again, then people would need to dig deep back to learn about those! Overuse is not good of course, but stopping them would be as bad IMHO.

I feel most of those are trying to bring an important point though. "If you are not..." => "What is the monetization strategy?". "Early optimization..." => "Beware, this probably doesn't make sense in your small co", etc.

I'm tired of blogs and deep analyses, like these, of something as useless as tiresome comments.

How can we keep meaning less, uninteresting content, such as this, off HN? Maybe a blog or deep dive how-to can help?

All these are good (to avoid).

I'd add to the comments to that start a certain way: 'nope' I don't know exactly why but I find this phrasing both dismissive and insulting. Also, all those starting with adverbs, like 'Interestingly,...'. Just say what you got to, I say. It hurts the message if what follows isn't interesting at all. Edit: I'm not trying to insult anyone, I just think this kind of formality where one has to justify, verbally, the existence of ones comment is distracting.

I'd also add the gross over- and misuse of italics for emphasis. I'd almost say it was a phenomenon. Like the amount of emphasis italics is inversely proportional to to commenters knowledge of the subject.

"If you're not paying for it, you're the product"

Yes. Thank you!

Appropriate as ever.

I do not think x means what you think it means.

From the comments:

> I baked a cake in go.

The fact that there are some comments that are tiresome doesn't mean that the readership is like that.

Correlation is not causation.

No. Who cares?

I’d add arguing by using inline quotes. Example:

some snippet of text from parent comment

I disagree because x, y, z.

another snippet

This is wrong because a, b, c.

(End example)

Doing so obliterates context from a position, especially long form comments (which is the main reason I’m here) in two main ways. First, the technique rarely reproduces the parent in its entirety, picking out black and white statements that are easier to argue against from a sea of nuance. Second, it cuts up the narrative in such a way that downplays the rationale of a position by either leaving out reasoning, or placing arguments between the reasoning and the conclusion.

Sure, the readers can go back and reread the parent. But when the structure of an argument depends on those snippets (and it almost always does) it becomes very difficult to grok.

Generally I just see it as a big warning sign that the quoter is more interested in winning than learning or getting to the truth of the matter and thus is best ignored.

Maybe it's my age and having come up via years of Usenet where inline quoting was absolutely standard, but I find inline quoting of a discussion helps me keep the flow of discussion. I find it's easier to follow than trying to retain a lengthy parent that a commenter is replying to, also at length.

If it's a long comment it's also likely some commenters are only able to address parts of it - again an inline quote clarifies.

I've never had cause to see it as a warning sign or more likely to be someone scoring points, that's going to happen sometimes with or without inline snippets.

I can see that, and perhaps my experience has just been unlucky. I missed usenet by a few years.

Hmm, actually something just came to mind where quoting may hinder, though I've seen it with and without. Quoting may help focus on misdirection. Where someone wants to have a good argument rather than have a discussion. More a reddit game than HN but it does sometimes happen here, e.g.

Someone making point with a couple of paragraphs.

Commenter takes one sentence or point to shred, maybe it was a weak example or poorly phrased, to invalidate the whole.

repeat. After a few rounds it's becoming clear they're intentionally avoiding the main point.

Have I just committed the cardinal sin of being wrong on the internet? ;)

Well you comitted the blessing of helping me feel heard so hopefully that balances out the sin. :) Exactly my point.

> Generally I just see it as a big warning sign that the quoter is more interested in winning than learning or getting to the truth of the matter and thus is best ignored.

But,to be fully honest, isn't it what this kind of conversation is about, ultimately speaking? There is a reason it happens mostly in low-stake contexts: dinner tables, casual conversation, comments section. Places where "bullshit pass" is implicitly granted to all participants. If we are not allowed to pick and choose and distort other's meanings then where's the fun and drama in all of this?

We differ on worldviews I think. I don’t find conversations interesting or fun if a bullshit pass has been granted. The point of a low stakes conversation to me is learning something about a person or subject — so distoring overmuch causes me to disengage (if & only if low stakes).

> The point of a low stakes conversation to me is learning something about a person or subject

That point of view is getting rarer and rarer, especially on the internet. Which is unfortunate. It has ruined online discourse for me almost completely.

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