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Comment by rick_2047 | Hacker News Reader

rick_2047

I don't want to pick on anyone (nothing personal maguay) but does this belong here? I mean this is supposed to be a high quality news site and not a place to post touchy feely comments. We frown upon too political comments/posts and try to avoid flame wars over silly things. So in that sense, this post is not supposed to be here.

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Is it really so bad to let our guard down for a few minutes to celebrate the holidays and the things we're thankful for?

Your office is supposed to be (in most cases) a professional environment for conducting business, but everyone has a holiday party each year... Just sayin.

Today is the 23rd, which is Festivus. Perhaps this was a ritual Airing Of Grievances.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus#Airing_of_Grievances

Then why don't we take our guard down when someone posts a little sarcasm or a small joke. Why do these posts always have a -4 or less karma? Why don't we have a separate section for lolcatz pics? In an office we have all that, nobody is totally professional with their first hand colleagues.

Memes kill my experience on so many other websites, that’s why I will downvote every comment which makes reference to a meme. (Other meaningful content might save the comment sometimes.) Others seem to agree which is why those kinds of comments always get downvoted quickly.

All the other stuff – sarcasm, jokes – is not always downvoted, it sometimes even receives a lot of upvotes. Don’t expect every joke to be upvoted, even if it’s a witty one. I guess it is consensus that we don’t want to see HN flooded with jokes and sarcasm.

Why this hypocrisy then? Shouldn't we have equal standards for all the things?

It's not hypocrisy, it's just very subjective. People upvote funny things from time to time, and downvote things that aren't funny often. There's no objective standard for that, obviously, but generally, 'funny' means something fairly new and unique and with some thought behind it, not trotting out some lame old sarcastic joke.

Edit: I suppose the moral of the story is: if you're not sure, don't post it.

No we shouldn’t and it’s not hypocrisy. It’s appropriate editorial control. Think how a magazine editor would think.

A great profile of Julian Assange might be worthy front page material if it is the first Wikileaks article in months, it probably isn’t if articles about Wikileaks were on the front page every day the whole last month.

Nice 'troll' rick but most don't get it.

We're not really celebrating "the holidays," though. We're celebrating one holiday. Technically we could have one of these posts for every religious holiday during the year (meaning we'd have at least one post every day). It's pretty inarguable that this post represents a really high signal-to-noise ratio or makes a difference in any way. Why should we make an exception for this post?

Well it is the most important holiday of the year in North and South America, Australia, Europe, much of Africa, and for a sizable minority population of Asians, and likely for people currently living in space stations or Antarctica. The community is a sum of its members, and much of the community is currently enjoying the holiday spirit. If the community should wish to indulge in non-Western and non-Christian holidays as well, I will not bah-humbug their holiday experience.

Well, first you're overstating the percentage of Christians in the world. Second, you're completely missing the point. Religious holidays (or really holidays in general) have no place on HN. I will "bah-humbug their holiday experience," as you say, because I don't think this content serves an intellectually interesting purpose. There are plenty of places for people to celebrate their religion -- this does not need to be another.

I really don't feel this is worthy of a big debate, though. My position is that HN is not a place for religious discussion, positive or negative, unless it has a more overreaching intellectual purpose. There's not much more to say.

I'm a strict atheist, but I'm also a descendant of Western civilization (formerly known as "Christendom"). As such, I spend the Christmas season as my forefathers have for the last few thousand years - enjoying the heightened good cheer of my fellow men, relishing the opportunity to spend time with my friends and family, and counting my blessings.

Hacker News is a news site, but it is also a community of hackers. If a HNer needs a place to stay in Mountain View or is in trouble in some other way, I would try to help them. As such, the occasional touch of a human element is appropriate. I feel it is acceptable to send my fellow hackers the traditional good wishes and cheer as my civilization (and most of theirs) have done during this time of year for generations, while not seeking to be exclusionary or force my beliefs on anyone. I see it as the digital analogue of taking a moment of time at a technical conference to tell my colleague that I hope his family is doing well. I would hope he wouldn't snap back at me that it was off-topic.

It seems that aggressive atheists are more annoying than Christians nowadays.

Sorry ... I definitely wasn't meaning to junk up HN. I thought it went along with many recent posts in Ask HN where people thank others for advice or help they'd received from HN.

At any rate, I highly respect the quality of HN, and will try to keep this in mind with future posts. Happy Holidays all the same!

I knew I would get down voted for this comment (all hail HN's hypocrisy) but I just had to say this. As I stated above, nothing personal.

And this does not go with the thank you notes. They are usually appended by a little brief of what people helped them with and which advice they did pick (or not pick). There are also (sometimes) analysis of what happened next.

I understand ... no problem. Though I did get a laugh about jsm386 saying it was the annual Airing of Grievances :)

Repeating what you said above, and contributing "I knew I would get downvoted for this" don't really belong on HN either. In fact they're probably worse. Heh.

Look at the second line, I explained why his comment is not in line with the thank you notes

Edit: Also personal comments also do not belong to HN

Maybe you should've made a 250,000 polygon WebGL Santa that waves and wishes us all a merry Christmas, with a Customize button that allows you to add a custom greeting, which is converted to audio via some speech synth engine, for $0.99, and submitted it as your startup. Also available for iPhone and Android. Coming soon for Blackberry. You're going to disrupt the holiday market. You'll be able to make a $46,000,000 exit by Easter, but if you hang on and make a 3D rabbit app, you can reach even greater heights.

I'm going nowhere with this post. :P

I think people would really buy something along that line. I mean if they can buy a application to make fart noises[1], they why not this?

[1]http://ifartmobile.com/

You can have that one free. Go find yourself a contractor on Elance for a couple hundred dollars, and in a few days, you too can be on the road to infinite wealth.

Yeah but if it doesn't use Node.js and Clojure and NoSQL it will fail.

The original was all Flash intro.

plus use a MongoDB backend. because MongoDB is web scale.

It depends on whether you think Hacker News is a community or not.

As I said, all hail HN's hypocrisy. When we have a slight sarcasm or a small joke we all downvote it. Then why do you think this belongs here, this is the type of thing we try to avoid in those sarcasm or jokes. You see, the joke and sarcasms should be OK if we are a community shouldn't they be? But we are a community which tries to generate high quality content related to hacking and startups. I don't think this is at all related to any of those things. If you want to put up with this, why not put up with nonsensical sarcasm?

In my experience... genuinely funny original jokes get upvotes. The same tired old memes or the "obvious" line are not.

But this is "Merry Christmas" which, if you think about it, is a holiday almost all of us (globally) share :)

Perhaps the upvote heuristic used by the HN hive mind is a bit more complex than you initially believed?

Naah, its just a hypocrite and does what it feels like doing.

So true, Rick. So boring those downvoters. They upvote "Thanks!", "Merry Christmas!", "Topbar is red!" and downvote criticisms on karma distortion and off-topicity. Mmh...

Lighten up - it's Christmas :)

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