Smashing your face with a hammer considered harmful | Hacker News Reader

Smashing your face with a hammer considered harmful

blog.brycekerley.net

80 pointslenary38 comments

This topic is hilarious for demonstrating the "we don't want to be reddit" background angst that permeates Hacker News. Allow me to make the following vaguely contradictory points in quick succession:

1) The sort of commentary that assumes other people have read the frontpage and felt similar things is actually the sign of a strong community. chirsaycock's post agreeing with OP is highly voted because a lot of people _did_ see today's posts and sigh a little on the inside.

2) This level of meta leads to people making stupid meta points. Someone actually said "This." on this site? bah!

3) "witty remarks considered harmful," a post that I personally find amusing, is in a state of "very downvoted." what absolutely delicious irony.

4) A significant presentation of negativity considering how many people apparently agree with the general point about the snowclone. We agree with you, lenary, we just don't agree about how we agree with you. "How dare you be right about us?"

5) Some actually funny meta-humor, but then you realize you've seen it before on reddit. I'm referring of course to the thread beginning "I have an opinion."

6) Will you upvote me or downvote me? Discuss.

I will upvote you, because I'm the OP and you are making comments useful to the discussion I hoped to provoke. Too bad about the downvotes for my comment "laughing is evil" (which was said sarcastically, ftr)

I think that I ended on that point because it's rather telling how we still manage to take upvotes and downvotes seriously, making us much more similar to reddit than we could ever be different.

Absolutely. The other expression that irks me, "X is evil", often referring to a company, product, API design, etc. "Evil" is a word reserved for oppressive forces and mass murderers; a programming feature that I personally don't need didn't cause the Holocaust. Can can we all agree to expand our vocabulary?

I was brainstorming what words would fit the "X is Y" where X is a thing and Y is one word that describes your opinion. I could only think of things like "my pet peeve", "annoys me", "is something I don't need" and other things that weren't very concise. What are some words in which the idea of Y belonging to the writer or speaker is inherently built-in in such a way as to express ideas like "X is 'eviltome'" and "X is 'annoyingtome'"?

I'm probably just being dumb right now, but I'm posting this on the off-chance I might actually expand my vocabulary.

Well, you can say "eggs are bad" or "I think eggs are bad."

When you say "eggs are bad" or "X is Y" it is not always assumed that "I think" is inherently built in, but sometimes it is.

Furthermore, if you say "eggs are bad" to a 4 year old kid, one implants an opinion about eggs into that kid, because they are impressionable. But if you say it to a 75 year old, they might want to know how you've formed that view, or more likely what you want from them or yourself by saying it.

So if you're going to say "X is Y" without 'I think,' at least say it to evoke an agreeable reaction - like at a Vegan conference if talking about eggs. Or else where opinions are fluid.

I think I am right.

I was thinking along the lines of words that carried the concept of implied doubt rather than requiring it through inference. I had been reading LessWrong and noticed someone talking in the comments about how the writing lacked nuance due to the need to make points clear. It got me thinking about the need for words that allow for this nuance in a way that doesn't disrupt flow. When I read the call to expand vocabulary I figured I would ask, since I felt my thoughts and his post were tangentially related. I'm sorry for not being as clear as I could have been.

How about:

  <noun> is the devil

This.

'expanding our vocabulary' is evil

witty remarks considered harmful.

laughing is evil

Not new, guys. Might I cite the essay:

"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful by: Frank Rubin Communications of the ACM, Vol. 30, No. 3. (March 1987), pp. 195-196. Key: citeulike:6239605 http://www.citeulike.org/user/gvdh/article/6239605

and the excellent (if solely concerned with the technical details of Rubin's response) rebuttal by Dijkstra, "On a somewhat disappointing correspondence", EWD 1009. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...

I don't get it (maybe because English is not my native language). I've always thought that "I consider X" means that someone does express an opinion, and not a fact. Am I missing something?

There's a very big distinction between saying "I consider X harmful" and "X [is] considered harmful". In the former, it's very clear that you're expressing your own opinion. In the latter, it's implied that your opinion is "the" opinion, and that X is considered harmful by people in general, not just by you.

(At least, that's how I've always read it. I suppose one could argue that "X considered harmful" actually should be read "X [is] considered harmful [by me]" or maybe "X [should be] considered harmful", but I don't think either of those interpretations are obvious.)

...and this is why E-Prime exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_prime

Ahem... "E-Prime exists for this purpose."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

It's a very common way of titling any essay about anything related to computers that you don't like, as a way of signaling to the audience that you have in fact heard of a 'computer'.

Or to put it another way, "considered harmful" is a dumb internet meme which just happens to be almost as old as the internet.

The usual phrasing is "X considered harmful," which is a passive sentence and doesn't actually say who considers it harmful. Originally it was used from a position of authority ; E. W. Dijkstra made about forty years of very important contributions to computer science, most of them more significant than: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T... .

Today it's complaining that an academic organization charges for access to papers ( http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmf... ) or warning about a base feature in a family of languages ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/array... ). One of these is an opinion from an unsatisfied customer ("I don't like the way ACM charges for papers and requires copyright assignment"), and the other is a pretty important point about a language from one of its designers ("Arrays don't belong in public APIs in .NET languages").

No, it's pretty much always been about petty complaints. As it turns out, Wirth changed the title precisely because it was inflammatory. The first documented use of it is a complaint about rent control: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004675.h...

The use of the passive voice ("is considered") implies that the position has more support than just the author and is a general belief. "I consider" would be seen as expressing the author's personal opinion.

Ah, thanks (@darren et al., too). There's always another subtlety to learn...

It is indeed 'the greatest blog in the world'.

"Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be temporarily unavailable. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience."

Posting an apparently controversial rant to HN when you don't have the capacity to handle the traffic... considered harmful.

I've grown weary of "considered harmful" as well as "you're doing it wrong".

So let's say, "Using 'considered harmful' considered harmful: Article titling, you're doing it wrong".

It's already been done, Eric Meyer already wrote '"Considered harmful" essays considered harmful': http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

2002, hmm? That's a lot of harm done.

I disagree. Smashing your face with a hammer is simply pretty damn harmful. There's just no believing or disbelieving this one. Anyone who smashes their face with a hammer isn't doing it because they don't see it as harmful (unless of course they've taken enough Vicoden that they're about to be dead anyway). They're doing it because they want to be harmed. Big difference.

Sometimes hitting yourself with a hammer can be a good thing. It depends on what you know and how it is being applied. For example, when your treating your head as a nail and coming at is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of acne, your likely to get fairer skin. The only reason the hammer is harmful in this case is because he isn't using the right hammer for the job.

</satire>

Same goes for posts starting with 'Why' without asking a question imho.

I have an opinion.

I disagree with the terminology you use to explain your opinion.

You don't have any numbers to prove this.

I hate to be this guy, but what is with the trend of people posting blog posts on HN that should have just been comments on the original thread? Or is this a result of the "it takes too long to come up with a witty retort" phenomena?

to be honest, it's because i'm new to posting here and felt like being sensationalist

It really wasn't meant to be personal. It was just something I thought I'd observed enough to voice and see what others thought.

it wasn't taken so. that's almost exactly where I was coming from to post the article anyway

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