Hacker News Disease
01.media
01.media
Original article by user matmaroon in 2009:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824103317/http://mattmaroon...
Spurred by their own comment in the original thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586154
And first posted to hn by matmaroon also in 2009:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588752
Sort of unrelated to the digging - the comments in the original thread on warner / lessig are pretty well balanced. Very little to no prescriptive law talk, which is the only law talk worth attacking from the perspective of the authority and knowledge of law and its application. There's nothing at all wrong with speculation around the outcome of dmca notices, using whatever legal knowledge you can dig up. It's not legal advice to either party. This goes doubly so in 2009 when all of this was much less understood. Seems like a pretty bad example case for the OP (OP).
Attacking "breathless techies" for discussing how they would like something to be, because observed outcomes are not this way, makes no sense what-so-ever.
As long as everyone is being reasonably descriptive, it's perfectly fine for anybody to discuss anything.
For example, "ip law is bullshit because of {my_differing_moral_base_presumption}" is an absolutely fine thing to say, and argue. You're not being prescriptive and nobody is ill-effected, or directed to be ill-effected, by your opinions stemming from your differing moral base.
Furthermore, claims about what you think the outcome of something might be - given your limited knowledge - are perfectly fine too. For example, "I think a reasonable court would find that the claim was bullshit because it's a 30 second segment of the song mixed over some anime, out of a 50 minute talk. It's clear the intent wasn't to republish the work for profit."
There's absolutely no problem with this from the perspective of healthy conversation. You're taking a good faith approach to the discussion and saying what you think might happen given your knowledge. You may ultimately be _wrong_ but you were never saying you were _more right_ than subject matter experts anyway.
Basically the only times it's a good idea to dump on people is when someone ignorant is being prescriptive. "When you're licensing your work you should add {some_clause} because of {bad_understanding_of_law}". That's when it's harmful. Or, if you're acting in plain old bad faith.
So if the article was complaining about this kind of harmful prescriptive talk, I'd agree, but that isn't at all what I'm getting from it.
Edit: a plain account ban won't work, he'll just make more accounts. Mods/admins need to be creative here since he'll just rotate his IP and be back an hour later.
"The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool
doesn’t know he doesn’t know."
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn
something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser
than before. He is full of murderous resentment
of people who are ignorant without having come
by their ignorance the hard way. "
It's becoming more widespread and the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.
But that doesn't comport with all non-tech, non-elites who also engage in this sort of thing.
In fact, it's pretty much the same thing discussed by Tom Nichols in his 2017 book[1], The Death of Expertise. I recommend it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Edit: Removed extraneous article.
Clearly you didn't read the second paragraph of the article:
> In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News. It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of smart people meet general tech industry discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of places that suffer from Hacker News Disease (and they probably had it first, have a terminal case of it, and are much less civil about it too) but HN is just the only one I’ve participated in, so they have the misfortune of being the community I’ve named it after.
Actually, I did. In fact, your quote is specifically referring to tech discussion websites, as it explicitly says:
It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of
smart people meet general tech industry
discussion.
"STEMlord
...a pejorative term for a particular kind of person who has studied in these areas at university or works in these fields who holds a pretentious, condescending attitude to anyone who has studied in any other fields, particularly the Arts and Humanities. They typically believe themselves to be more "intelligent" and "rational", while generally remaining incredibly ignorant outside of their areas of expertise and having the charisma of a rotting pig's backside."
That said, I think while amost everybody knows someone like that, I believe that it is often the opposite and many devs should be enouraged to be a bit more forthcomming.
I think the "disease" is common in fresh graduents of university in general.
Entertaining read. But find the perfect discussion group then.. its quite a challenge, I gather. Disease symptoms aren't just endemic, but do we actually have 'disease-free' places anywhere on the web?
No, you can't inoculate yourself from stupidity and ignorance. This applies to the author as well.
Stupidity is a perjorative term for an abundantly natural and ubiquitous state. Its results may be frustrating, but accepting the profound intellectual limitations of oneself and others is essential for emotional well-being.
Rest is "old man angry at the clouds" material.
I've seen it first hand in other industry. (some) Lawyers are always willing to litigate since this is their job. They dont care if you will win or lose, they just want your money. Obviously the "good lawyer" should advice you when not to litigate, but since cases take years, managers switch jobs (exactly as described in the article) and some bullshit excuses can be made - nobody really checked their success ratio. In fact, is there a study in effectiveness of those lawsuits? They probably earned some money due to chilling factor, but was it higher than cost of litigation? Probably yes as well, but the author barely even touches this subject.
The situation is often even more pervasive in IT projects - where I have seen multiple cases of consultants paid by the hour, what translated to zero incentive to actually ever finish anything. They wont kill the golden goose that lays them golden eggs. If I didnt know the decision makers (who have MBAs - so supposedly not random people), I would suspect collusion - getting kickbacks from the consultants to keep them on (who probably spend their days doing side projects for other customers). But no, it was sheer incompetence.
There are lots of people who dont care if their job makes sense or not - they will litigate/write code/do whatever as long as you pay them. They are supposed to advise you when their services are not needed, but then it might mean that they lose jobs / money, so they dont have any incentives for that.
Sadly I guess the theme of this submission is that "hacker news is stupid", so if anyone points out a flaw in the article, they will get downvoted to oblivion. Because the author is much smarter than us and obviously their article is flawless.
Also companies dont waste millions on fruitless projects /s Most companies dont even make any retrospectives into their projects, probably because so many fail.
please don't use terminology like 'retarded' in your article, we should be moving away from this as a whole
By normal people, do you mean the terminally online twittersphere? Your average person has no problem with most of the pejoratives the internet sees as off limit.
This is pure personal opinion ofc - but my perspective here is of someone in tech who's entire social bubble is comprised of random professionals not in tech (europe).
Because I'm not at all clear as to the people to whom you are referring.
You mean like me and most folks I know? None of us are retarded. Nor do we deliberately insult others.
However, we also don't cower in fear that words used without malice are actually hurtful.
Those that are differently-abled are to be accepted and respected for who they are.
Those that jump down others' throats as the vocabulary police are the retarded ones, IMHO.
And yes, some folks have very thin skin, metaphorically speaking. And that's okay. But I don't need the sorts of folks who can't or won't understand context/nuance in my life.
In fact, to those particular folks I say, fuck off!