HN: The Good Parts (2016) | Hacker News Reader

HN: The Good Parts (2016)

danluu.com

37 pointsmetadat48 comments

Yes but the comments that I make ...

:-)

Edit: I watched a documentary on the making of QI - a British TV quiz where the questions or answers are supposed to be "Quite Interesting". And the commentator pointed out that they have changed the sort of facts they bring into the show - in the early years it was all "you might think X but really it's Y". But there are a limited number of "common misapprehensions", and the show has / will exhaust them. So now they focus on Quite Interesting things that you did not know before.

I tend to think of HN as the process the QI team goes through - lots of discussion, a few interesting things I did not know before and very rarely something that will chnage my view on a subject. It's just that can only happen so often.

So yeah, most internet comments are bad. And even on HN which has a high signal to noise ratio, the overall noise is still pretty loud. But so far it's helping me.

As the film says, it'll do till it dies or I find something better.

Because everything is comparative.

99.999% of Comments on the internet are pure junk. HN isn't that much different. As stated "On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. "

But even if HN were only 99% wrong. That 1% comments is still a 1000 times better than the average internet. And as mentioned in the article, most of the time that 1% comments are just pure Gold.

For example, the current trending AAPL report on HN, chollida1 provides a summary [1], as he has been doing for other Big Tech Stock over the years. It is simple and to the point. Trying to provide as much Facts as possible while sprinkling a small dose of decent objective analysis.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33363751

Yeah, as much as I’ll deride HN, I made the mistake of trying to talk to people on YouTube comments and Steam forums today. HN is an intellectual utopia compared to those.

Thus, by reading 1000 HN comments per day I have the chance to learn 10 useful things.

Worth every second. :)

HN is the least worst internet forum

Well said, save for the fact that HN is a link aggregator. I miss the old style fora, with their sections and content from members, not just a discussion based on links to an external website.

Like democracy

But by a very large margin. If dang started his own for-pay forum I would join in a heartbeat. The moderation is phenomenal. And I fear for his health. If he went solo he could hire a backup person or three. You think he couldn't get 10,000 people paying $5/month for this kind of content?

I love HN technical discussions.

I wish to god we could ban all the political/corporate/lifestyle discussions.

I say this as someone who lacks the discipline not to get sucked into them, but nevertheless regrets it when he is.

Technically a lot of that is is off topic, but rules are selectively enforced (via community at least)

Even for the political discussions, HN still has the least-bad discussions on the internet, which I think is why people keep engaging in them. The only discussions that really bother me are the reddit style stuff

Cough... https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amichail

You can often spot the impact of "why is the sky blue" type posts in that there are no discussion threads, it's just a long list of one-of "Rayleigh scattering" replies

Many people on HN are wrong, but it's the quality of wrong on HN that is vastly superior to the wrong you'll find anywhere else.

there's something like Knoll's Law for HN where everything seems like intelligent opinions until the topic is in your area of expertise and then...

I've definitely seen this, but I also think HN had a decent list of base competencies where you actually do get comments from informed people. Knowing which topics attract trustworthy comments is still tough

I'd say "mainstream" tech topics attract more uninformed comments because everyone thinks they know something, while more obscure stuff gets better comments (but obviously I could myself be falling for the bias of believing stuff I don't know about)

Also like "Gell-Mann Amnesia" after physicist Murray Gell-Mann:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

- some blog post https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

I'm not so sure about that. On HN it can be harder to spot the bullshit because people can sound very authoritative even when they are completely wrong or clueless. I experienced this a couple of times with topics I happen to know very well.

If this is ever me, happy to be called out. I'm only copying everyone else!!!

Indeed. As a gentleman of intellect I insist upon only the highest quality, artisinally crafted bullshit. No mere pedestrian mind-muffins will satisfy the refined palate of the HN sophisticate.

I'll have my bullshit served only on the highest quality silver platter. Please and thank you.

When it comes to tech, yes. When it comes to areas outside of tech... not so much

Previous discussions:

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772925

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20092118

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049601

I hope this comment was one of the good ones.

If you find yourself writing an informative comment on HN that will likely get buried. Urge yourself to write a blog article instead.

I've posted some blog type content over the years and don't know any good way to get anybody to read it (or really even a reason why they should). Posting on HN gets way more interaction and views than most people's blogs would

You should submit the article to HN. If you just make a comment it will likely only be seen by people reading that particular comment section that particular day. But an article you can link/reference and re-submit. (you can also link to specific comments on HN, but a standalone article is a more expressive medium)

Something I appreciate about HN is having the opportunity to make a case to dozens or perhaps hundreds of my peers, without the burden of having and maintaining an audience. I don't think people recognize my name from one thread to another, and if they do I don't think they have much of a parasocial relationship with me. I don't see any evidence people "follow" my comments, for instance; the people I talk to more frequently seem like people who just have similar interests and click the same threads, not people who are interested in me and are following what I do. On two occasions people have sent me an email thanking me for making a certain comment, but it always felt like a peer pulled me aside to have a one-on-one chat, not like I was some kind of personality.

There's a moment towards the end of the Bo Burnham special "what." where he talks about the weight having an audience has in his life, and he says, "if you can go through your life without having an audience, you should do it." I do have thoughts to share and I am working on starting a blog, but I try to keep Burnham's warning in mind.

Ah this is such a succinct description of the real value of the town hall discussion format. I don’t care or want to maintain a subscriber list, but I absolutely do want to contribute and actively participate in my area of interests. HN is the best area I’ve found for that.

I've done this a few times, and it's amazing how much better (according to myself, that is) the content is than a comment. Proper length, formatting, images, inline links, and things like ‹abbr› and ‹key› elements just make for a superior reading experience. Unfortunately this means the answer might be years in the making, as I keep accumulating drafts.

"You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole" plays in my head reading all the "while what you said is interesting, allow me to shit all over you" comments on HN. It's also the only forum I participate in because it's still got really good discussions and content

> "On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect."

This "zero comments" part doesn't line up with my experience. Maybe what was meant was "on any niche topic that very few people understand that I happen to be an expert in". I consider myself informed about a number of topics, and also constantly learn things from HN within those topics, from people who are much more informed than I am. (But, I'm not really a top 1% kind of expert on anything)

If the Hacker News API actually returned comment scores it would be relatively easy to build an app that surfaces good comments, ahem.

There is also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

If only "good" correlated with the number of upvotes :)

Yeah.. the upvote counts are probably more useful here than Reddit, but you still end up with a lot of wacky groupthink

I think Slashdot had the best voting system ever when it was still popular, but maybe that's just rose-tinted goggles

How did Slashdot's voting system work?

Never used it but afaik you could vote along different axis. So you could vote "+1 insightful" for instance, so if a comment had a lot of votes, you had a more idea why it was upvoted.

There was also meta-moderation, which allowed the community to deal with bad upvote/downvote behavior - brigading, stalking, etc. It wasn't perfect, but it did avoid the near-universal ills of moderator bias (including unconscious/cognitive bias), burnout from over-exposure, and flat out anti-empirical theories about how to do moderation properly. I wish more experiments like that had been tried (kuro5hin also made some efforts and Advogato took it even further) instead of basically reverting to a Usenet-era model.

I think the really valuable part was that you only got a few upvotes to hand out, and only once in a while, so you'd treat them with a lot more reverence

I highly recommend maintaining a blocklist of usernames. There's a ton of users posting drivel on this board and you won't remember all their names.

Even something as simple as a uBlock Origin static filter like this will work:

    !!! Asshole maintains lists of people like he's a god https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365189
    news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(.hnuser[href$="=Arnavion"]) .comment > .commtext:style(color: #f6f6ef !important)

That makes it so all comments by user Arnavion are colored with the default background color that HN uses, and are thus invisible. You'll be able to see the text if you really want to by selecting it, but resist the urge. The `!!!` line will remind you why you blocked them if you ever decide to relent / trim your list later.

You'll also need:

    news.ycombinator.com##.commtext a:style(color: inherit !important)

... to hide links in those hidden comments.

Apart from that, I recommend having showdead on because I've seen good comments get flagged just because they went against the groupthink of the timezone that happened to be on lunch at that moment, but that'll also display banned users, so you'll need:

    news.ycombinator.com##^.comtr:has(.comhead:has-text([banned]))

... to hide them again.

Edit to reply to notrealhnuser's dead comment:

>A lot easier with a user script where the names are an array rather than selector per user as you've shown.

Yes, I wrote one such extension in https://gist.github.com/Arnavion/a6d68f5e1071ab3fa23fc614c66... I don't use this myself any more since I already have uBO. Adding new entries isn't really a hassle since I just start by copy-pasting an existing one. But any option that you find convenient is fine.

>Also I suggest `display:none` on the entire comment, username, etc.

The problem is that HN does not lay out comment trees in nested HTML elements but as a flat list. So hiding a comment with `display: none` leaves its replies still visible, giving the impression that they're replying to the previous visible comment.

But yes, if you're doing something dynamic with userscripts as you suggested, you could indeed write JS to detect all the nested replies and hide them too.

I find that assholes often provide some of the most useful commentary.

A user on here who shall remain nameless is an idiot of the highest caliber in just about every topic _apart from the one she's an expert in_. If I block her then I lose all that useful commentary on that one specific topic which happens to be something I care about.

Finding out that people you despise aren't wrong about everything is one step in growing up that I'm seeing fewer and fewer people make. That your outsourcing your mental stability to a computer should be a red flag. How do you deal with people who you dislike when they get into a position you can't ignore?

Currently the choice seems to be scream at the sky/invade the capitol.

>If I block her then I lose all that useful commentary on that one specific topic which happens to be something I care about.

Yes, I have a few entries of that type. I have them as `color: #dddddd !important` so that they show up colored as flagged comments instead of being completely hidden.

>That your outsourcing your mental stability to a computer should be a red flag.

Absolutely. Blocking a person from your life is not a trivial decision. It dehumanizes them. You should make it only after exhausting all other options and understanding what it would feel like if it happened to you.

>How do you deal with people who you dislike when they get into a position you can't ignore?

That I have to deal with people I dislike in N situations doesn't mean I should accept that I have to deal with them in N + 1 situations.

This comment is underrated.

(2016)

Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx had phrases for the likely coming decline in HN comment quality.

Reports of the demise of comment quality have been greatly exaggerated.

But now madam, we are merely dickering about the price

HN has a very interesting “vocal minority” thing going where certain articles will have VERY predictable comments.

ShowHN - “this doesn’t work if JavaScript is disabled” or “you should explain this product better I don’t want it”

Any hardware device: “I’ve noticed declining quality because the space bar is a very specific type of plastic now” or “I can’t even ssh into this. I miss the days when I could ssh into my shoelaces”

But there are also just insane corners of knowledge where there isn’t a lowest common denominator and it’s pretty interesting stuff.

When I do know about a given topic I don’t have to scroll TOO far to find an opinion I agree with, and sometimes an argument I hadn’t come across that changes my view.

> "I miss the days when I could ssh into my shoelaces"

that is absolutely t-shirt worthy

More than a vocal minority: HN has a vocal individual thing.

Relative to other sites, the commenting body of HN is small. The frequent commenters represent an even smaller group. Combined with an interface that deliberately draws attention away from who exactly you're reading with desaturated text, and you've got pretty ideal situation for the opinion of one frequent commenter to produce what appears to be a somewhat popular view.

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